Talk:Main Page

From Wikidweb

Table of contents

1 Should we enter the Webby Awards?

2 Search Engine Optimisation

3 What Primary Domain Should the Directory Use?

4 Outreach

5 Why it is safer to upgrade your Mediawiki

6 A little way to go :-)

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Should we enter the Webby Awards?

I'm thinking of coughing up the entrance fee (ouch!) and entering the Webbies... I don't know that we'd win anything, but it might bring us some good exposure. What do you think?--Aerik Sylvan 17:33, 9 Jan 2006 (MST)

Which category are you thinking of? Community? Unfortunately, the community hasn't really taken off yet. Non-profit? While your purpose may be altruistic, the submissions here are overwhelmingly commercial. (Of course, that may change when the community does take off.) How about Weird? It includes sites that "reflect a fresh perspective in thought and action strong enough to start a revolution..." (I don't think you're weird. Really! I was just trying to be witty and amusing.) -Jean 23:36, 10 Jan 2006 (MST)

How much does it run to get considered, and what kind of exposure does it get? I know when I first got into creating websites, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of websites that offered awards, usually just to get a link back. However, from your discussion, I gather this organization is reputable. -- Mcgelligot

With the cost involved ($245) I would question the worth of it at this point. The rate of new submissions to the directory (several dozen per day) is enough to keep any reviewers busy already. The categorization of sites seems to be lagging behind new submissions quite a bit for regional and/or language categorization as the original submitters don't do enough to update their own listings. By getting involved with Webby the likely result will be an even higher rate of submission which could cause the site to degrade to simple link farm status rather than being a well categorized directory. My vote would be to hold off until a more formal stucture of reviewers and category maintainers is in place to handle all of the one stop anonymous submissions. Hmm, is that two cents or three worth of feedback? :) --StuffOfInterest 13:21, 17 Jan 2006 (MST)

Thanks - good feedback! I'm also not sure how much it would even work out - that is, if we didn't place anywhere if we'd get any extra attention at all. I think the number of editors works out to be roughly some proportion of new visitors, so, the more new visitors we get, the more editors we attract, but you're right about having to watch that ration too - how many new entries per editor I mean.--Aerik Sylvan 22:48, 17 Jan 2006 (MST)

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Search Engine Optimisation

At the moment, the main motivation for people listing themselves here, is to improve their website pagerank on google; So called "Search Engine Optimisation", also known as abusing the pagerank system. It's not really a major abuse, since they have gone to the trouble of placing the link in a relavent place on the web, where it might also be useful for human web users. It's far more considerate than wiki spamming. But non-the-less it could be considered a minor abuse of the web. What's more, in some cases it may be the same 'SEO' people making use of this website, who also carry out the breathtakingly selfish and anti-social act of wiki spamming.

...on the flip-side, it does supply a good motivation to get lots of entries in this directory. That's why "rel=nofollow" is switched off on this wiki (allowing it contribute to google's pagerank calculations). And it's working. Just look at all these new entries being added!

Keep the goal in mind though. The goal is to create a directory which is useful for real human users, so they can come along and look at a category, and see a listing of websites which they will find interesting and relavent, and they can read a good description of the website.

(Bingo ;-) the plan is to grow the directory to a point where it contains enough information to attract people to browse the listings, then they start to edit the entries, and the quality really goes up - but we've gotta do as well as we can in the mean time --Aerik Sylvan 22:48, 17 Jan 2006 (MST))

I believe one key here will be to clean up and improve the category listings much better. Many categories are already overloaded to the point of not providing utility. The main category which my site appears in has 87 entries. That is too many, especially when there are no descriptions to accompany the site names. These busy categories need to be broken down into sub and sub-sub categories to help people figure out what they are looking for and at.

Regarding descriptions, the entries in the categories really do need a short description to go with the site name. I've never looked at the wiki code myself so I can't say how difficult it would be to add information to the entries.

Finally, in the category display, having a backlink chain would be very helpful. As you browse down through the categories it would be nice to be able to back up several levels at once rather than one level at a time. This is best accomplished having a backlink chain shown at the top (and probably bottom) of the category page.

A number of improvements like this will have to happen if we want this directory to be human usable rather than a SEO tool. --StuffOfInterest 10:14, 18 Jan 2006 (MST)

Great feedback - I have longer responses for some of it, but let me respond to just two items for now:

descriptions: are you talking about having descriptions showing in the category listing? Like maybe a snippet in small font? I might be able to do this fairly easily.. hmmm

I would see it as being an additional bit of specially tagged into in the article. The problem with snippets is that you never know for sure what you will get. --StuffOfInterest 07:39, 24 Jan 2006 (MST)

Categories: I'm favoring a blend of dmoz-style categories and also tag-style categories. I figure this will evolve with the growing community, but I should give you a head's up that I've got something in development (I'll go ahead and put it up here ASAP for beta testing) that lets you view listings by multiple categories - say "Shopping" and "Clothing" for example, making the tag-type approach more feasible.

