I have been following the discussion of Wikipedia being reliable as a
source for information. Here are my suggestions. I have seen that
there is a
Wikia.com, which is meant to be another human edited web
directory such as DMOZ. Unfortunately DMOZ, while freely
downloadable, has a copyright policy incompatable with Wikipedia.
However, having a human edited web directory has its bonuses, and
incorporating the categorization system of Wikia into Wikipedia can
help to increase our reliability and credibility.
For example, the two could be coded into eachother, in such a manner
that when you create or edit an article, you could enter a template
command that pulled information from the directory database and
displayed the related external web links from that category at the
bottom of the article, in a nicely formatted manner. Perhaps a maximum
of ten websites could show. I imagine an article on The Madness of
King George could contain {{Directory: Movies: Historical Fiction}} at
the bottom of the article. This has an added bonus of not being an
unnatractive listing of hyperlinks as it would come in a preformatted
flavor preferably created by a designer.
When one creates an article, they would also be asked to scour the web
for reliable (i.e. preferably .gov and .edu sites) and other sources
of information. What does this do? This emphasizes our advantage
over the EB, and it also advances Wikia at the same time.
Wikipedia is getting big. As everyone has said, recent changes is
simply too large and some of the rifraf is getting through. Perhaps
there could be a form of checkboxes with categorizations of
information (Think: Google Personalized categories), and I can only
monitor the directories of my choice.
This sort of a system would quiet the noisemakers by making the
information in our articles easily verifiable. All of this stands
apart from the fact, though, that these noisemakers simply do not
understand the concept of "Wiki".
/Alterego