[Bug-gne]To few articles/posts

[Oliver Denzel]

Hi all,

I'm writing here to get a few infos, because, as others already 
mentioned, the discussion faded away.
In my opinion that's also because of the general interest in an un- or 
only lightly moderated encyclopedia. Compare this to nupedia. I'm in my 
8. semester of computer science, in a few weeks I will graduate(?) and 
they tell me, that I don't know enough about computer sciences to review 
an article. That's something that made me think about what I read here 
on the list. People insisted on having an unoderated pedia, but at 
nupedia are only a few people allowed to do the moderating. I also know, 
that everybody can review the articles, but only after some VIPs reviewd 
them and changed them.

Let's make the best from the situation, and learn from the errors of 
nupedia. For example they have three different layouts, which is a very 
bad thing. Next they do have some sort of structure, but it is very much 
oriented towards science. It is very strange then to find something like 
sports between Agricultural science and living composers. And for 
computer science just "computers". And that is the part where most of 
the articles are.

So one thing we could do better is to define something like a tree, 
which helps us to categorize information better. I think of a structure 
of nodes, which are interconnected. Something like you have in OOD. To 
illustrate it: We have sports, a child of this is martial arts, which 
the children kickboxing and muai thai. Igf you write now an article 
about skyboxing for example, you would select category sports, sub - 
category martial arts. Here generate a new node. Link this node to 
kickboxing, because Skyboxing is derived from kickboxing. And then you 
enter a little bit of data which is specific to a martial art, like 
origin, style and so on. This would give a new author a little bit of 
guideline, and we would be much faster when translating this to a new 
language, because we only have to translate the "template" and the 
possible selections. Now we have a node, then we write an article, which 
is linked to the node. With every node there is an article of the kind 
definition. This one is shown, if you display "Skyboxing" together with 
the abstracts of other articles like a description of the history, the 
style and links to some prominent skyboxers.
Another good thing to do is to integrate other efforts into ours. We 
could get a lot of data from sources like genealogists, which have for 
example a very long family tree of the british royal family. This could 
be used to build up structure in which we could insert our articles. 
Another source of information would be for example the GNU project on 
acronyms, I don't remember the name.
A last thing we should think of is the system of mirror - servers. If we 
only give the possibility to mirror the complete server it will be very 
hard to get a lot of mirrors. But if we allow to mirror only branches of 
the tree, then we can excpect a lot of more mirrors. Or we could make 
the possibility to link from "private" GNE servers to the public 
one/ones. So that one defines on his tree Tae Boe, and links to 
Kickboxing on the official server.
Ok, one after the last one ;-) : It would be very helpful, if we don't 
concentrate at the beginning to much on writing long & perfect articles, 
it would be sufficient if we had a few of them combined with a lot of 
definitions and other strucured information. In this way we don't have 
to care to much about open links, missing articles and bad & slow search 
results.

Enough for now.

Ciao

Oli