Silvan Reinhold (U. of Frankfurt/Germany) offered a concept for supplementing a wiki with navigational trails superimposing context over the wiki content. WikiTrails adds a “tracking engine” into the wiki database and provides visual navigation of paths. There is a level of automatic creation of these paths (tracking), requiring data aggregation and merging of trails, and there is manual creation. There is also a semi-automatic mode (self-tracking) that allows the user to turn on and off the tracking capabilities easily, a balance between convenience and control.
Wikis are primarily node-centric navigation, which is great for understanding a local network fully. Things link to other nearby things. But it is not good for finding relevance in more distant locations on the network. Graph-centric navigation provides a nice global overview, but it is too complex. Path-centric navigation is a good middle ground. It has more context than a node, but less complexity than a graph. Paths provide a temporal order between information.
Use of trails in this fashion leads to a number of helpful insights that can come from the collective. The entire content network can be traversed more easily by using the path information to identify relevant entry points for broad domains and subjects without needing some consciously engineered portal. The user navigational choices also can aggregate to provide “Frequently Asked Next” (FAN) lists to suggest which are the better next clicks to make to get to useful information. Frequently traveled trails and annotations can also be generated to allow the user to make decisions informed by collective intelligence.
For more information, see WikiSym abstract or download the paper.
