Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Separating content from presentation

[Mike Warren]

Bob Dodd <address@hidden> writes:

> Stuart Yeates (Re: Classification difficulty and incompleteness)
> makes some very good points about classification in terms of how
> subjective classification (and hence editing) can be, and that
> strongly suggests, to me at least, that rating systems and
> clasifications exist as *views* of the data i.e. as part of catalogs
> of the information, and not as part of the internal structure of the
> 'pedia.  There will (hopefully) be many catalogs, each filtering and
> presenting the 'pedia in a manner appropriate to its users
> (e.g. filtering content to make a children's encylopedia), but with
> only one 'pedia.

I like this approach best overall, but I think there would be the
potential for feedback into the ``core'': if articles are getting
rated or filtered consistently ``too low'', it doesn't make sense to
clutter the database up with them. Of course ``too low'' is a
subjective term, but...

Also, classifications would need to filter to the core somehow, to aid
searching. Well, actually, depending on how classification was done,
this might not need to happen at all...

I would think, though, that getting people to at least register before
they vote/rate/ articles or submit things might be a good way to help
ensure that trolls don't infect the content too much. However, it's
certainly reasonable to assume that *most* users who take the (small
amount of) time to rate an article will do so truthfully, and that
*most* people who submit articles will be submitting serious work.

I don't think the parallels to /. are warranted; a daily news site
which hosts (mostly) anonymous discussion is nothing like an
encyclopedia which mostly hosts static content with (presumably)
credited authors. Perhaps ``everything2'' (http://www.everything2.com)
is a better parallel...?

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