Imran wrote:
>Additionally consider how RandomPage is used,
>
>* By people looking for interesting topics.
>* By people looking for pages to edit
>* By people who want to see the scope of wikipedia.
>
>For the first two categories of people, if they find a page interesting
>they're likely to follow up links from it, if not they'll just hit
>randompage again. What these people don't want is to be given another
>article which is very similar to the article they didn't want to read, so
>this will put off both contributors and casual readers.
This is a different matter entirely from what you said, and I'd agree with it. :-)
>The third category will likely come away with a highly skewed view as to
>the kind of article in Wikipedia.
I still disagree with this. 2/3 of our articles are on small towns in the U.S. Finding a lot of them gives an accurate representation of what we have. However, it does not give an accurate representation of what we *want* to have: we want to have articles on a broad range of topics, from film to physics. And, as you've pointed out, it's not very useful for most people who click on "random page": they're looking for an article they can edit somehow, and most of the cities are not what they're looking for.
>For virtually all uses of RandomPage people do not want or expect to see a
>series of related articles in rapid succession.
I would agree with this too. Another thing I've noticed about it is that it keeps returning the same "random pages". You can see this if you click on it more than a few dozen times.
kq
Magnus wrote:
>BTW, I recently read that the Encarta atlas contains 1.8 million
>entries. 35000 single-cow-places will vanish in the long-term expansion
>of wikipedia. That is, if it continues to grow as we all wish.
We have a long way to go. :-)
I don't mind Ram-Man's bot so much, but I'd like to find an equivalent resource for towns *outside* of the U.S.
kq
> Hello Wikipedians,
> Is a book published in 1917 in the US still covered by
> copyright?
1923 is the magic number, so no, your 1917 book is
in the public domain.
I'd like to try writing a taxobot. Does anyone have some bot code he can
share with me? Where can I try out the taxobot without messing up the real
Wiki?
phma
Hello,
Mmost arguments in favor or against different
solutions seem to have been presented now, but I must say I lost track who wants
what. Furthermore it's a useless waste of energy to work on different
solutions without knowing which is wanted.
So I invite people to give their vote..
www.wikipedia.org should:
[] not be changed at all.
[] redirect depending on the browser's language setting to the wikipedia
in the prefered language.
[] be a multilingual portal (1)
[] other ______
(1) draft to be further improved at
http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php
with language of the welcome message derived from the browser settings and
prefered language highlighted.
this message is crossposted to intlwiki-l and wikipedia-l and to metawikipedia [[What to
do with www.wikipedia.org]]
greetings,
elian
Imran wrote:
>To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of
>classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly
>chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
Actually, RandomPage gives an accurate view of wikipedia: we have far more of Ram-Man's articles than anything else, so they turn up more than anything else. A year ago we had far more Atlas Shrugged articles than anything else, so *those* would always turn up. The solution? Write more articles on other topics.
kq
elian <elian(a)gmx.li> writes:
> www.wikipedia.org should:
>
> [] not be changed at all.
>
> [] redirect depending on the browser's language setting to the wikipedia
> in the prefered language.
>
> [x] be a multilingual portal (1)
>
> [] other ______
greetings,
elian
I vote for the multilingual portal. It emphasizes the international
scope of the project. It is also a nobrainer that everyone understands.
People can bookmark the main page that they prefer.
Automatical redirection reminds me of the 'helpful' attitude of
Microsoft Word, which makes all kinds of decisions for me, that are
seldom what I want, and difficult to disable.
Erik Zachte
Just to point out the problem with voting:
People have been talking about the difficulty of decision-making. So I
invite people to vote on how decisions should be made.
Decisions about Wikipedia should be made
[] based on votes on choices picked by one person
[] slowly and incrementally
[] only by qualified individuals
[] other ______