Wikiduden

Interactive illustrated Wikipedia content?

Is there anywhere a visual "Duden" type illustrated Wiki? The idea would be to have blank diagrams such as made famous (I think) by the Duden dictionaries on which terms and links could be placed. So an "Edit" would not be to change the drawing (although that could be funny, kind of like WikiGraffiti, but let's not go there) but to add descriptors.

There are special advantages to this, I think, for minority languages and languages of poorer (low literacy, low connectivity) countries. You could quickly develop a lot of useful content that does not require high levels of literacy or sit-down-in-front-of-the-computer reading. Info rich Wikiduden pages could be printed up at a cyber/telecenter and taken to remote places.

The big problem is where to get the illustrations that are used as templates, and indeed this might be the end of the discussion. Before that, but related, is deciding what the illustrations would cover: Is it necessary to have a single page with an improbable number of logically related items? Or if not, how to break things down?

If that's solved, then there is how to do the editing. It almost requires a WYSIWYG interface. The neatest thing would be to have a way to move things around and add/subract elements from an illustration, but that could lend itself to inappropriate, silly (or even funny) results.

Then there's higher level editing and drawing issues - some drawings are so culturally/regionally linked. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, but there's consequently a lot of editing packed into a single illustration.

I'd be surprised if this hasn't been discussed, planned, or even started somewhere already.

Static images and editable tags

"Shellbook" - a relevant/adaptable concept?

There is an organization working on a similar concept but in a different environment (desktop publishing): Shellbook. See http://www.shellbook.com/

Working example on Yoruba edition of Wikipedia

A message on AfrophoneWikis on 15 Dec. 2006 informed us of a successful addition of editable tags and links to an image. See http://yo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Eyaara . The only problem is that it requires some experience to be able to add tags in the right places without better direction or WYSIWYG.

Dynamic images

See also: Collaborative images

The technical complexity of interactive designs, and use of java and flash, are mentioned in a note on the AfriophoneWikis group: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/afrophonewikis/message/125

The Bubbl.us site offers a way to collaborate online on arrangements of dialog boxes and lines (implying relationships) among them. Could something like this be adapted to Wikipedia? See http://bubbl.us/