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