Proposal talk:Apply levels of importance

Many projects already rate importance, in the context of the project. In many cases this is an opinion and open to debate. Graeme Bartlett 05:11, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Specifically, this is an aspect of many of our WikiProjects, and we could potentially tie those WikiProject ratings to the Random Page function. But, setting up a whole new ratings system with the sole purpose of improving the Random Page function would rather seem like overkill.--Pharos 00:42, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I agree with the statements above. We're already doing something like this. I would like to see focus on something either a bit more revolutionary, more urgent or more important coming out of this strategy review. --Bodnotbod 15:31, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but many articles are related to multiple wikiprojects, and often get different importance ratings. So do we take the highest, lowest, average, median, or some arbitrary formula? A ranking from a specific project is OK, because the scope is sufficiently narrow, so we know that to the handful of members of that project, it's importance from their related and specific perspective is low, medium, or high. But for WP in general, what is the perspective? Importance to citizens of the related countries, the whole world, or just the English speaking world (for the English version)? Is importance to historians, philosophers, theologians, etc. more relevant, or the general population? For specialized subjects, is importance limited to practioners in that specific sub-dicipline, the profession as a whole, or what? For partisan issues, is its importance to the partisans relevant?

I think a multi level ranking system is frought with perril. Just take the two examples of World War II and Albert Einstein: which of these is more important and should get a 1 vs. a 2 for example? I don't think it's needed either. More important articles get more attention in general. Naturally there are less important articles that get more attention than those that are arguably more important from some other perspective, but a ranking system is not going to change that, because WP is not a dictatorship. It's just going to start a lot of unnecessary and unproductive battles. Dhaluza 15:36, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there's actually a tool at the bottom of each proposal that also lets you rank the proposals. That's an easy way to give feedback - though commenting is ALWAYS better, of course! -- Philippe 15:33, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Quality NOT Importance. If it's Quality the community is rating, rock on. Very high value. The HIDDEN ranking widget at the bottom of the page just does not work. -- jsonin

Importance is fine, and even page hits (but editors would start hitting their own favourite page to get it higher up the list). As for "1989 Super Bowl of Poker (4)" and others listed, I would disagree, as would a lot of other editors.--Andreasegde 20:47, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

See en:Wikipedia:Vital articles. I thnk this system works much better as one only needs to categorize about 1,000 articles, on one page, instead of edit 3,000,000 talk pages with templates. The goal of such a system should not be to marginalize any article but to promote improvements to the quality of more visible articles. HereToHelp 22:11, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I think that Proposal:Core topics complete focuses on just enough ranking to focus our editing attention. This proposal misses the point, and ranks for the sake of ranking. I therefore oppose merging the two. HereToHelp 15:34, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, without having seen any of the other (possibly better) proposals mentioned here, I'd say this offers a valuable instrument should anything like my own infamous Proposal:Divide Wikipedia ever be enacted. -- Thamus ^joyfulnoise 07:37, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:05, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

The impact and use case seems to be almost limited to the use of the random page feature. There are very few disambiguation cases (where a search term may have different meanings) that would truly profit from a simply ordinal scale. The current organisation of disambiguation pages is in general more appropriate and adapted to the different perspectives than the result of the proposal might be. --79.192.198.122 11:41, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Eye of the beholder

You cannot reduce importance to a single-dimensional concept unless you define exactly what makes something important (and if you do that, someone will disagree with your definition). (See [1].) Perhaps you could have a plethora of categories that rank everything from various perspectives, but it would even be difficult to produce a good sampling of perspectives. Further, who will decide the ranking. If I add content, do you think I will voluntarily rank my content as having low importance so that few people will ever see it? Why do you think I added that content in the first place? Everyone will want his/her contributions ranked highly. This is a recipe for bickering.

Mark as done?

As has been pointed out above Wikiprojects already do this, so can we mark this as done? WereSpielChequers 10:31, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I'd rather not. Wikiprojects are active only on one (as far as I know) language version of Wikipedia - though there may be more that I'm not aware of. They're certainly not universal. I don't want to push an English-only myopic vision on these proposals. -- Philippe 14:16, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Improving the Random Page function without human intervention

If we change importance to popularity, the Random Page function can jump to an article or book or file (for Commons) or whatever whose probability of ocurrence depends on the number of views it had in the last month. These statistics are already known: see http://stats.grok.se/ (only article namespace should be used except for Commons where the File: namespace should be used). In this case the Random Page will jump to the page that a random user will want to see. Best regards, Alpertron 14:15, 12 January 2010 (UTC)