[WikiEN-l] To boldy delete what no one had deleted before!

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> Slashdot has an interesting thing where they have ratings for
> postings, with different categories. They then permit you to consider
> certain categories to be more or less important to you (e.g. funny
> postings may be raised up in the rating meaning you're more likely to
> see them).

I think that has been proposed before and reejcted. Could be proposed
again, I suppose.

> In principle a similar thing could apply to the wikipedia, if we don't
> do a hard delete to articles (or only for the truly nasty vandalism
> stuff), but simply rate them along multiple axes then it could be
> possible for a user to indicate to the wikipedia what he or she
> values, and only articles that are highly enough rated for their own
> set of values would appear, (with a default set of values used for
> anonymous users.)

That would mess up linking between articles.

> Doing it that sort of way potentially avoids the either it's suitable
> for our glorious wikipedia; or it isn't dichotomy, and permits poor
> quality articles a chance to improve below the waterline before
> becoming full-fledged articles.

Userspace is generally used for article incubation in controversial
cases. Having a Wikipedia project place or namespace for this is not a
bad idea though.

> I'm not saying it would be a perfect system, but it would probably be
> better than what we have right now; in other words we would have far
> less deletionism, because we would have far fewer deletes.

You might get arguments over links and redirections to or from or not
(as the case may be) this namespace.

Carcharoth