[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

Tue Aug 19 01:42:13 UTC 2003

These are my thoughts/suggestions/wishes for WP 1.0:

1. Wouldn't it be cool if instead of the way to geeky sounding name 
"Wikipedia 1.0" we named it "Wikipedia 2004" or whichever year it gets 
released? Just like Windows and Windows is successful!

2. I want pictures! WP is SERIOUSLY lacking in the graphics department. 
Like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle doesn't even have a picture of 
a circle! My utopian wish is for every article to have a nice picture of 
the article's topic on it. If I want to read about 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilcox%2C_Nebraska then I probably want to 
see a photo of it too. Unfortunately there aren't many good FDL 
photographs out there.

3. Better search. The current one doesn't work very well. And the fact 
that if you search for "Stalin" for example, takes you to the Stalin 
page instead of a listing of pages containing the word Stalin is annoying.

4. Some organisation. WP is very chaotic. If I was to find the article 
about Stalin without using the search function it would be very hard. I 
think narrow topics are often hidden this way because it is hard to 
browse for a topic.

5. Maybe we could start with releasing just a segment of the wiki-web? 
It is very possible that there isn't enough interest in a printed WP 
version. Maybe not in a CD version either and then someone has done alot 
of wasted work. So instead why not release "Wikipedia: Organic 
Chemistry" or "Wikipedia: World War II" as a litmus tet? There are 
thousands of articles just waiting to be written in each of those subjects.

6. How would wiki-links be implemented in a text version? It's the most 
important feature of WP imho, and I cant imagine how it could be made in 
a practical manner.

BL