All,

Is there any chance we can break 7,000 by tomorrow?  I think so.  OK, maybe
it's a long shot, but I thought I would nudge wiki activity along a little,
and I have been harboring some thoughts about that for a while...

There are some ways of aggregating information quickly from credible
sources.  One way is to copy it from public domain government sources.  Here
are some good starting points:

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Research.shtml
http://www.science.gov/
http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/History.shtml

Etc.  Of course, if you *do* copy info from public domain sources, remember
that the article is status "4" until it is significantly changed, and you
should (for the benefit of the *reader*) state at the bottom of the article
what the source of "an earlier version" of the article was (with a link).

There's another way that one can quickly do research for and produce
articles quickly, if that's what you want to do.  Indeed, it's something I
wish someone would make a page about: mining information from the many
"portal"-type websites that exist now.  For a collection of such portals,
see
http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Collections_of_expert-reviewed_re
sources

Finally, there's a project I would love for anyone to organize (on the
wiki).  Often, when we write articles, gathering good external links is done
as an afterthought.  But this can be one of the most valuable parts of the
overall "cluster."  So here's another approach we might take to this task.
We might go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or other
unquestionably reliable resources, and systematically add links to many
different of our own articles, and if necessary create new External Links
pages.  To put it differently, normally when we look for links, we look for
links for each encyclopedia article topic.  But it might prove to be more
useful to look for links by resource for many different articles all at
once, assuming all articles from a given free, edited resource are pretty
reliable.  Anyway, that's just an idea.

--Larry

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