StartingPointsDiscussion

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Hey all,

Are we planning on rewriting any "local interest" StartingPoints any time soon? Looking around, many are at least a year dead. Here's some:

MeatballBibliography - January
HyperPolis - dead URL, page last edited August 2002
ViewPoint - its chief protagonist said this was dead over a year ago, "well over a year" after it died
GradualViewPoint - October 2002
PersonalCategories - ironically, the only change since May 2001 is to add a category, namely CategoryUnimplementedWikiTechnology

Here's a couple of suggestions for replacements:

BrainstormMode - a nice essay, recent, and amusingly lacking in self-referentiality.
WikiDefined - what better page to exemplify a wiki on Wikis?

If nobody objects - and silence is not an objection - I will unilaterally change the page, because I feel it paints a false impression of a dead site. I put this here first to gather a couple of suggestions of focal points of attention recently (anyone suggest any good nodes?) and to avoid stepping on anyone's space.

-- ChrisPurcell

Extras:

CategoryWikiTechnology: There has been enough interest in this area (including CategoryUnimplementedWikiTechnology, linked to straight away) for it to be marked up with its own category now. It's also why many people come here: to discuss the technological end of Wiki on Wiki. -- ChrisPurcell

Some interesting facts I just found by checking the page views logs for the last three days:

80 more unique IPs visited MeatballWiki (263) than any other page of the site, the nearest being RecentChanges (183)
RecentChanges itself got twice as many unique IPs as IndexingScheme (91), it's nearest neighbour
SunirShah got as many hits as IndexingScheme! Joint third, not bad.
The total for all pages was 1812, but that counts each IP for however many pages it visits, not # of unique IPs.

Without knowing more, it's hard to say whether there are many people popping in at random page, following maybe one or two links then getting bored, or a few crazy madmen running through incredible sections of MeatBall at once. Probably a mix, of course. Another question: how many of those front-page hits are we losing one or two links later?

I'd guess we have about 20-30 RecentChangesJunkies, and either a lot of people who don't like the look of the site at first blush, or a lot of spiders.

I was thinking of using the view log to get some nexus pages, but we want the front of the site to link to the active community interests, and I would think that means the places all the changes happen (this *is* a Wiki after all).

-- ChrisPurcell

PLEASE change the page. By the way, I suspect many of the people who are reading my diary are personal friends (and enemies?). Also, me as I tend to go to my "homepage" from many different computers strewn about the world. That would also increase the unique IPs for RecentChanges. Certain pages like IndexingScheme, LikePages, and even SoftSecurity are examples in various wiki clone distributions for InterWiki links so they tend to overwhelm the statistics.

The goal of StartingPoints is not to be recent insomuch as an index of (unobvious? important?) places where people might want to start poking around the page database. What constitutes such places is an excellent question, and one that deserves an answer. A better answer than the one we have now. -- SunirShah

I was thinking a role based StartingPoints would be superior. e.g.

I am a...	Good pages	Good categories	Meatball's take
Wiki developer	KeptPages, etc.	CategoryWikiTechnology, ...	We support lots of different wikis, even if we worry a lot about FeatureKarma for MeatballWiki.
Wiki founder	SoftSecurity, WikiLifeCycle, etc.	CategoryManagement	Leading is harder than building; we act as a support group.
Wiki user	TextFormattingRules, SoftSecurity, HowTo	CategoryWikiSyntax?	Learning how to use a wiki is more than just learning text formatting rules.
Journalist	MeatballBackgrounder, MeatballMission, AboutThisSite	CategoryMeatballWiki	Ask someone, such as SunirShah.
Blogger	WebLog, SocialSoftware, SlashDot, KuroShin, etc.	CategoryWebLog, CategoryRatingSystem, etc.	Blogging is sadness. ;)

A table is probably the wrong format, but you get the idea. -- SunirShah

I still want to do this in my infinite free time when I'm not galavanting around the 'Net trying to save the world. -- SunirShah

On MeatballMantra, Bayle/Sunir suggested StartingPoints should list our "political emblems". Sunir: "Those already have pages to describe them though. Isn't that a bit boring? Or maybe it would serve as the nucleus of better StartingPoints?".