I’ve madeaha.www.i494.comto share aha! moments. In 3 words, “Twitter meets Wikipedia”.
Why?
Writing articles hurts: research, collect thoughts, organize, filter the best, and write. This takes 20+ hours, and most articles languish half-done.
People don’t share “Ah, I get it!” moments on Wikipedia — that’s not its goal. Yet those personal insights are what make ideas click.
My goals:
- 收集像推文一样简单的见解(“虚数是常规数字，经过旋转”)
- Categorize them by Wikipedia topic
- Use voting/comments to select the best insights to develop further (hacker news/reddit/stack overflow)
- Grow insights organically — an optional “details” section that can expand into an article (Wikipedia)
- Browse any topic or url and see the best insights for it
Distributed Learning
我的朋友建议使用“分布式学习”这个词。While understanding a topic is a personal journey,we can share what really, truly helped us “get” an idea.
For example: there was anexcellent article on the Fourier Transform. One of the best parts:
Hecolor codedthe equation and made it a sentence. Why, oh why doesn’t every wiki math article have this? (Because it’s a reference, not a tutorial).
There aredozens关于帮助灵感迸发的绝妙技巧，它们需要1)曝光2)过滤3)应用到主题中。
Vision
I’m experimenting with ways to share insights. Some ideas:
Hacker-news like homepage to vote up popular insights:
While reading a page, keep insights on the “margin”:
While writing, have live-previews, TeX support, and edit multiple insights at once:
The ultimate dream:
- Small: Anyone can blast out insights without 90% being forgotten in text files (my personal use case)
- Medium: Insights in-progress can be developed / commented / ranked
- Big: Visit a topic like “imaginary numbers” and get an organized view of the best insights, diagrams, analogies and examples (not another tutorial walking through the definitions that didn’t work the first time)
This isn’t a replacement for Q&A sites, wikis, or blogs — it’s a repository of insights that helped speed up the learning process from those other sources.
Future
Let’s explore ways to reduce the friction while learning: make it easy to share ideas, and filter the ones that work best.
I’ll be writing as normal, but instead of starting with private notes that wither away, I’ll keep ideas in a public arena. The best insights can be combined and developed into full-on articles.
The project is brand-new, evolving, and feedback is welcome! Feel free to kick the tires andadd your own ahas混合:)。