Inércia Sensorial

So I just read how Britannica is planning a new website version, mostly to “compete” with Wikipedia. Britannica’s CEO also talks about the relationship between Google’s results and Wikipedia’s pages.

Anyway, one criticism is valid, sometimes Wikipedia articles are not the best source of information about a topic. And this is being written by someone who searches daily on Google for terms followed by the word “wikipedia”, because Wikipedia usually have results that are good enough.

So here’s my idea, dump Wikipedia’s database of article titles, and let people submit links to these titles. And let users vote Reddit-Digg style. Find a way to deal with spammer’s bots and you’re ready to do.

For example, the Wikipedia article for “Design_pattern_(computer_science)” (which I have open in a tab right now) would be just a bunch of links for other sites that users can do whatever you want them to do so you can sort the links by relevancy.

As I’ve said on my previous post, I’ve been feeling lazy lately, otherwise I would go and implement this.

You might ask, why not just add the links that users would upvote to Wikipedia? Well, rare are the articles on Wikipedia that accept “full” links on its references section. Most links are put for citations, and these are just used to justify small text/phrases excerpts/facts, not whole webpages. And the “external links” section of Wikipedia articles aren’t sorted, and that’s the whole point of my idea :p

Now go and build it and remember to buy me a beer if you make a buck.