[Wikipedia-l] Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?

Sat May 31 09:00:16 UTC 2003

>... but I think that Web-based things should be tailored to the
> medium, and that means that information should be arranged in a web-like
> structure, not artificially forced into a one-dimensional structure like
> traditional writing. It would be good to have a way to save related
> articles together, but what is related depends on the reader, again. A
> reader interested in Chap would want [[Chap]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]],
> and [[Chap's views on Things]] saved together, whereas a reader interested
> in Stuff would want [[Stuff]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Guy's
> views on Stuff]] all saved together. I expect a technical solution could
> be thought up to enable readers to group articles for saving together,
> according to their personal preferences. :)
>
> > * We do not require the reader to click around unnecessarily, which can
> > be confusing to many people
>
> I'm not sure I follow this argument. Isn't that what people do on the Web
> all the time?

The issue with many small interlinked articles is noise. You won't be able to 
type in "Sauna" and find what you would reasonably expect there (an 
etymology, a bit about finnish culture, health issues, literature links), 
instead you will have to use a *Search engine*, type in "Sauna" there, and 
get an immense number of articles that aren't related to the subject at all, 
like the fact that Johan Paulik made a film "Sauna paradiso" and that the MV 
Blue Marvin (a ship) also has a sauna. This is the problem which we have with 
the WWW today already, and we should do everything to avoid that wikipedia 
will be running into the same problem in some years and just shows up as the 
same noisy mess the WWW is today. We already have that problem right now: Go 
and try to enter "palestine" in the wikipedia search: There are more than 500 
matches. The one article named "Palestine" is more or less a link list. What 
tells me that? I don't get the information out of Wikipedia, I'll get it out 
of Britannica. (Check out this link and you'll understand the difference: 
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=115036)

In other words: I do not want to need a google on wikipedia, to filter out 
noise, because it probably filters out that part of noise I am interested in.  
The only way to deal with that are IMHO *large* articles, structured by good 
editors. It is far easier to scroll down a large article with good structure 
(headlines) until you reach the part you are interested, than to klick around 
and hope to find that piece of information somewhere in some article which is 
somehow linked by a chain of three other articles.

Uli