How about letting users vote on each article?
Here's one such scheme of the top of my head, which might be used with a
little tweaking.
1. Start with zero articles in the print version.
2. Any user can "vote" for an article to be included in the print
version.
2a. Put your votes on the talk page, or a "\print" sub-page
3. If anyone disagrees, then we need discussion and a tally.
4. Any page with 80% or higher vote /supporting/ inclusion, goes to the
print version.
Ed Poor, "trying to compromise" as www.googlism.com would say
The server does seem to be having some trouble. My request is reaching
the server, but the server is refusing it. Then again, it just started a
few minutes ago, so it could just be countermeasures against high CPU
load or something.
> From: Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net>
> Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
>
>> A weak point of Wikipedia is that people write about what they are
>> interested in, so given several topics of apparently comparable
>> importance, the length, depth, and quality of the articles may differ
>> widely.
>
> This is true. This is called "Systematic bias":
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
> Replies_to_common_objections#Systematic_bias
>
>> This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become
>> much more apparent in a print edition.
>
> Is that really so bad, though?
Not on the Web, no.
> I'm sure most people will understand. :)
Yeah, right. I'm sure they'll understand why Phillips Exeter has an
article and Choate (now Choate Rosemary Hall) doesn't.
Why Bronx High School of Science has an article and La Guardia High
School of Music and Art (of _Fame_ fame) does not.
Why Cal Tech gets five paragraphs, Princeton gets seven, Harvard gets
fourteen, and MIT gets thirty-six. (This means the section on MIT's
_architecture_ is longer than the _entire article on Princeton._)
Why Radiology has nine paragraphs and Cytology gets one sentence.
Why Marianne Moore gets eight paragraphs and Vachel Lindsay gets
"Vachel Lindsay (1879 - December 5, 1931) was an American poet born in
Springfield, Illinois."
It doesn't bother me at all on the Web, but I think the slogan
"Wikipedia is not paper" may turn out to have an uncomfortable amount
of truth in it.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)world.std.com alternate:
dpbsmith(a)alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
I seem to be having an editing conflict with
[[user:MPF|MPF]]. He is insisting on changing "tuliptree"
to "Tulip tree" and "cucumbertree" to "Cucumber tree". We
had a big discussion about the capitalization issue last
year, though I don't think we discussed the compounding
issue. Does anyone remember this? Didn't we decide for
plants NOT to capitalize? In any case, all the authorities
either compound or hyphenate; none of them use two separate
words. See [[talk:Tulip tree]] for more.
--
John Knouse
jaknouse(a)frognet.net
----- Original Message -----
From: Delirium <delirium(a)rufus.d2g.com>
Date: Sunday, February 29, 2004 6:40 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trading with the Enemy
> Which all makes it somewhat odd that the law still exists. If
> it's not
> going to be enforced even in such egregious cases as this, why not
> just
> repeal it?
Chilling effect. The *threat* of the law actually being used makes some publications self-censor.
John