Sj wrote:
I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of
But do we have adequate coverage in that subject area?
Well, we certainly have decent coverage for some subsets of these subjects. I agree that we should start smaller; perhaps American History and Mechanics? I think we could manage either of those. (One of the skills we need to develop is the ability to cover a subject area or any size in 100 pages; the broader the subject area, the higher-level the produced content. WP right now has very few good overview articles, as is evidenced by the scattershot quality of top-level topics linked directly from the main page -- but we do have the editor expertise to fix that, as evidenced by our deep articles.)
Interesting that you should raise this. I had already asked myself how could I go about choosing articles for 1.0, and the first thing that came to mind was the topic overview articles. Anything else would follow from there. If any group of articles should be priorized for being brought up to editorial standards it is these. They would be the lead articles for each section of a paper product. Nothing binds us to the strict alphabetical order of many traditional encyclopedias.
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
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
I could be convinced about this, if it were a loose and unbinding measure of reader responses. I do think that there should be a more detailed (one explanation-box per category/facet; more options) and less rated review function, which would be more closely bound to the validation process.
Having these ratings kept loose is essential if we don't want a whole bureaucracy built up around them. (I do find a 10-pont rating scale more visually menaingful.) Security against a person casting multiple votes needs to be kept to a minimum. We certainly don't need to keep track of every vote that a person has cast. I would even go so far as to say that a person may cast a new vote after *every* edit, but I would attach more weight to votes cast since the last edit. An algorithm can certainly be devised to calculate a rating based on the available votes. When surveyed on many topics people do have a tendency to rate things higher than average. That can be normalized by looking at votes across all topics, and taking the raw average to be equivalent to 5.0 on a ten point scale.
The idea that validation is done to elicit improvement of articles is important. Many educators to-day are questioning the role of tests and examinations in schools. For them we should be "testing for learning" rather than "testing of learning"; this conforms well with this idea of article validation.