[Wikipedia-l] Thinking ahead

[Larry Sanger]

I was doing some editing on Wikipedia just now and had the following
thoughts.

I don't think it's going to die down--ever.  It's going to be active,
and while it might die down somewhat, in fact, over the next many
months, it's only going to get ''more'' :-) active.

I think this makes certain improvements, related to scalability,
particularly crucial.  One improvement that Jimmy has mentioned (maybe
just to me--I forget where anyway) is to divide Wikipedia into several
distinct categories.  Perhaps "science, math, and philosophy," "social
science," "applied arts and sciences," and "culture" (as per Nupedia) or
perhaps something finer-grained.  Then, whenever anyone saved a change,
the change would be logged on one (or more) of *several* "recent
changes" pages as indicated by the user.  Then, if I was interested,
then I could look at *only* those changes in the "culture" section.

If we don't do this--or come up with some other solution--we're going to
have a serious problem of a "recent changes" page that just moves far
too fast-and-furious for anyone to follow.  It'll get very sloppy.  The
experience today and yesterday already bears this out.

Larry