TheKillerAppForRoboticsIsWikipedians

From Robots Wiki

Consider Alice, who writes about birds on Wikipedia. Suppose her articles invite you to use your home robot to carry a webcam around to take pictures of birds when you're away at work. You would like to get pictures of male cardinals, and Alice's article tells you what to use for feed to best attract cardinals, and has sound files of songs you can play on outdoor speakers to attract them. You're part of a community of Wikipedians with home robots, and they help you set up your software so that your webcam only takes pictures when it sees something as red as a male cardinal at the feeder.

Alice is a Wikipedia editor, so she is already the kind of person who likes to be appreciated for sharing her knowledge. If her readers have cheap, fetch-and-carry home robots, that gives Alice new ways to help people attract the birds she loves. Perhaps Alice will enjoy editing on Wikipedia even more, now, and her readers will enjoy her articles more, too, now that Alice can share more.

People are constantly thinking up new uses for cheap, fetch-and-carry robots. These robots need training for each new task, but lots of robot users working together as a community can do it. I often read that "robotics today is where computers were in the 70's," but I disagree. I think robotics is today where encyclopedias were in the early days of Wikipedia. Wikipedians, Wikians and others already have the right stuff to make home robotics happen in a big way...resistance is futile. — Dan Dank55 (begun 22:38, 20 December 2007 (UTC), edited in light of Jimbo's comment below.)

What is the broad principle you are hinting at here? I think it is something like "we can get more people involved in home robotics if we can think of fun collective projects that will get more people interested". And I think that is 100% right. In the Wikipedia context, it could be one thing, but think of a ton of other interesting projects online, things like Wikia or youtube or facebook... how could your idea work to attract people using those projects too? (I don't have any specific ideas, I am just brainstorming here...)----Jimbo Wales 14:56, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Note: Jimbo's edit came before the dual-licensing and therefore cannot be used on De.Wikiversity.Org unless we ask him first. - Dank55 15:28, 8 January 2008 (UTC)