Carcharoth wrote:
On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 9:31 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
<snip> > The community hasn't really woken up to the fact that Wikipedia > is no longer only an open shelf needing to be stacked, but it is a > depository of a huge wealth of material that needs to be protected, > sorted and (urgently) sifted. >
Agreed. Though is it annoying when you see people working on things to address this, and then see critics, who inspired some people, carry on criticising the meta-processes, instead of supporting efforts made to improve those meta-processes.
The proposition is like this: X is to WP as WP is to Encarta. Solve for X, both conceptually (as a visionary), and in practical terms (if there is a transition to manage, let's be the far-sighted ones ourselves).
I suspect Douglas Adams did the first part. What people will want is something designed for display on a hand-held device. You summon up first short versions of our "lead sections" and then, instead of a long scroll, you get a menu with options like TOC, basic image, gallery, "simple English", "stable version", "live version", '"see also"... The inherent simplicity of article = single live webpage is an artefact of chunky great monitors.
Charles