Introduction
Hello, I write posts on Hive mainly in the Gods Unchained community. I recently became a Trial Curator there under OCD. Ever since I joined Hive, I have been thinking about how cool it would be to use Hive as an engine for Wiki style content. I looked around for any project doing this at the time, and I couldn't find any.
I kept the idea in the back of my mind though, and a few days ago while chatting with @acidyo they pointed me to Propolis Wiki. I was super happy to see that someone actually got a working Wiki platform on top of Hive. I looked into it and ended up chatting with @pharesim on the Propolis Wiki Discord.
I learned a bit more about what the Propolis Wiki is trying to do and asked a few questions to see whether they would take the development towards my idea. They are not interested and they pointed out some serious issues regarding the implementation.
There is also HiveWiki developed by @crrdlx. But similarly to Propolis Wiki, this implementation is a single Wiki for Hive. What I have in mind is a generic platform that would allow anyone to start a new Wiki hosted on Hive, comparable to how frontends like PeakD or Ecency support Communities.
One key limitation of these solutions is the lack of a mechanism for contributors to earn voting rewards for their work on the Wikis. As a result, people tend to publish similar content as blog posts instead, allowing them to earn rewards for information that would otherwise fit well on a Wiki about Hive.
I don't have the technical skills to implement something like this, but I also don't want the concept I have to wither and die in my head. So I would just like to explain it here, where I hope it would be seen by people who would actually be able to turn this idea into reality. I understand that there are significant financial, technical, and implementation challenges and that the likelihood of something like this becoming a reality is very low.
Fandom: the template
Fandom is a hugely successful website that allows anyone to start their own Wiki, about pretty much anything they like. I find myself reading stuff there frequently, about many different topics. A Gods Unchained player once started a wiki there, but it has been abandoned for several years now.
One of the major downsides for me is the large number of ads, the top one in particular being quite intrusive. They slow down loading and make for a bad reading experience.
The other obvious downside is that most work is done on a volunteer basis, while the company collects ad revenue. There is apparently a reward program for editors only, but according to the webpage the rewards are essentially merch and get distributed to only about 200 people. Hive on the other hand rewards everyone that produces content.
Hive frontends like PeakD or Ecency enable people to create blogging communities and reward them for it; Fandom enables fans to create Wikis and keeps all the ad revenue to themselves. Wiki content and blog posts share many similarities; it's mostly the dressing that is different. And Hive already supports version history - an important aspect of any Wiki.
And then there is also of course paid hosting without advertisement. Some companies do offer sophisticated features, like for example 20i. But even simpler but professional hosting solutions have moderate costs. Here is an example for MediaWiki hosted by https://www.mywikis.com/
The Hive ecosystem solved hosting blog posts for everyday people, not only without costs for them but actually distributing rewards for their efforts. I imagine a similar solution for Wikis where the reward system is adapted to how Wikis are written and maintained, where readers have the opportunity to cast votes when they find an article they deem deserving, independently of the date it was published or when it was last updated.
Hive onboarding efforts could target Fandom editors. I expect many would be dissatisfied with Fandom in some way, for example with the excessive ads, and would be open to actually start getting rewarded for their efforts.
This recruitment effort should probably focus on new subjects, like a new game, book, or television series. I don't think anyone is interested in copy-pasting existing content and exposing Hive to claims of plagiarism and copyright infringement.
Guild Wars 2 Wiki: my favorite reference
I played Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 for many years. Using the game's Wiki was a crucial part of the game experience. In the GW2 client there was even a slash command that opened wiki pages directly. The game studio hosts and maintains the server, but the content is created and curated by the community.
They even have their own Discord to coordinate and foster relationships around the people that contribute to it. There are a bunch of talented people there, not only building great templates as demonstrated by the landing page but also building custom widgets that enhance functionality and bring usefulness to a higher level.
The way this Wiki is presented and run is how I would like to have it in Gods Unchained, hosted on Hive.
Curating quality content
One of the questions then could be how to encourage quality content. In Fandom, many Wikis are created and abandoned, as you can see from the Gods Unchained example I referenced above. Hive communities similarly suffer from the same predicament.
Large communities have the critical mass to sustain themselves. But when this is not the case, Hive has been relying on curation rewards supported by groups like OCD to offer enough incentives to keep communities active and people producing regular content.
This is where Wikis are somewhat different: they don't need regular content to be pumped out. And what counts as 'quality content' is much more objective than a typical blog post. Information is more factual and stylistically more neutral and plain. Quality content is measured on the completeness of coverage of a topic and the accuracy of the information. Literary style, 'interestingness', or insight into the topic, which generally would determine the quality of a blog post, are not relevant in this case.
Then, once the initial content is written, it's mostly a matter of keeping up with updates and occasional bursts of new content following new releases, like a new expansion in a game or a new Season in a TV series.
