wikipedia: Ratings for articles and Questions & Answer
January 14, 2006
My latest idea for wikipedia was quiet around and one time I sent it to the wikipedia people but their answer was to join the mailing lists what I didn’t do because I only wanted to submit my idea and then let them do it or not. But now it’s time to bring them back up and add on another one!
Ratings for articles
At the end (or beginning) of an article we should put a good viewable rating system maybe from 1 to 10 so people will be able to rate content. Of course there would be a problem when the article is changed but there should be a way to display that, if the changes are only small the system could display (some ratings are based on a previous version of this article) or we would calculate a percentage of the change and then substract this percentage from the whole rating so the score would lower a little bit but not to much, the problem would be if much changes the rating would lower very much but then I think we should just archive the old ratings with their old versions when the percentage of change is higher then 5 or 10% or if the changes are marked as significant.
I think this rating function would help wikipedia getting out of some troubles it had with quality issues!
Questions & Answer
In the last time the questions and answer websites are popping up (yahoo did it, lycos did it) but where is wikipedia? I think a very good and popular idea would be to add the possiblity to ask questions about an article right under the article and if someone answers the question he adds its answer possible in the article and then the questions is archived on a page but since then the question wouldn’t be asked anymore because the content is now in the article. I think that would be pretty cool because not many people want to take a look at the discussion page if they have only a little question. They would just need a little form where they take in their question and their email adress to get an email when the question is answered.
So use the comment function of this blog to give me some feedback and write wikipedia about it.
