Filed under: %a la mod,chain-gang,Glory, glory, glory,knowledge,unfinished draft,wikipedia
Realization: In academia, science has grad students to do anything known to be important but not yet automated / solved. A common goal once these are identified is automating / solving. Wikipedians have done the first part, but don’t clearly have an analogy to the second as a goal.
Software design (for wikis) has focused on making reading better or more accessible, or helping making manual work less arduous; but not primarily on identifying automatic classes of work and solving them / knocking them off. That’s been limited to bot developers and ad-hoc tools built on the toolserver. (If any tools in the wikiverse do this, they are often by Magnus, and regularly get rate limited by the limitations of default toolserver allocations when they get popular.)
Thought: I suspect that is really the primary work moving the project forward. We need to recognize that and start framing and articulating goals, tools, and infrastructure accordingly.
<update from the AI era: yes, with bells on!>