User:Mesoderm/sandbox
  • One of the smartest things we could do for WP, on the whole, is to target high-traffic (>50,000 hits/month) articles (on important subjects -- i.e. not on the latest hot film/band/game). This acts as advertising for Wikipedia, and makes it much more likely that people that see these things will contribute to the smaller articles. The high-traffic articles also tend to be central to a cluster of topics, and editing the central node makes it much easier to fix the articles at the spokes, because now we've got sources for the central topic (which very often can be used as sources for sub-topics as well) and we've got a broad overview of the topic to see where each of the sub-topics fits in (which helps us organize it, and determine what/how to cover).
  • A good place to start is getting all high traffic bio/med articles to B/A quality.
start at Biology
staying in cat_list tree ... is_cat_descendant()
add_to_list() if (get_stats() > min_traffic);
next_article();


Superfund sites
  • TOXMAP --> city project
  1. Start with major cities/bioregions/watersheds/etc. and use TOXMAP to generate maps of superfund and TRI sites for articles related to the area in question.
  2. Making articles for each of the sites/events on these maps
  • Cancer cluster maps ... dig through PHIL/etc. to see if anything is freely available already in Pub. Domain ...
  • Make citation template for CTD data and incorporate into reftools
  • Psychology articles should not be dominated by biomedical perspective. Social theory should be given equal (or greater) weight.
  • Notes re: Wikipedia long-term goals/strategy
  • Usability and information architecture ... we've got a lot of content on Wikipedia, but it's poorly organized, and vast swaths of it are in terrible condition ... we need to start looking at the bigger picture, and consider how this information should be organized. Not just w/ simple things like "portals", but by changing the way we choose to break reality up into individual topics, how we link between them, and article structure, amongst other things. Right now, most of the focus seems to be on how to improve individual articles, without much rhyme or reason to the information architecture at the site or subject level.
  • Improved WP stats tools ...
  • Categories most commonly edited by user ...
  • User clusters -- which groups of people tend to edit similar articles
  • Sources most commonly used by user (publisher, url, etc.)
  • Avg. chars modified per edit & net (non-template, etc.) chars contributed to project
  • Geostats
  • Categories with poorest sourcing (few scholarly/reputable works, low sources/sentences ratio, etc.)
  • AWB-like tool for Linux would be nice ...
  • Figure this out ...
  • citation templates should be used, wherever possible (which is almost everywhere). This should be placed in the manual of style for references. We should of course enable people not to use them, and insert raw text references; but we should not encourage them to use them; and we should change them to templates whenever we come across them.
  • They are machine parse-able and we can make automated tools to analyze articles for their sourcing. This is an extremely useful feature both for improving the quality of the encyclopedia, and by making it more easily and deeply searchable by people who are using Wikipedia as a research tool.