Permaculture Information Web

[Chad Knepp <pyg AT galatea.org>]

Stephanie Gerson writes:
 > What if there's different, and perhaps complimentary, information in 
 > entries
 > about the same plant/relationship - but because they get different ratings,
 > they aren't necessarily read together?
 > 
 > For example, entry 1 and 2 are about the same plant/relationship.  Entry 1 
 > has
 > information X, entry 2 has information Y.  Information X and Y are
 > complimentary, but because entry 1 gets a higher rating than entry 2, 
 > readers
 > only read information X and miss information Y.  Or is someone (i.e. users)
 > going to take responsibility for condensing information, so that bits and
 > peices from different entries can be woven together?

Hopefully this (the condensing) will happen because people will have a
small amount of ego motivation to create information entries that are
moderated highly by their peers.  These two factors should combine to
evolve the dataset towards ever higher quality...  provided the
infrastructure is in place to support it happening ;-)

 > Although this model is successful from the vantage point of ensuring 
 > quality,
 > Chad mentioned that it will end up fragmenting the content...
 > 
 > Also, I've been thinking about filtering.  There is already such an 
 > abundance
 > of information - and when it gets overabundant, it becomes useless.  Can
 > entries be deleted by users/moderators - i.e. if they get a low enough 
 > rating
 > or are not used for a given amount of time?  How to present only relevant 
 > and
 > useful information, vs. storing all information for the sake of storage?  
 > How
 > to allow information, when it becomes obsolete, to go extinct?

This has been my plan anyway.  Even if things aren't deleted if two
pieces of information match an equal amount but have different scores,
the higher scoring piece will surface.  Very low moderated items can
be set to not display at all, which is effectively the same as
deleting them.  Of course user/authors can delete (or edit) low
scoring entries but I'm a little wary about allowing any kind of large
scale deleting of info.  I think going through the database itself
(external to Eden) and periodically removing long unchanged and very
low scoring elements could help remove cruft.

 > some change I found in my pocket
 > *Stephanie

-- 
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'