What makes me uncomfortable about this is that it's such a (for the most part) insignificant article being promoted to a FA and on the main page. Not only is it eerily short, its subject is incredibly obscure. Many of the C1K are still at start-class and B-class, yet people still get this to the front page. Not saying it's bad; a meaningless featured article is better than not having one at all, but I think it would be greatly beneficial to the project and our public perception if we were to put more stress on the core articles. When people say "Wikipedia is a bad resource", they're not talking about a social hygiene movie from 1946, they're talking about the 118 chemical elements, many of whose articles are B or Start. (I was working on Lutetium; halfway through my research and before I could reformat the article I got indefinitely banned).
2008/9/24 Flameviper Velifang theflameysnake@yahoo.com:
What makes me uncomfortable about this is that it's such a (for the most part) insignificant article being promoted to a FA and on the main page. Not only is it eerily short, its subject is incredibly obscure.
A lot of the time it is less hassle to write about obscure topics. Few people trying to POV push and less worrying about what rates inclusion.
On Sep 24, 2008, at 12:22 PM, Flameviper Velifang wrote:
What makes me uncomfortable about this is that it's such a (for the most part) insignificant article being promoted to a FA and on the main page. Not only is it eerily short, its subject is incredibly obscure.
I disagree on the obscurity - the main academic book on trash cinema has 17 separate index mentions of it, including two separate ten page sections on the film.
-Phil
On 9/24/08, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I disagree on the obscurity - the main academic book on trash cinema has 17 separate index mentions of it, including two separate ten page sections on the film.
In other words, a lot more could have been written, but unfortunately wasn't. :/
—C.W.
On Sep 24, 2008, at 1:30 PM, Charlotte Webb wrote:
On 9/24/08, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I disagree on the obscurity - the main academic book on trash cinema has 17 separate index mentions of it, including two separate ten page sections on the film.
In other words, a lot more could have been written, but unfortunately wasn't. :/
Half of the article's citations are to that book.
-Phil
This is a terrible, terrible, terribly idea.
The value in Wikipedia does not come from the core topics. It cannot. Our article on the United States of America will never be particularly valuable, because there are 17000 equivilents one can easily find. The glut of supply prevents it from attaining value. History of Elephants in Europe is immensly valuable because it's unique - it doesn't duplicate what already exists. A main page full of core topics would drastically undersell Wikipedia's value.
Brian
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Flameviper Velifang theflameysnake@yahoo.com wrote:
What makes me uncomfortable about this is that it's such a (for the most part) insignificant article being promoted to a FA and on the main page. Not only is it eerily short, its subject is incredibly obscure. Many of the C1K are still at start-class and B-class, yet people still get this to the front page. Not saying it's bad; a meaningless featured article is better than not having one at all, but I think it would be greatly beneficial to the project and our public perception if we were to put more stress on the core articles. When people say "Wikipedia is a bad resource", they're not talking about a social hygiene movie from 1946, they're talking about the 118 chemical elements, many of whose articles are B or Start.
(I was working on Lutetium; halfway through my research and before I could reformat the article I got indefinitely banned).
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2008/9/24 Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com:
This is a terrible, terrible, terribly idea.
The value in Wikipedia does not come from the core topics. It cannot. Our article on the United States of America will never be particularly valuable, because there are 17000 equivilents one can easily find. The glut of supply prevents it from attaining value. History of Elephants in Europe is immensly valuable because it's unique - it doesn't duplicate what already exists. A main page full of core topics would drastically undersell Wikipedia's value.
Brian
There are other articles on the united states but they tend to be either lack the fouces of wikipedia, be hard to find, are behind pay walls, are rather less condensed or have pov issues.
Our core articles do get quite a bit of interest [[United states]] averages about 45K views a day. [[Mon and dad]] about 60. But of course not that simple.
The first problem is defineing what core articles actually are
Pure popularity is pretty meaningless otherwise [[MySpace]] is a core article but [[Kenya]] may not be.
Traditional standards may help but they tend to have an Angelo/us-Europe centric bias.
So what is wikipedia's main value to its readers?
Well the most significant factor appears to be current events indeed looking at last month's rankings most of the articles towards the top are related to current events.
The rest are mostly internet related [[youtube]] [[facebook]] or sexual.
The type of current events vary but tends to be major news stories deaths and films.
As you go down you start to hit more computer game/TV stuff.
The articles with some exception tend to be fairly specific so people are going to the articles they want rather than starting with general terms and surfing over (one exception would be our sex related topics).
Of course some are hard to classify such as http://stats.grok.se/en/200808/$1
So what does this mean for the main page? Well other than the current events bos we don't need to worry too much about the image being presented. It makes little difference if the featured article is a core topic or obscure people tend to go where they want rather than where we try to guide them.
What does this mean in terms of less mainstream articles? Not too much. A key part of our current events articles popularity is probably that we had an article on the subject before everyone was interested in it. Wikipedia was interested in [[South Ossetia]] before you were:
http://stats.grok.se/en/200808/South_Ossetia