User talk:Leucosticte/AutoBlurb

Did you know criteria (removed from page because the idea doesn't sound all that workable)

If it's automated, then probably the best way to get the text we're looking for is to just grab the first sentence from an article. Maybe that default could be overridden by some text in a tag, e.g. <dyk>remarkable [[recall power]], researchers believe, is a big part of how [[elephant]]s survive?</dyk>, in the elephant article. Picking which articles should show up in this feed is a bit tricky.

Should we put a focus on new articles? It could, for instance, just provide a feed of sentences from the newest articles, so if the most recently created articles were A, B, and C, then you would see the first sentences from articles A, B, and C. The downside to that is, suppose new articles come in spurts. Suppose 50 articles are created in quick succession, and then there's a pause in creation. You'll see the last ones for some time on the main page, and those in the middle or beginning of that spurt will only be on the main page for a very brief time.

Maybe we could randomly select from among the newest articles created in the last, say, 12 days. Or randomly select six from among the 120th newest articles, and keep rotating it. Or a combination of the two — the 120 newest articles, or the last 12 days, whichever yields a larger number of articles.

Focusing on newer content gives people something to visit the site to see, if they want what's most recent and therefore perhaps most relevant to current events. Another possibility is to just put all the articles in the site in the hopper, so that way something older might hit the main page once in awhile. Sometimes people forget the wisdom of the past, and so it's good to look back at that stuff. Or they forget how dumb people were in the past, and how some of that dumbness is still practiced in the current age. Leucosticte (talk) 20:00, 2 September 2012 (UTC)