--- Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
stevertigo wrote:
IMHO, the 'lets mine this turnip and hope we find gold' approach won't work. It's a Murphy's Law, or something like it. Testing to see what crap floats is indeed only useful for
Calvinball.
Yeah, just putting new toys online to see what happens is really a stupid idea.
Thankfully, we never tried such nonsense at Nupedia. Who knows what we would have ended up with, instead of the twenty-plus high-quality articles we now have after years of hard labor.
Point taken (and thats certainly my kind of sarcasm :]) but you also make My point: The use /discovery /application of the wiki software to the purpose of creating an encyclopedia was a relative fluke. You can't expect that kind of breakthrough to happen again in the same manner to the same general group of people in a newly developed application toward the same idea.
In fact the conditions are greatly different than Nupedia, as Wikipedia was a separate experimental fork which was started from absolute scratch. Im sure your'e far more aware than I how Wikipedia is not a 'lets throw it up and see what it does' kind of environment anymore. Im sure thats not the way many other non-coders see it, who contribute largely through the established "normal" wiki processes, and see the value of Wikipedia in the hard work put into it by countless people.
The AVF idea is about drastically changing the way that Wikipedia articles are edited (ideally in a way which conforms to and mirrors the egalitarian and meritocratic openness of Wikipedia that has brough success thus far). There's a philosophical base and a history of discussion about the idea which newbies and even oldbies need to understand, in order for it to really work IMHO, but I understand if ATP your'e just looking at it from the basic 'will this code work for something' point of view.
All of the above *might* happen. Which is why we
have a test phase. If
the voting trolls really turn out to be a problem,
we could restrict
viewing of the individual votes to admins (to check
for bot abuse and
the like). Or each user could chose to hide his/her
votes individually.
In the test setup, everything goes. Even anons (or
whatever they're
called now :-) can vote. This might or might not be
a good idea in the
long run. But there's only one way to find out.
No, all of the above can be *expected* to happen in a 'test phase' for an app which in fact does not yet work and for whose immediate results are explained to be meaningless. If written to solicit help, the T'Pol wiki will probably give you pretty much the same kind of results. All that said, Ive read Timwi's explanation of what to do with the first batch of cookies and Im somewhat more hopeful. Yes, baby steps -- I understand.
Stevertigo
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