Fundamental reform of Wikipedia, ideas wanted Options

[Peter Damian]

Wales gives you complete charge, and you have three fundamental reforms that you are allowed to implement.

What would those be? And what are the problems or abuses that each are supposed to address?

This post has been edited by Peter Damian: Sat 12th September 2009, 12:04pm

[TungstenCarbide]

Wales gives you complete charge, and you have three fundamental reforms that you are allowed to implement.

What would those be? And what are the problems or abuses that each are supposed to address

There is only so much that can be done with the wiki model. The vast majority of the millions of articles will always be crap. Without recognizing and using expertise, very few article will ever reach a high level.

That being said, there are a few things that could help;

1) I would hire and a systems analyst (for lack of a better term). This person would be empowered to experiment, turn on and tune things like flagged revisions. They would be responsible for analyzing and measuring the results. It's easy to say 'I know all the answers'. It's hard to put one's imagination to the test, with genuine metrics, and honestly see how it matches up with reality.

2) BLP is one of the biggest problems. I'd try some things and see how they work; op-out, revision control, create and empower a sympathetic committee of editors to give personal attention to BLP victims.

3) Veropedia seemed to be a pretty good idea; take good articles and run them through some cleanup filters and publish them - revise as needed. Copy this idea with a Foundation sanctioned side project. Featured articles seems to be a logical place to start. Elect good editors for limited terms to run the project, or maybe FA writers. Pay them with the advertising revenues from the site. If the money is good enough consider hiring expert editors from academia to write an occasional article - they might be willing if their work doesn't get instantly shit on. Consider redirecting the wikipedia articles to the 'releasedpedia' articles, when they exists, with a back link for wiki editing. Nothing like a little competition to shake things up.

This post has been edited by TungstenCarbide: Sat 12th September 2009, 7:37pm