On 26-10-2002, Imran Ghory wrote thusly :
On 25 Oct 2002, Gareth Owen wrote:
The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com writes:
How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.
RandomPages
RandomPages is one reason for which we really need article classification by topic, as at the moment it roughly assumes that articles are going to spread across all topics equally. If that ever was true it certainly isn't true now. Even if autogenerated articles were excluded, in the long term we would get certain topics having far more articles than others. To avoid giving a skewed view of the pedia we need some sort of classification systems so that the RandomPage function first randomly chooses a topic and then returns a random article from that topic.
There was some discussion about classification, metadata and solutions to tackle the growing volume of information. Then there were 10,000-15,000 articles. It was either rebuked or the importance was minimized. To classify was thought unwiki and impracticable ("who will classify, according to what criteria, what about multiple categories and wrongly assigned articles who would correct them"). Manning was in favour and I think it is thanks to him we have Wikiprojects. Long ago I created metadata subpages for a few articles as an excercise in this direction but probably they got votes for deletion as a search engine whoring.
Have you worked out some solutions ? How do you think it could be accomplished ?
Regards, Kpjas.