[Foundation-l] Brainstorming: External links & Funding options

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2007/4/26, Versageek <wiki at versageek.com>:

>
> The concept:
>
> 1) Create a WMF controlled wiki, to be used only to host 'external links'.
> (for the purpose of discussion, we'll call this 'linkswiki')
>
> With this concept, the criteria defined in WP:SPAM and  WP:EL still
> apply, we may choose to relax certain aspects of the criteria a bit for
> linkswiki based links, but we wouldn't start allowing everything that gets posted.
>
> Then modify the link policy to something like "only 'official sites' and
> references/sources allowed on the main wiki article pages" (or some
> variation of more restrictive criteria that people can agree upon), all
> other 'external links' would be either posted directly to linkswiki or
> moved there via bot on a continuous basis. Each encyclopedia page
> would have an 'external link' to a corresponding page on the linkswiki.
>
> {insert a healthy amount of tech wizardry and creative thinking here to
> maintain the linkswiki directory and make it more useful to our users, this
> also requires a functioning SingleUserLogin to be practical. }
>

There are such the projects, for example:

http://www.wikilinks.org/wiki/Main_Page

but they do not work very well. MediaWiki is not a good software for
collecting links. It is difficult to mange the structure of them and
to control the content. The collections of human-controlled lists of
links are useful if they are well organized, like for example DMOZ:

http://dmoz.org/

Links in Wikipedia are organized by relevance to the article's
context. You can remove or add links when you feel them useless or
useful for reader of encyclopedic article. If you leave links only,
and allow adding more - not so well relevant to the former article's
context you probably end up in chaotic list of links.

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.poli.toya.net.pl
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html