A pictorial wiki is the result of a thought experiment on WhatIsaWiki: what would an open, organic, observable visual wiki look like?
- Open is the least intellectual leap: the audience are assumed to be artists, and anyone with a mouse or other visual editing tool can edit anything.
- Organic is the most interesting challenge. Each visual concept (location, member of the community, etc.) must be assigned a visual tag for the brain to remember and reference. I suggest a simple, small 2D doodle or pictogram. To link to another page, you doodle its title, and the best match is chosen and linked. Concepts could be as simple as a 2D picture; they could be a 2D picture mapped onto a 3D object (WikiPedia:Panorama); or they could be a complex 3D model of objects and graphics. New locations are created by linking some area of an existing location as a link, then "naming" and filling in the new location. The static links produced replicate the way games such as WikiPedia:Myst worked.
- Observable is a technical challenge — how do you display graphical changes — but not an immediately interesting intellectual challenge.
An organic pictorial wiki could allow a community to map and explore a real world location, such as a village or town, or a fantasy one. Note that some form of textual communication — likely contained within or associated with a concept — might be helpful for community building, depending on the situation; alternatively, textual information such as community rules and individual messageboards could be incorporated simply by drawing the text! -- ChrisPurcell
I don't know what the wiki would look like, but I'm sure the vandalism would be porn. :)
More seriously, SecondLife runs on some of the above ideas. It's not wiki-like in the sense that members can't edit other people's work, but there are many facsinating visual experience going on within the community. If I wasn't on dialup, I'd spend some time touring that universe. -- StephenGilbert
Another idea: allow wiki-like annotation of existing visual media.
- http://flickr.com - members can highlight and annotate images.
- http://wikimapia.org - locate and annotate landmarks on GoogleMaps.
Do you consider such combinations to satisfy WhatIsaWiki — open, organic and observable? I personally would think that neither is fully open, as important parts are not editable by the entire audience, nor organic, especially in the linking structure. -- ChrisPurcell