On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:35:15 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Sj 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
Wow, lots of talk about an important subject. Wonderful.
< > What TomK has said about this ... is just right for the short-term.
Exactly. We should first concentrate on creating progressively longer WikiReaders before we tackle something as large as an entire general encyclopedia (even a full concise one would be daunting).
I have to say, I don't like the name WikiReader, and hope we stop using it as a general term. (-: All of the wiki is meant to be read. I will just write "subpedia" and hope you know what I mean.
I would vote for World History or Physics, despite the different topics of
But do we have adequate coverage in that subject area?
Well, we certainly have decent coverage for some subsets of these subjects. I agree that we should start smaller; perhaps American History and Mechanics? I think we could manage either of those. (One of the skills we need to develop is the ability to cover a subject area or any size in 100 pages; the broader the subject area, the higher-level the produced content. WP right now has very few good overview articles, as is evidenced by the scattershot quality of top-level topics linked directly from the main page -- but we do have the editor expertise to fix that, as evidenced by our deep articles.)
For a longer-term scalable solution, I think a fairly simple solution which would improve not only this 1.0 validation but also many other aspects of WP maintenance, is the creation of a page for explicitly managing metadata flags for an article -- "stub", "copyvio", ahd "wrong language" flags as well as review flags for higher-order quality validation. See the metada section of the validation article:
Yes, I think a flag: meta tag would be good for this since that type of information is really not appropriate for category:.
Or a longer metadata section in the db (which might be more scalable).
As Ant has noted elsewhere, the intent of validation is to get editors to improve articles, not to encourage them to waste time voting on the 'best' version; as such I think a simple objection/response system, where
Why not readers then? Simply have a 'Rate this article' link in the toolbox of every article. They could give a 1 to 5 rating across a few different categories (completeness, readability, and accuracy) and be able to give an explanation in a text box. The rating would then be associated with the version
I could be convinced about this, if it were a loose and unbinding measure of reader responses. I do think that there should be a more detailed (one explanation-box per category/facet; more options) and less rated review function, which would be more closely bound to the validation process.
readers think are pretty good (a minimum number of unique votes would be needed to rate any article). Some other mechanism would then have to take place to finish the validation process.
Could certainly work as a low-barrier-to-input source of information. Expecially if the result of such votes were not made public save for articles with hundreds of them...
_sj_