Wikipedia customization through web augmentation techniques

Wikipedia is a successful example of collaborative knowledge construction. This can be synergistically complemented with personal knowledge construction whereby individuals are supported in their sharing, experimenting and building of information in a more private setting, without the scrutiny of the whole community. Ideally, both approaches should be seamlessly integrated so that wikipedians can easily transit from the public sphere to the private sphere, and vice versa. To this end, we introduce WikiLayer, a plugin for Wikipedia that permits wikipedians locally supplement Wikipedia articles with their own content (i.e. a layer). Layering additional content is achieved locally by seamlessly interspersing Wikipedia content with custom content. WikiLayer is driven by three main wiki principles: affordability (i.e., if you know how to edit articles, you know how to layer), organic growth (i.e., layers evolve in synchrony with the underlying articles) and shareability (i.e., layers can be shared in confidence through the wikipedian's social network, e.g., Facebook). The paper provides motivating scenarios for readers, contributors and editors. WikiLayer is available for download at http://webaugmentation.org/wikilayer.xpi.