there was an interesting internal tech talk recently at the Turing Institute by a fairly recent addition to the research engineering group, who had a lot of previous experience in various technologies knowledge bases in various different organisations, and was being mildly critical of the system that had evolved here.
One thing struck me about this was that however you construct such a system, much of it (like an iceberg) is not in the visible components, but is reflective of how people use/navigate/update the knowledge, which is a shared delusion (like William Gibson's depiction of cyberspace in Neuromancer) - not in a bad way, but the longer the system exists, the harder it is for new people to acclimatise to it. Large parts of the structural information used by people to work with it are in their heads, not online.
so the system could automatically document how different kinds of users use it, by keeping breadcrumb/paper trails (you can of course do this in a wiki) and then do some kinds of statistical analysis to provide common, distinct modes/patterns explicitly. This could even be done in a privacy preserving way by combining federated learning (e.g. in client side tools, or browsers etc) with differential privacy, perhaps....
a project for an intern?
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