--- Sj 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
Wow, lots of talk about an important subject. Wonderful. What TomK has said about this -- that it requires no technical support, but instead requires defining specific reachable subprojects, drumming up community interest in them, and providing regular updates and 'prereleases' with the status of the whole project -- is absolutely right for the short-term.
Exactly. We should first concentrate on creating progressively longer WikiReaders before we tackle something as large as an entire general encyclopedia (even a full concise one would be daunting).
I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of the currently-underway English Readers -- and start defining the scope of our first validation effort. Feel free to write me privately with other suggestions, if you don't want to spam the list...
But do we have adequate coverage in that subject area? Also, wouldn't a smaller WikiReader be a better place to start?
For a longer-term scalable solution, I think a fairly simple solution which would improve not only this 1.0 validation but also many other aspects of WP maintenance, is the creation of a page for explicitly managing metadata flags for an article -- "stub", "copyvio", ahd "wrong language" flags as well as review flags for higher-order quality validation. See the metada section of the validation article:
Yes, I think a flag: meta tag would be good for this since that type of information is really not appropriate for category:.
As Ant has noted elsewhere, the intent of validation is to get editors to improve articles, not to encourage them to waste time voting on the 'best' version; as such I think a simple objection/response system, where each objection should be responded to by some future editor (and where the articles steadily improve) is a good way to think about it.
Why not readers then? Simply have a 'Rate this article' link in the toolbox of every article. They could give a 1 to 5 rating across a few different categories (completeness, readability, and accuracy) and be able to give an explanation in a text box. The rating would then be associated with the version that existed when the rating was created.
These data could be part of any validation system by feeding it articles that readers think are pretty good (a minimum number of unique votes would be needed to rate any article). Some other mechanism would then have to take place to finish the validation process.
Just an idea.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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