Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: January 11, 2009
Tags : digg, mixedink, wikis
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MixedInk: Wiki Meets Digg

mediaink

MixedInk is a new collaborative wiki service with a strong dose of social voting, or as the company suggests: Wiki meets Digg. MixedInk aims to help users overcome the noise created by multiple contributions by adding a voting element to each user generated contribution.

The base of MixedInk, like any Wiki is a topic; an organizer proposes a topic and invites people to participate. Participants contribute ideas and opinions addressing the issue. They also edit and remix other people’s submissions. While this is going on, users can also rate other submissions, creating a social preference that allows the best contributions to rise to the top.

Demo video below. It’s an interesting idea, but it feels a little busy. On one hand you’ve got your Wiki elements, but users can edit other contributions before and during voting, so it wouldn’t be difficult for example to edit a higher ranking contribution to make it worse, or having done that using it as your own. Still, maybe it won’t be gamed, and it is different as an idea. One to watch.

Check out Slate’s Inauguration Speech wiki for an example of how it works here.

Vanessa

Hi Duncan,

Thanks for writing about MixedInk!

I just want to clarify the concern regarding users editing contributions and (1) making them worse or (2) taking undue credit. Unlike with a wiki, MixedInk shows a full list of versions for the community to browse and rate. When someone edits a version written by another author, the original piece remains in the list unchanged. The new, edited version enters the list to be rated on its own merits alongside the original. So if the editor did a good job, the new version will be rated up by the community. If the editor made it worse, the new version will be rated down. In every case, we track authorship, so the original author gets credit for his/her work, while the new editor gets credit for his/her changes.

I hope this helps clarify!

Best,
Vanessa (Co-founder at MixedInk)

Michael Allan

I think what Vanessa is saying, is that every contributor has her own copy of the shared text, as a separate document. So *Vanessa* works on her document, *I* work on mine, and so on... How we collaborate is by *sharing* bits of text, copying the best contributions amongst ourselves, and working them into our own documents. All of us are trying to make our own documents the best, so they can attract the highest ratings. Is that right Vanessa?

I have questions about the voting. I heard earlier that MixedInk was going to be a tool for democratic consensus building. The idea was that the final, top rated text would be the expression of a group consensus. (Like it says in your slogan, "many people, one voice".) Is that still the idea? Because the way the results are currently reported, there's no count of participants for/against the final text. So there's no way to know if it's *really* a consensus.

One more question: Some of the participants may start assigning zero-scores to all of the competing documents, in order to increase their own relative standing. Right? And others will feel compelled to retaliate. And some of them might get the idea of creating multiple accounts (sock puppets), so they can retaliate in force. So, instead of open collaboration, it could descend into open warfare. What can prevent that?

Mike (a not-unfriendly competitor, of sorts)

Janette Toral

Interesting concept. I wonder though why would users be motivated to put their post in a 3rd party instead of creating a group blog or a pbwiki (and even monetize).

Michael_Allan

Right, MixedInk corrals all the contributors to a single, central site. The advantage for users is they get access to MixedInk's collaborative tools for sharing bits of text. They also get a voting system, to agree on a final, consensus document. The advantage for MixedInk, of course, is it shows ads to the users, and makes money.

Open alternatives are being developed (by others). Some of them (like Votorola) have comparable features to MixedInk, so users can still share bits of text, and they can still vote to reach consensus. But they can also choose their own posting sites, and are not exposed to ads. However, none of these alternatives is in beta release yet. Still at least a couple of months away...

Mike

Vanessa

Sorry for the delayed response! I just want to clarify that it's easy to embed MixedInk as a widget into anyone's website - just send me an email: vanessa [at] mixedink [dot] com.

-Vanessa