This is also where the roles of a Curator / Editor and a Writer are slightly different compared to Hive communities. I suspect the Editors would be the initial authors interested in developing the Wiki. Another important aspect is to have any changes approved by an Editor before they are made public, to help maintain quality standards. This could also help with preventing abuse, where people would submit large quantities of low quality text to game the system in hopes of higher rewards, for example.
Curation groups that already have the means to incubate new communities could expand their reach into more mainstream audiences by also incubating Wikis, administered by competent Editors and expanded by proficient Writers. All would be incentivized to do quality work by receiving rewards using the voting mechanism that Hive already has in place. This would also help with avoiding abandoned Wikis, as the curation group would be able to assign new replacement Editors if necessary.
Bringing in revenue from advertisers and referrals
I would also support enabling an additional revenue stream in the form of ad banners. A limited number of ad slots, definitely non-intrusive, paid for with Hive.
I'll give an example with Gods Unchained. Suppose a new marketplace selling the game's NFTs would like to get a bigger share of the market. They would pay the Wiki creator in Hive tokens to host an ad banner for a pre-determined number of days. The wiki management interface could provide the tools to manage requests, payments, control the banner display, and even queue automatic banner switching.
Or if the parent company Immutable X would like to promote their other games to 'adjacent' customers, they could also buy ad banners. Of course, more popular topics would probably attract more mainstream advertisers. This would then become another avenue to help bring Hive and crypto closer to mainstream use as well.
An example with referrals: third-party excellent marketplaces like Token Trove have a referral system where a user automatically receives a small % of the fees charged for every transaction. Each Wiki page dedicated to a card NFT could have a widget that connects to the order book and pulls the card price in real-time. The page would also contain a link to that card in the marketplace, allowing the viewer to easily purchase the card they are looking at, while the Wiki collects a small fee from the referral link.
Rewarding editors and writers
So how would votes distribute rewards among the participants? This is the technical part where my solutions could be off the mark and impractical.
I suppose some changes to the current reward rules would be ideal. This is what I think would be helpful, irrespective if it is technically feasible or not (I don't know) or if it would open vectors for abuse I cannot foresee. Of course, there could be other ways to reach similar results that are technically more practical.
There could be some options for who could add more pages to the Wiki - ideally an option for Editors to do so while ownership remains with the Wiki owner (so expand the privilege / authorization from just the owners).
If all pages are owned by the Wiki creator then the process of collecting and distributing rewards would probably be less complex than if the Wiki pages were owned by multiple accounts.
Rewards (essentially from voting) would be linked in some way to the popularity of the Wiki.
A Wiki doesn't need to have new content added all the time, but a popular Wiki gets the same articles read repeatedly over time. There should be a way to reward attention, so a Wiki that gets a lot of views and a lot of 'appreciation votes' from readers should be able to collect rewards from those votes. If the reader comes back multiple times and chooses to reward those pages, then the Wiki should be able to collect rewards from repeated voting. As I understand it, such a mechanism would be a major stumbling block considering how the Hive blockchain is designed.The distribution of rewards among Editors and Writers should be designed in a fair but fraud resilient manner. This is a major operational topic and I don't have any concrete solutions to offer. I expect other more capable people would be able to contribute with workable solutions.
Contributors doing ad-hoc, non-recurring tasks like CSS templates or coding widgets could get compensation from a separate funding source. The Wiki could set aside a percentage of the earnings in a fund to pay for such tasks.
If any ad revenue is involved, it would be distributed to all participants in the same proportion as the voting rewards.
The Editors would be rewarded for any writing work they would do themselves (I suspect most Wikis would be heavily expanded by the Editors) and then an extra fixed percentage as a reward for the editing work.
Curation communities like OCD would be able to support their Wikis of choice with just one large vote regularly, instead of having to analyze individual contributions like they do now.
If a community like OCD is responsible for incubating a Wiki, they could set up at creation time a percentage to be routed back to them, similarly to what already happens when an author defines the beneficiaries of their blog posts.
Why is this necessary?
Hive is all about rewarding people who create content - there was a necessity to develop a way to reward those people for the content they create. A Wiki is one of the most useful types of online content organization we have now. And so many people around the world produce Wiki content without compensation... and if Hive solves that for blog posts, it would only seem natural to extend it to Wikis!
I see Wikis having a huge potential to increase the popularity and success of the Hive blockchain. It is also a genuinely useful use case. It seems like a solid way to reach mainstream content creators and consumers in the hundreds of millions if we take Fandom stats as a measuring stick.
This is not a funding proposal. My modest expectation is that a group of people with the financial and technical means would read this and get excited enough to try and make it happen.
If this idea is incompatible with the fundamentals of the Hive blockchain, perhaps it would make sense to create a fork tailored for this particular purpose? Another solution to circumvent the blockchain's limitations could be a new token, but I don't see how that token would gain any value without the backing of the standard HP voting rewards.
I would like to thank both @crrdlx and @pharesim for critically reading and providing feedback that I incorporated into this final version.
Thanks for reading!
