[WikiEN-l] Ideas on a methodology

Thu Jul 3 21:48:53 UTC 2003

My wife and daughter are going on vacation soon, and so for one week,
I'll be able to fully indulge my natural inclination to stay on the
net 18 hours a day.  :-) So I plan to do some things that I haven't
had time for.

Once upon a time, I did a study of our site and Britannica's,
comparing our articles to theirs.  As I recall, I used our 'random
article' feature to select ten topics, and then I compared theirs and
ours.  (But I seem to remember finding some subjects on which we
didn't have an article and they did, so I don't know how I could have
done that.)

What I'd like to do is sit and explore Britannica and Wikipedia,
comparing and contrasting our strengths and weaknesses, with an eye
towards my REAL project for the week, which is to put together a
"Roadmap to 1.0" for Wikipedia.

So far, we have put aside most talk of 'finalizing' articles for a 1.0
release because there was so much left to do.  But now I think that we
have a huge number of articles, nearly complete coverage in many
common areas, and that it would be wise to start thinking about how
and when we might produce a '1.0' version to make it easy for content
re-users to produce CD-ROMs, books, whatever.

One of the crucial components in deciding when to make a push for
something like that is our overall level of completion.  And measuring
against Britannica is a good way to assess that.

What methods should I use?  I obviously can't read both works cover to
cover in a week.  :-) So I have to randomly sample somehow, I guess.

And I might supplement my random sampling with some 'linear' checks
like: do we have an article on every leader of every nation?  Do we
have an article on every city in a list of the 100 most populus in the
US?  Things like that.

--Jimbo