On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
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Slashdot has an interesting thing where they have ratings for postings, with different categories. They then permit you to consider certain categories to be more or less important to you (e.g. funny postings may be raised up in the rating meaning you're more likely to see them).
I think that has been proposed before and reejcted. Could be proposed again, I suppose.
In principle a similar thing could apply to the wikipedia, if we don't do a hard delete to articles (or only for the truly nasty vandalism stuff), but simply rate them along multiple axes then it could be possible for a user to indicate to the wikipedia what he or she values, and only articles that are highly enough rated for their own set of values would appear, (with a default set of values used for anonymous users.)
That would mess up linking between articles.
Doing it that sort of way potentially avoids the either it's suitable for our glorious wikipedia; or it isn't dichotomy, and permits poor quality articles a chance to improve below the waterline before becoming full-fledged articles.
Userspace is generally used for article incubation in controversial cases. Having a Wikipedia project place or namespace for this is not a bad idea though.
I'm not saying it would be a perfect system, but it would probably be better than what we have right now; in other words we would have far less deletionism, because we would have far fewer deletes.
You might get arguments over links and redirections to or from or not (as the case may be) this namespace.
Carcharoth