[Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us?

[Anthony]

On Dec 17, 2007 12:54 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Interesting hypothesis.  You knew I was going to test it, right?
> > Taking a random selection from about the middle of April 18th:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virginia_Tech_massacre&oldid=123806652
> >
> > "As of" only appears once.  "As of April 18, 2007, Cho's motives for
> > the killings remain unclear."
>
> There is also an entire section set out as a timeline. It is a fairly
> well written timeline though, so it is quite encyclopaedic, it doesn't
> look like people have just been adding things on the end.

Yeah, I don't see the problem with a timeline of events, as long as
it's updated based on when things occurred, not based on when things
were discovered (unless the discovery is itself noteworthy).

> Being such a
> big story and having so many people working on it, however, means it
> probably isn't representative of how Wikipedia handles most current
> events.

I don't really have much sense of how Wikipedia or Wikinews handles
smaller stories, because I don't use Wikipedia or Wikinews for either,
I use Google.  I have used Wikipedia during big complicated stories.
It's not great, as it gets things wrong an awful lot during the early
period of time as facts are still coming out, but if you read
everything skeptically and follow the links to the sources when
appropriate, it's often useful in a way I really haven't seen anything
compete with.

What domain name y'all decide to use to host it, I don't care, but
please don't take it away and replace it with a traditional news
report.