On Wednesday 13 November 2002 09:18 am, wikipedia-l-request@wikipedia.org wrote:
...... But, the three options above might be just perfect for the "stable" wikipedia version that Larry proposed. Contents there will be controlled and checked anyway, so a little categorization on the side will be managable to the reviewers. The readers there would see categories and filters, but things like editing, talk, and all the tons of links needed for an "editable" encyclopedia will not be there, so there's plenty of room. Beside, we wouldn't want to give a CD-ROM with a current wikipedia dump to a school anyway. The reviewed version would be perfect for that.
Magnus
I now agree. WIkipedia is not the place to have self-descriptive tags on articles. Newbies won't know about them and old hands would be swamped with adding and reviewing tag relevance. There are also /way/ too many articles now to really even consider this. This idea /may/ have been possible to implement a year ago but IMO it is too late now. But this idea is perfect for Larrypedia/sifter.
However, I still think it would be neat to automatically set-up 'communities of articles' by having some software program dig through all the article links and see what links where, what links back, how often and then assign scores to articles - higher scores for a given category would be categorized in that category. The program can start from the Main Page, dig its way down into the links and then group links based on the categories we have on the Main Page.
This of course wouldn't be perfect and the 'categories' would need to be made into lists that could then be human edited. But then we could use the 'Watch links' function to have a customized Recent Changes and searches.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)