CZ Talk:Requested Articles

Can we put a link on the main page to Requested Articles? It is almost impossible to find that page, so nobody uses it. I think this would be a useful resource, to match articles desired with skills of personnel.--Martin Baldwin-Edwards 06:17, 20 August 2007 (CDT)

Yea, outta-sight-outta-mind, eh? I've added it to CZ:Communicate.  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 13:40, 20 August 2007 (CDT)

Eaxactly! Thanks for that, let's see if it does anything:-)--Martin Baldwin-Edwards 13:41, 20 August 2007 (CDT)

Planned refactoring

I'm planning to refactor Requested Articles unless anyone has any objections. My plans are as follows:

• Requested Articles probably needs to be made more prominent on the wiki. I often run across pages that I think are pretty important, but which I am not knowledgable enough to write about, or which I don't have time to write about. The primary role of Requested Articles needs to be to help others find articles that need writing. I think that Requested Articles, and the on-wiki community planning substructure used on the Other Wiki was a good thing. I think that the primary problem with forums and mailing lists is that they encourage [Note by Daniel Mietchen 14:51, 30 August 2009 (UTC): they encourage what?]
• Alphabetical sorting is not very useful here. I think that it might be better to sort by date in a blog-style format - so stuff that's current appears at the top.
• We already have a signing method (four tildes) - it seems reasonable enough to just use that, rather than the "requested by (person's name)" format.
  • If requests are signed and dated, we can prune very old requests out without having to inspect history.
• In each request, just a few topic labels might be useful to help people find stuff that they could write about - think about them like tags. If someone were to put up a request for someone to write about Thomas Jefferson, they might put, say, "politics, United States, US president, history, 18th century" - just so the reader who is scanning the list can just search for the topic they are interested in and find stuff that they could write about.
• It'd be useful, but not essential, for people to be able to vote on which articles they considered to be most needed. Something like the voting system used on RationalWiki's "What's Going on at CP?" page could be used.
• A link from the template used on Special:RecentChanges might be nice.
• If a consistent format were used, it would be trivial for a programmer to write a script that could turn the Requested Articles list into an RSS/Atom feed (and that could be routed into the @citizendium Twitter account, and onto a mailing list) - that way we could send out the Batsignal to get authors to come and write!

The format I think would work best would simply be a bullet point list with each bullet point following this format:

* '''[[Article title]]''' - subject labels - optional description --~~~~

An example might be:

* '''[[Pope Benedict XVI]]''' - religion, Catholicism --~~~~

which would become:

• Pope Benedict XVI - religion, Catholicism --Tom Morris 09:57, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

It would take only an hour or so to write a script that would transform a page of these into an XML feed. Such a script could sit on another server and run every half an hour to generate and upload the latest feed. It would also be neat if someone could write a Greasemonkey script that would have a little drop-down next to each red link on Citizendium that would allow you to push request, and a little box would pop-up so you could tap in some subject labels and a description, and it would then add that to the request list.

What do you think? Good idea? If nobody objects, I will refactor this page in two weeks time, on 2009-09-13. Once the page has been refactored, I will write and make open source a script (probably in Ruby) to convert the page into an appropriate XML format (probably Atom 1.0). –Tom Morris 09:57, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

I welcome the initiative and have been thinking along these lines myself a bit recently, which led to the following conclusions: (i) Special:WantedPages already provides this sort of functionality, though it does not come with measures of importance other than the number of pages that link to the target page. (ii) if the Related Articles subpages are homogeneously structured across the site, the number of pages that link to a target will come closer to a measure of importance. So I suggest (iii) to concentrate on getting the Related Articles pages set up (or cleaned up, for the bot-created ones).

Besides, I think that the sort of Greasemonkey script that you proposed could have multiple uses (also in the approval process, or in requesting bot actions).

--Daniel Mietchen 14:51, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Following my promise to refactor on 2009-09-13, I've actually refactored Requested Articles today. I hope nobody objects to me moving older requested articles into the older requests section. The plan is to move it towards a blog-style layout - so people can easily see the requests in order of when they were made rather than by their alphabetical position. Nobody seriously thinks "What I really need to do today: fulfill a request for an article beginning with the letter 'P'." (We ain't Sesame Street!)

I thought about doing the tags which I put in the original post, but decided that it was a bit silly. Instead, I think that the easiest thing to do is if there's a sudden massive burst of people who have requests for articles on a similar topic is to move those requests to a subpage of the Workgroup - so we might have, say, CZ:Biology Workgroup/Requested Articles if there were lots of requests for stuff about biology. Then we'd just link to the specific workgroup Req'd Articles page from here.

In response to Daniel Mietchen's post: I agree that Special:WantedPages serves a similar role to CZ:Requested Articles. Similar, but not the same. The point is to have two different approaches. Sometimes I'm wandering around the wiki and I see a glaring omission - like Jamaica - that I'd like fixed promptly, but on a subject that I know very little about. Posting it on Requested Articles is a way I can do something that might prompt someone into writing it.

Anyway, I hope people approve of the changes I've made to the Requested Articles. I'm taking silence as consent. ;) –Tom Morris 17:51, 11 November 2009 (UTC)