CZ Talk:Basic Article List

Does the PL-template understand lemmas?

It gives more information than R, but lemmas are important here as well.--Howard C. Berkowitz 15:34, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

I switched to {{rpl}} to have the best of both worlds. In this setup, it may make sense to also include articles that we actually do have, and the page would update itself as things proceed. --Daniel Mietchen 15:43, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure we need RPL on here, just R (I think we need another version of RPL that gives everything RPL has and everything R has - RPL seems to be missing a link to the Related Articles subpage). If a page exists and has a definition, it can be deleted from the list. Basically, this list isn't a comprehensive list of basic articles, it's a sort of shared to-do list of stuff that is basic enough that it needs to exist on Citizendium if we are to consider ourselves a useful lookup resource. That means the absolute basics: countries, capital cities, historical but no longer existing countries (Gaul, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics etc.). Take a look at Wikimedia Meta-Wiki: List of articles every Wikipedia should have. We really need to satisfy that if we want to thwart the "oh, they haven't got an article on {important topic X}" objection and reach our quixotic 100,000 by 2011 goal. –Tom Morris 21:19, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

I've created {{rpr}}. This may do what we want. As the {{r}} and {{rpl}} naming convention isn't documented, I've used {{rpr}} fairly arbitrarily. Oh well. I know what it means. I'm sure the creator of {{rpl}} knows what it means too. ;) –Tom Morris 21:31, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

If the article exists...

It doesn't need to be on the list. This is a list of articles that don't exist but which need to be created if we want to push CZ as a basic information resource. It's basically a to-do list. Once things are done, we can remove them.

Also, am I fighting a losing battle over having the countries organised by population? I mean, the reason I did this so is because I figure if we don't have an article on a country with 100 million people, that's a much bigger problem than if we don't have an article on a country with 5,000 people. If we are trying to write 100,000 articles by 2011, we need to prioritise. I'd be happy to spend my time writing articles on relatively obscure philosophers, old video games and programming languages, but this is an attempt to start the ball rolling on the stuff we are missing. –Tom Morris 15:36, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, you are. I wouldn't object if you organized by population within region or some other form of indexing, but it's difficult to find specific countries in this list. Yes, population is important, but it's not going to be the way people approach it. I'm more likely to focus on countries in Asia and Africa than in South America, so I want to find them.

There's value in having existing articles to know from what a new article could be leveraged. If there were some subordering, then it would be easier to see where we are after started articles were begun. Right now, however, I find an unordered list by population to be overwhelming. Population isn't the only consideration, as with Holy See.

Personally, I'd think carefully about trying to be a "basic" information resource, where it will be very difficult to compete with WP, and would rather be seen as a "contextualized" information resource. How to advertise that is another question. --Howard C. Berkowitz 16:05, 26 January 2010 (UTC)