On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)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