[Wikipedia-l] Re: Censorship and bowdlerization

Wed Nov 13 19:41:20 UTC 2002

On Wednesday 13 November 2002 09:18 am, wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org 
wrote:
>......
> But, the three options above might be just perfect for the "stable"
> wikipedia version that Larry proposed. Contents there will be controlled
> and checked anyway, so a little categorization on the side will be
> managable to the reviewers. The readers there would see categories and
> filters, but things like editing, talk, and all the tons of links needed
> for an "editable" encyclopedia will not be there, so there's plenty of
> room. Beside, we wouldn't want to give a CD-ROM with a current wikipedia
> dump to a school anyway. The reviewed version would be perfect for that.
>
> Magnus

I now agree. WIkipedia is not the place to have self-descriptive tags on 
articles. Newbies won't know about them and old hands would be swamped with 
adding and reviewing tag relevance. There are also /way/ too many articles 
now to really even consider this. This idea /may/ have been possible to 
implement a year ago but IMO it is too late now. But this idea is perfect for 
Larrypedia/sifter.  

However, I still think it would be neat to automatically set-up 'communities 
of articles' by having some software program dig through all the article 
links and see what links where, what links back, how often and then assign 
scores to articles - higher scores for a given category would be categorized 
in that category. The program can start from the Main Page, dig its way down 
into the links and then group links based on the categories we have on the 
Main Page.   

This of course wouldn't be perfect and the 'categories' would need to be made 
into lists that could then be human edited. But then we could use the 'Watch 
links' function to have a customized Recent Changes and searches. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) 