While we're on the subject of wiki, this caught my eye today: Russell Buckley's Manifesto for Taking Wikipedia into the Physical World talks about applying the principles of wiki to meatspace via location-based technologies. Perhaps you're travelling and want to know more about the landmark you're visiting, or you're in your own town and suddenly get curious about the old mansion looming next to the co-op. In Buckley's model, you could snap a cameraphone shot of either locale and instantly get back a host of information sent to your phone, with text, audio and/or video content that's been prepared by others. There are many ideas floating around about this sort of locative informatics, but what makes Buckley's idea interesting is that it takes the wiki model as being central to how the information is generated: anybody can create content, contribute information, tag and annotate the space for others to later stumble upon; this would generate an open content, bottom-up information grid mapped to the physical world. Much of the technology needed to implement such an idea already exists and, moreover, wouldn't be very expensive. It seem inevitable this this sort of location-based infomapping will be happening in the near near future, and when it does, I'll happily cast my vote in favor of user-editability.

[Via pasta and vinegar]