I’m trying to figure out the essence of peoplicious and specifically how it fits into the world which has something called wikipedia. The short answer is that peoplicious is about entering structured information and links using forms and bookmarklets, while wikipedia is about entering biographies about people using html and wiki format. Peoplicious provides a less-effort collection bin of info and links about a person. Inputting articles about a person is integrated with the browsing process– more like bookmarking than wiki-ing. Wikipedia provides a more-effort method of compiling prose and links about a person.
Their goals are different as well– Peoplicious is about collecting all the stuff about a person on the Internet, including recent news, while Wikipedia is about compiling information that would go into a person’s permanent biography. For instance, peoplicious structured data includes name, image url, homepage url, blog url, del.icio.us url, and technorati name. Wikipedia structured data for a person consists of the fields:
<!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] -->
{{Persondata
|NAME=Magellan, Ferdinand
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Magalhães, Fernão de (Portuguese); Magallanes, Fernando de (Spanish)
|SHORT DESCRIPTION=Sea explorer
|DATE OF BIRTH=Spring [[1480]]
|PLACE OF BIRTH=[[Sabrosa]], [[Portugal]]
|DATE OF DEATH=[[April 27]], [[1521]]
|PLACE OF DEATH=[[Mactan Island]], [[Cebu]], [[Philippines]]
}}
Input Process
Wikipedia allows users to enter information about a person in the form of HTML wiki pages. Guidelines are provided to help standardize the look of these pages.There are also ’structured’ elements. One can put a person’s page in various categories by providing a link on the page to the category page. Users can also add PersonData, which is a set of biographical fields meant to be read by other software and which is by default hidden from wikipedia users.
To add a person in wikipedia, a user must learn html or the wiki formatting. This is not too complicated, but is enough to lose a lot of potential contributors. They must also learn the guidelines set-up for biographical pages. This requires at least a few minutes of research.
Peoplicious is form-based, so no html or wiki protocol is required. The user clicks on contribute person, then enters the person’s basic data in the dialog. Wikipedia allows the user to enter prose about a person as well as links. Peoplicious is not for adding prose– its for adding links about a person. Even the images for a person are just links.
Peoplicious also provides bookmarklets and a firefox plug-in that makes adding an article to a person’s page extremely easy and integrated with the browsing process. This is called people-marking an article. With wikipedia, there is no such concept– all information including links are just html, so the user must go to the page for the person and edit it. There is not a huge difference in effort, but one must always keep in mind that browser-researchers have a very low effort-threshhold when it comes to pausing their research to record their findings.
Adding people to lists in peoplicious is also form-based– the user selects the person from one listbox and the list from another listbox. With wikipedia, the user enters a link to the ‘category’ page using the wiki format for an internal page.
Wikipedia Documentation
Information about categories. You add a page to a category by inserting a link in the page to the category page.
Information about People Categories
PersonData is metadata for biographies. Germans are using it a lot. No xml interface to it yet.
Project Biography is a working group on wikipedia dealing with bios.
