Sj wrote:
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.)
Interesting that you should raise this. I had already asked myself how
could I go about choosing articles for 1.0, and the first thing that
came to mind was the topic overview articles. Anything else would
follow from there. If any group of articles should be priorized for
being brought up to editorial standards it is these. They would be the
lead articles for each section of a paper product. Nothing binds us to
the strict alphabetical order of many traditional encyclopedias.
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.
Having these ratings kept loose is essential if we don't want a whole
bureaucracy built up around them. (I do find a 10-pont rating scale
more visually menaingful.) Security against a person casting multiple
votes needs to be kept to a minimum. We certainly don't need to keep
track of every vote that a person has cast. I would even go so far as
to say that a person may cast a new vote after *every* edit, but I would
attach more weight to votes cast since the last edit. An algorithm can
certainly be devised to calculate a rating based on the available
votes. When surveyed on many topics people do have a tendency to rate
things higher than average. That can be normalized by looking at votes
across all topics, and taking the raw average to be equivalent to 5.0 on
a ten point scale.
The idea that validation is done to elicit improvement of articles is
important. Many educators to-day are questioning the role of tests and
examinations in schools. For them we should be "testing for learning"
rather than "testing of learning"; this conforms well with this idea of
article validation.