Re: Slightly OT: Comments, ideas, or suggestions for improving websites
On Tuesday, 6 December 2005 at 21:43:15 -0600, Josh King wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Currently I am the lead admin/webmaster of DebCentral.org. I really
> would like to take a few minutes out of your life to gather some inputs
> on an idea I have.
[...]
> subject was the basis of an article written by a colleague of mine,
> Christian, webmaster of Debian-News [1].
>
> After that article, he and I began discussing ways we could cooperate
[...]
> I'm looking to the community to maybe help us figure out the best way to
> handle this. Any ideas or suggestions for what we all could do to better
[...]
Hmm... what is it about the web nowadays -- so many sites which are
really little more than excuses to include sponsored links (aka adverts)
which have little or no relevance to the word or phrase linked. I don't
even know what the technology to insert those links is (they don't seem
to show in the source listing at a very quick glance, but I guess its a
java thing).
I'm half inclined to ignore this post as merely promotional, but
debcentral looks fairly interesting, even if I couldn't create an
account on its wiki (that part of the form missing). The other site
mentioned led me to a vaporous advertizing site on the first link I
tried. But just the same, the idea of combining the various Debian
resources does seem appealing if it leads to less redundancy and more
specialization.
My thought is that a single debwiki could be used to assemble all the
other resources. It could be set up so that the 'community' would leave
comments, perhaps with a score (marks out of ten) for the competing
offerings. That could allow the various webmasters to prune their
low-scoring parts and specialize in the areas they do well. It would
avoid the need for everyone to agree in advance and allow a sort of
'evolutionary' growth. Eventually the combination of the central wiki
and the linked sites might become a reasonably viable organism. The
separate webmasters would get better at the areas they found themselves
specializing in. The central wiki might need some careful management as
it grew to give it a clear structure. Has anybody written code for
organic wiki management -- putting most visited and most linked parts
near the centre, and ultimately allowing the unvisited and low-scoring
bits to wither and drop off?
Perhaps Josh could turn his site inside-out and add the links to all the
others he has been investigating, so as to create the animal I describe.
Or perhaps it's a rotten idea.
--
richard
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