Two desired Wikipedia features
Wikipedia is great but I think it could be improved even further by having the following 2 features:
Feature One:
Make it very easy for a reader to ask questions about a particular topic, and let readers view and rate the questions.
The motivation for the above feature is simple: many Wikipedia entries are incomplete for two reasons:
1) An editor omits a piece of information which he deems insignificant.
2) Information is not included because it is not known.
Letting users ask and rate questions addresses the first issue because now the readers can explicitly state what kind of information they are interested in.
The second issue is partially addressed as well. While information about a subject may not be known, it may be discovered. But something should motivate the discovery(which is often a difficult, or impossible). And what better motivator of discovery than curiosity ? If many people think that a particular question is important, it just might motivate someone to make an effort and find out an answer to the question.
In conclusion, with reader's questions, Wikipedia becomes much more powerful: It is no longer driven just by editors(people with knowledge, who actually edit Wikipedia entries. For any given entry, there are orders of magnitude fewer editors than there are readers), but also by readers.
Feature Two:
RSS feeds for Wikipedia entries. This is a direct consequence of above feature. When a reader asks a question, he might want to be notified when the entry is updated. Alternatively, even if a reader doesn't ask a question, he might still be interested in tracking "the progress" of a particular entry.
Feature One:
Make it very easy for a reader to ask questions about a particular topic, and let readers view and rate the questions.
The motivation for the above feature is simple: many Wikipedia entries are incomplete for two reasons:
1) An editor omits a piece of information which he deems insignificant.
2) Information is not included because it is not known.
Letting users ask and rate questions addresses the first issue because now the readers can explicitly state what kind of information they are interested in.
The second issue is partially addressed as well. While information about a subject may not be known, it may be discovered. But something should motivate the discovery(which is often a difficult, or impossible). And what better motivator of discovery than curiosity ? If many people think that a particular question is important, it just might motivate someone to make an effort and find out an answer to the question.
In conclusion, with reader's questions, Wikipedia becomes much more powerful: It is no longer driven just by editors(people with knowledge, who actually edit Wikipedia entries. For any given entry, there are orders of magnitude fewer editors than there are readers), but also by readers.
Feature Two:
RSS feeds for Wikipedia entries. This is a direct consequence of above feature. When a reader asks a question, he might want to be notified when the entry is updated. Alternatively, even if a reader doesn't ask a question, he might still be interested in tracking "the progress" of a particular entry.
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