2008/9/24 Wily D <wilydoppelganger(a)gmail.com>om>:
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
--
geni