You could auto-build a DMOZ style tree using the first category listed in an article and each primary upstream category. --StuffOfInterest 07:39, 24 Jan 2006 (MST)

Best Regards, --Aerik Sylvan 13:32, 20 Jan 2006 (MST)

The goal is not to become a big SEO spamdexing link farm. So there's some questions to think about:

How can we attract real human users to actually make use of the directory?

I have always thought we need to grow the content first - and attacting people looking for SEO was the quickest way I could think of to do this.--Aerik Sylvan 22:48, 17 Jan 2006 (MST)

How can we discourage people from seeing this as purely an excercise in search engine optimisation?

Tough one - they may, but as long as we get decent entries from them, in the long run it won't matter... but how do we get decent entries from them? Some will do it out of respect and goodwill, others will do it cuz we'll edit their entry anyway if they don't - the volume then becomes an issue: number of entries per editor... --Aerik Sylvan 22:48, 17 Jan 2006 (MST)

How can we attract entries from a wider range of websites (not just loans, mortgages, gambling, and other SEO favourites)?

I can think of no answer better than Mcgelligot's on this one - put resources we like into the directory. Maybe I should write a bookmarklet thingy to add entries? (Bit of javascript that grabs the page you're browsing and creates an entry with it) - what do you all think? --Aerik Sylvan 22:48, 17 Jan 2006 (MST)

How can we encourage people to make entries which are useful to humans, and not just crammed full of SEO keywords (example bad SEO style listing from today (http://www.wikidirectory.org/index.php?title=Himalayanfrontiers.com&oldid=5291))

Ugh - yeah, the SEO keywords, and just plain bad descriptions. I can hard code more stuff into the wiki - I'm already using more "hard" measures than the typical mediawiki project, because it seemed appropriate to me. I think this also provides a "throttle" mechanism - more hard coded security makes it a little harder to make new entries, which both slows down the number of new ones and also improves the average quality. I've been thinking of blacklisting any links that aren't on the whitelist. It would be frustrating if you're trying to discuss an external link, but it would stop 99% of the spammers. I could also code something that checks for some punctuation, too many commas in a sentence, etc. Ideas? Comments? --Aerik Sylvan 22:48, 17 Jan 2006 (MST)

-- Halz 05:46, 13 Jan 2006 (MST)

Perhaps one way is for editors to find the kind of websites we do want in the directory and actually put them there. Then inform the website owner of the new link. This might get him or her to put other quality websites he or she controls on the directory. Word of mouth spreads pretty quickly among webmasters. We might somehow get a kind of viral campaign going if she tells two friends, and he tells two friends;). Mcgelligot

I like it! I've added a few sites I like, but haven't emailed the owner. I'd want to be sure to keep the verbage of the email non-spammy sounding is the only suggestion I have.--Aerik Sylvan 22:48, 17 Jan 2006 (MST)

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What Primary Domain Should the Directory Use?

StuffOfInterest brought up an issue that has been brewing for awhile: The directory currently works at two domains, Wikidweb.com and Wikidirectory.org. It's probably time to settle on one, and redirect to it (or pick a brand new one?). There are pros and cons with both, and I'd love to get inputs here. Thanks in advance! --Aerik Sylvan 13:24, 20 Jan 2006 (MST)

My preference would be towards "wikidirectory.org" with a redirect at "wikidweb.com" to shift all traffic over. Unfortunately, I see that someone else has registered "wikidirectory.com". It only has a stub showing now, but it would be nice if it was forwarding over to "wikidirectory.org" also. --StuffOfInterest 07:36, 24 Jan 2006 (MST)

I like "wikidweb.com". -Jean 20:44, 24 Jan 2006 (MST)

I think you need to register the same domain at *.com and *.org to stop people leaching off of you, which leaves out both names that are currently registered as their duplicates have been taken. So long as the name is memorable the exact name isn't important for this application. --Wikikiwi 22:41, 25 Oct 2006 (MDT)

Thanks - I actually registered wikidweb.org also, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Yes, it would be nice to have wikidirectory.com, but oh well... Thanks for your input, --Aerik Sylvan 00:10, 26 Oct 2006 (MDT)

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Outreach

Well, I went out and found a website to add to the directory and wrote an email to the webmasters. Here is what I wrote, I am sure our collective brains can come up with something better:

Dear Battle of Britain Website Staff,

I have just added your site to the Wikidweb.com Directory. Myself and other editors are looking for information intensive websites like yours to add to the directory. If you have other websites you would like to include, please visit www.wikidweb.com and add them. If you know of other webmasters with quality websites who are looking for placement in a directory, please tell them about us.

Whoops, I meant to include the Url where I added the link. Well, there is one edit already.

I am not sure how many of us it would take adding websites here and there to get a groundswell going. We might also consider the method of finding sites as well as the type of sites that we think would be responsive to such a campaign.

--McGelligot 12:59, 30 Jan 2006 (MST)--

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