On 08/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mar 7, 2008, at 1:02 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber
<kmw(a)armory.com> wrote:
and
scope.
Which should be "everything that exists."
We already have that project under way. It's called the 'Internet'.
Please feel free to use it instead of projects that try for more
uniformly higher quality such as the wikipedia.
That's unfair on a number of levels.
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google
searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in
the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things
in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that
will get reflected in how people treat us.
The problem with our plot summaries and trivia
sections has little to
nothing to do with their quality - in fact, they're usually quite good
for plot summaries and lists of odd connections.
Yes, there's always going to be losers with any thing that helps
maintain quality. Most of the measures we have are only correlated
with quality, not direct measures. That means that some things get
excluded when they shouldn't. But my point is that this is probably
unavoidable if we want a high quality encyclopedia, which to be
brutally honest, it doesn't sound like you do, particularly- you value
covering 'everything' higher.
Encyclopedias are not an exact science, and never will be.
-Phil
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.