[Wikipedia-l] The hard part of 1.0: selection.

Sun Jul 18 01:30:38 UTC 2004

We won't be forking. We have a rating system achieving consensus. So far
so good.

I predict the all-in shitfight will be in turf wars. Selection, as every 
partisan editorial group tries to get its articles into the final cut. Not at 
the level of editing the articles themselves - an approval mechanism will 
handle that - I'm talking about telling people that their area won't get all 
the articles it might want in. If any.

(The worst thing is that we'll have to cut back the areas we're actually 
really strong in.)

[[Wikipedia:List of encyclopedia topics]] gives us some idea of what should go 
into a single-volume reference. We also need to work out roughly how the 
Columbia or Concise Britannica break down into space per topic area. (Do we 
have any work in this area already?)

A version rating system (as is mooted on the mailing list) will help a lot. 
That is, the mooted peer-rating system which looks likely to happen anyway. We 
can use this to 1.0's benefit - rather than set some poor bastard to rating 
the articles, we *let the wiki do the work*.

    1. Wait till a lot of articles (or a fair few) have been rated.
    2. Set a cutoff level that gives you a book's worth of articles. Call that
       milestone 0.7.
    3. Examine just how imbalanced we are.

This will give us Wikipedia 0.7, let's say. 0.8 can be better, 0.9 can be 
area-selection-complete, 1.0 can be a polished 0.9.

What we need is a way to let the wiki do the work for step 3 above. Is there a 
way to harness dilettantism to achieve consensus on what to cut and what to boost?

Bringing areas up to scratch will still be real heavy lifting. How much real 
work, we can't know until we get the 0.7 described above.

Thoughts? (Jimbo, you there?)

- d.