Hi!
On 29 Nov 2011, at 05:14, Shaun McCance wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> What are your thoughts on adding stub articles/sections to the KB?
> For example, adding an article for how to specify account names
> without actually writing the content, along with a note to whoever
> comes along about what the article should contain.
>
I think stub articles are great, but I also think we have some problems with
stubs that say, Wikipedia won't have:
1. will we create and forget about stubs (I have in the past -- now we have
Pending articles)
2. who moderates once stubs get created? Wikipedia has a very active community
of editors. Removing spam is comparatively easy, ensuring quality is a whole
other thing (I know now Daniel does a lot of this)
3. how do we drive people to create articles that are in stubs?
Question #3 interests me greatly.
Wikipedia is free of ads, and you see Jimmy Wales beg you at the end of every
year. The KB has ads (which I prefer, to begging, fwiw)
Wikipedia is free-form knowledge. The KB is focused on SQL, MySQL, MariaDB
(what I would consider more niche - i.e. barrier to entry is higher)
> I've seen stubs work well in other docs efforts. They're an easy
> way for contributors to cherry pick work. But with the "everything
> is always published" model of a wiki-like KB, stubs can be annoying
> to average readers, like a 90s-esque "under construction" banner.
Stubs can be mighty annoying when you're looking for something via search and
all you find is a stub
I wonder if it will also hurt our Google rankings? More stubs = less content =
"spam" site. Do we know the impact stubs have on this (and we can't compare to
Wikipedia, because we know that there is whitelisting of sites in their search
engine -- see recent thread on "hacker news" in where they were not #1 any
longer and Matt Cutts, search maestro/webspam dude at Google chimed in to help)
If the benefits outweigh the potential cons, I'm all for stubs
cheers,
-c
--
Colin Charles, http://bytebot.net/blog/ | twitter: @bytebot | skype:
colincharles
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