[Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

Sun Jul 18 13:20:08 UTC 2004

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:35:15 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Sj <2.718281828 at 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_