User:Wormcast/Notions

Subject survey

This is either a request for information that already exists, or a suggestion for creating it... I have often wondered what types of articles make up the bulk of wikipedia, and would love to see, for instance, a pie chart showing this. E.g. what percentage of all articles are about places, about people, companies, entertainment, etc. It seems to me (particularly when I use the 'random article' function) that certain more or less un-historically important categories (TV shows of the late 20th c, minor bands, etc) are massively represented compared to other, more significant areas, but I'd love to see it in numbers. -Wormcast (talk) 01:31, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Someone actually did a small sample of this fairly recently, in fact: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias#Article_distribution. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 03:13, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Excellent - that was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Thanks, Melodia! -Wormcast (talk) 11:57, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Now all that remains is to automate this and have it updated in real-time Wormcast (talk) 00:38, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Controversy quotient

Rating of how controversial a topic is, based on reverts rate, but filtering out identified vandalism. Perhaps account for individual fanatics by weighting reverts per author.

Obscurity quotient

Rating of how obscure a topic is, based on page edits, visits, links.

Distributed translation

Create a tool that distributes small pieces (sentence?) of an auto-translated article to registered users (based on language proficiency in the target and destination language). Users would then correct and approve/edit/reject the chunks, which would then be placed back in the main article. Basically a way to push translation proofing out to the experts in a small and manageable way. Could even make a game of it - have each "player" translate a passage and then rank each of the other players' translations. Best translation wins and is incorporated.