charles matthews wrote:

Ed Poor wrote

...

What conclusion can we draw from this? I'd like to hear some discussion

on this, please.

Interesting that Ed and I, not a usual combination, have both been talking recently about the [[Arnold J. Toynbee]] article on its Talk page.

Interesting, that is, in the sense that Toynbee was hot on civilizations' responses to challenges, as catalytic of development.

WP actually needs rivals, right now. My view is that WP can easily take on _any_ online opposition, as far as factual volume is concerned. We have the bodies. We can simply put up enough 6/10-rated articles (today's Guardian) about _everything_, and dominate Google. Simply extrapolate from where we are.

I like that approach. I like, for example, posting good bibliographies of prolific authors, where the WWW generally has scrappy lists. In the long run, and with good search and hyperlinking, we create a most awesome research tool.

There are these other challenges:

• quality writing (doesn't come easy)
• higher accuracy
• fuller reach into deep academia, outside the Anglophone world (for

wiki-en), across cultures

• get the other breaking-new media to say 'uncle'
• put hard-copy encyclopedias out of business
• make people want to release under GFDL so that WP can easily

assimilate their content

• Textbooks'R'Us, have our articles segmented so that getting a

reasonable first textbook draft is just a filtering exercise.

But I think we know all this. To return to Toynbee, it is more a question of how to get Wikipedians to 'feel challenged', on the specifics. Right now, with the site running slow, the main practical challenge seems to be hardward/developers/cash. _I_ mostly feel challenged by the sheer breadth of approach needed.

Charles

At the risk of being tedious,

article rating article rating article rating article rating article rating

might be a reasonable first step towards goals 1, 2, 3, and 5 on that list. Even a _bad_ article rating system would be better than no article rating system at all, since the obvious deficiencies of a bad system would quickly provide the spur for developing a better one. If the first system is truly sucky, we lose nothing in the long run; we can simply archive its data, and start again from scratch, and the second try will be better because of it.

As has been said many times before, what really counts is starting to gather the data. Analysing the results and fine-tuning the system can be done later; the scope for getting useful information from detailed analysis of the whole database of ratings is _immense_.

Remember categories? They were really controversial when they were first introduced, but now they are invaluable, and it's hard to remember what MediaWiki was like without them.

-- Neil

Stefan Sittler wrote:

I have been wondering about this, actually. (I'm newish to WP). Could somebody show me how exactly categories are helpful? A link would be fine. It's hard for me to see the usefulness. A link or three would be fine, maybe an old pertinent discussion. Thanks.

I've used them to basically find things in the same category. For example, [[Category:Islands of Greece]], and its sub-categories for different island chains.

I see them as fulfilling a lot of the functions that would otherwise have to be fulfilled with lists, but in a more maintainable way, since they're maintained incrementally on the article side, not centrally on the list side (the "list" is then automatically generated). They don't completely replace lists, but they automate a lot of the more tedious sorts of lists that would otherwise have to be constructed and maintained.

-Mark