My day job is analytics and mixed in with that is often a healthy dose of solution architecture.
Solution Architecture in this sense involves analyzing requirements and putting together the necessary technological and other components required in order to affect a solution.
It was from researching diverse technologies that I first bumped into blockchains in the first place and for most of my use-cases graphene based blockchains are a great fit.
There are a couple of glaring or slightly outside the box use-cases that I have been mulling over for the last while that I want to put out to the steemit community for comment.
For starters let’s take Wikipedia
Whenever I want to start researching a new topic I often start with Wikipedia…. Not that it’s authoritative, but because you can quickly get a broad set of related concepts, jargon and associated paraphernalia relating to the topic to delve into further.
Wikipedia amongst other things has a number of challenges:
- Funding appears to be an issue judging by the number of pleas for donations.
- More obscure topics are generally poorly covered.
- There are often notifications pointing to the fact that certain sections lack citation or other forms of corroboration.
Now when I look at just these three problems immediately the steem blockchain comes to mind.
Plugging steemit type functionality into the back end of Wikipedia would go a long way to incentivizing contributors to contribute to Wikipedia even on the most obscure of topics.
Bounty type functionality could be put in place for missing citations etc.
There are a number of challenges however and that’s where the steemit community and the wisdom of the crowd comes in.
The last thing one would want from Wikipedia is for it to become even more susceptible to poor content contribution.
With incentives in place, gaming of the system, spam etc. is likely to emerge quickly.
Therefore content quality verification and validation would become crucial.
A very robust reputation system would need to be in place with a number of gates for contributed content to pass before being accepted and rewarded.
Unlike steemit this would not necessarily be vote and steempower based as a highly distributed quality assurance mechanism would be required.
I have a couple of ideas in this regard but was wondering what fellow steemians think could work. Hence the call for comments.
I guess the other big question is, would a site like Wikipedia be open to being approached to become part of the steem ecosystem. Think what this could do for Steem and Wikipedia.
They probably would need to take a phased roll-out for any blockchain based incentives however this could simply be deployed to certain topics, measured and effectiveness assessed as functionality is exposed.