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Directory:Akahele/Ten new Wikipedia articles (view source)
Revision as of 17:17, 22 October 2010
, 17:17, 22 October 2010Comments
One thing is clear. With over 3 million articles in place on the English Wikipedia, the heady days of "help us build the encyclopedia, create the article you were looking for" are well bygone. Another thing is fairly clear. The <a title="Traffic stats for Line management" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Line_management" target="_blank">articles</a> that I <a title="Traffic stats for Job sharing" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Job%20sharing" target="_blank">personally</a> created <a title="Traffic stats for Robert Half International" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Robert%20Half%20International" target="_blank">recently</a> seem to serve more people's needs than at least 80%-90% of Wikipedia's other new articles. But, now that I've been blocked from editing Wikipedia, the encyclopedia won't be getting any more such useful, well-written articles from me.
One thing is clear. With over 3 million articles in place on the English Wikipedia, the heady days of "help us build the encyclopedia, create the article you were looking for" are well bygone. Another thing is fairly clear. The <a title="Traffic stats for Line management" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Line_management" target="_blank">articles</a> that I <a title="Traffic stats for Job sharing" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Job%20sharing" target="_blank">personally</a> created <a title="Traffic stats for Robert Half International" href="http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Robert%20Half%20International" target="_blank">recently</a> seem to serve more people's needs than at least 80%-90% of Wikipedia's other new articles. But, now that I've been blocked from editing Wikipedia, the encyclopedia won't be getting any more such useful, well-written articles from me.
==Comments==
9 Responses to “ Ten new Wikipedia articles ”
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Neil Baker
Interesting idea and taking a look at new articles goes some way to showing how close Wikipedia is to the point of saturation.
My own view is that I’d rather they were working more on getting “essential” articles up to scratch and then locking them, but that’ll never happen.
Because of that, and because of the constant search to create a “new” article, the result is “news-style” creations and splits/forks/coatracks from existing articles.
Given the amount of content now on Wikipedia, and given the vast majority is of a terrible quality, it would make perfect sense to end open editing and send the experts in.
I shan’t hold my breath.
Dan T.
Is “Saari Raat” pronounced “sorry rat”?
Edward Buckner
Very good, but be careful of the obvious implication that people will try to draw: that Wikipedia is full up, or has reached saturation point, 3m articles etc.
Its coverage of academic and scholarly subjects – the real stuff of an encyclopedia – is woefully inadequate. My own tutor, who died recently and was one of the great and good of the academic establishment, still has no article.
The red links in the list below suggest that Wikipedia is a long way from being ‘filled up’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IEEE_publications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophy_journals
Even when there is a blue link to follow, what you find on the other side is usually poorly written and inaccurate.
Arooj J.
The issue seems to be bleeding over into related articles. I was poking around The Bohemes article and it seems as if the original author is trying to inject The Bohemes into the articles of other bands.
Gregory Kohs
Arooj, it would appear you’re talking about the efforts of a user named “Smith Jones”. He was not the original author of the article about The Bohemes. It would seem fairly clear, though, that he’s a reader of Akahele!
CaliforniaSmith
I have a hard time reading this site due to its (to me) ugly layout.
I am not a picky reader and rarely notice a web pages layout.
But, in this case – something about the site makes it very unappealing to read.
It may be the grey bars on the sides.
My monitor resolution is 1280×1024.
Could you take a poll to see if anyone else feels as I do and then somehow fix the layout?
Thanks
California Smith
p.s.
I rarely run around criticizing people or web pages, but you do seem like a reasonable man who would listen. I understand that the content of a page should be more important than how the page is arranged, but I really think a better layout would retain readers to your blog.
Do you have your own monitor set up in portrait mode?
Gregory Kohs
I agree, the site’s layout leaves a great deal to be desired. Frankly, on a 100-point allocation scale, I would suspect that layout/design flaws are contributing about 12 to 14 points to our Alexa ranking stagnation (currently hovering around the 400,000th most popular websites). Surely, though, about 30 to 40 points are attributable to “content not interesting enough to me”, and another 20 to 30 points must go to “poor cross-channel marketing”.
The struggle is that we got this site off the ground as a nearly unfunded non-profit, and we took an available layout from a batch of WordPress templates that were already pre-fabricated.
Surely, we could find a better layout, or perhaps style one from scratch. But, (and I believe I speak for the other three directors) I think that until we at least cracked the top 100,000 Alexa sites, we did not have the time or motivation to work on design issues.
I certainly appreciate your feedback. If you have any specific recommendations for a new WordPress layout, please post them here, or contact me privately. I’m not hard to track down.
CaliforniaSmith
I know nothing about WordPress or web page layout but I did find this in a Google search.
If this is possible – try going to the Theme Options -> layout, and look at “Layout WIDTH and type (FLUID or FIXED)” where you can choose a fluid, rather than a fixed, width. That may fix the issue.
I am interested in maintaining the supply of Greg Kohs kerfuffle available on the internet – and I believe that increased web traffic to this site would aid me in that goal.
p.s. I had always assumed that the word kerfuffle was Yiddish, but when I looked up a more detailed definition – it appears that the word is actually Scottish.
Anthony DiPierro
I think what Greg’s trying to say is “patches welcome”. And, of course, cash is welcome too. We’re not a 501(c)(3), so you can’t deduct your contribution. But you’re more than welcome to make it. Make checks payable to “Internet Review Corporation”. Contact Greg for a mailing address.