User:SteveBaker/Random interesting article

In 2004 A. J. Jacobs read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica (roughly 60,000 short articles, 600 long ones) in a single year. He's not the first person to have done that - but he made the news. That was roughly when I first started reading and editing Wikipedia - which in 2004 contained about 200,000 English language articles.

Inspired by Jacobs, I started a habit of clicking "Random article" three times before going to bed each night - and religiously reading whatever popped up. This was a tremendously mind-expanding thing. After doing this for a couple of years, and reading a couple of thousand articles (most of which I'd never have read otherwise) people started noticing that I was able to talk somewhat intelligently about almost any subject.

But after a couple of years, I stopped doing it. The problem is that now that there are over 5 million articles, a very great number of them are not at all interesting or mind-expanding. You only need to read just so many articles about Japanese railway stations, obscure Rock bands who only ever made one record, Pokemon cards, episodes of "The Simpsons" and so forth. Those articles are valid and important - and they may be well-written - but they aren't "interesting".

So - how can we help our readers to find the "interesting" articles and lose the tedious ones?

Goals

 * 1) To expand people's minds by tempting them to read outside of their 'filter bubble'.
 * 2) To increase readership in Wikipedia by making it a truly endless source of something interesting to read.
 * 3) To have a "Random interesting article" button on the left-side menu (possibly as a plugin).
 * 4) To have enough articles flagged as "interesting" that you're unlikely to get much repetition if you hit "Random interesting article" three times a day for ten years.  Let's say: 10,000 articles...and out of pool of 5 million articles, it shouldn't be hard to find that many.
 * 5) To add roughly 3 articles per day to the list so that our readers never run out of them.

Every read should provoke that "Wow! I didn't know that!" response - and "I'll have to tell my co-workers about that around the water-cooler tomorrow".

Proposed Acceptance Criteria

 * The article doesn't have to be spectacularly well-written, but it does have to be comprehensible.
 * It shouldn't be very long - because TL;DR.
 * It should be reasonably well-referenced, and if there is something particular about it that makes people say "Wow! I didn't know that!" - then that specific, memorable fact must be well referenced.
 * It should not be a mindless recitation of facts - bot-created material, biographies, articles about plants, articles about small towns that contain nothing much beyond what should be in an info-box are a no-no.
 * There shouldn't be one of a long series of similar articles that are included in our list. If articles about Japanese railway stations are indeed considered interesting - that's fine - but we have 470 articles about Japanese railway stations that begin with the letter 'A' alone - we probably only need a couple of the more interesting ones in our list.
 * The aim is to be mind-expanding, so we must seek diversity of subject matter. We can't generate mostly biographies or mostly articles about physics.
 * Obscurity and Fascination are to be weighed and balanced. An article about a very obscure government officer from the 1920's must be pretty amazingly fascinating in order to get onto the list...but an article about black holes can be much less fascinating, because of the importance of the subject.

Current alternatives

 * Special:Random - far, far too many boring articles. Yawn.
 * Enhanced Random Article - "Enhanced" here means excluding dabs and stubs. Excluding dabs seems worthwhile - but a well referenced stub can often be quite interesting.
 * Featured articles and Special:PagesWithBadges - are beautifully written, well referenced, etc - but they are quite often not interesting, there aren't enough of them, they are almost always TL;DR.
 * Special:RandomInCategory isn't mind-expanding, it tempts you to stay in your field of interest...anything Category or WikiProject-based is likely to suffer the same problems.
 * Special:MostLinkedPages ought to produce "important" pages - but not necessarily interesting. For example, the most linked to article is USA - which doesn't fit our mandate here.
 * Vital articles and CD version are both efforts to distill down Wikipedia's content to a more manageable subset of important articles - that should avoid the Japanese railway station articles - but "important" isn't necessarily "interesting".
 * April Fools contains a bunch of really weird articles - so does Unusual articles - those might help to 'seed' an initial list with a bunch of stuff - but we'd have to heavily dilute the silliness with "fascinating" and "compelling" and "mind-blowing" articles in order to maintain a balance.
 * Things listed in "On this Day", "Did you Know" and "In the News" on the front page often make for interesting reading - but "On this Day" stuff seems to have a fairly narrow spread of topic areas - and "In the News" obviously suffers from 'recentism'. Did you know almost always points to stubs - or at least rather undeveloped articles, but it may be a source of interesting articles for us.
 * Doing something with watch-lists is an interesting idea - perhaps people watch pages that are more interesting? My watch list fails that test miserably.

It would be interesting to investigate whether we can use a combination of these tools to cull the set of 5 million articles down to something more reasonable.

Infrastructure

 * A way to store our list of interesting articles.
 * A way to pick from them randomly.
 * A way to add to the list without it getting stuffed full of crap...ergo: A committee.
 * A way to promote the existence of a plugin that adds the new button to the menu.
 * A push to make that button become a standard Wikipedia feature.

The Payback

 * Make Wikipedia more interesting ==> more readers ==> more editors.
 * Expand people's minds ==> make the world a better, richer, deeper place.

What's next?

 * Go to the Talk: page here - discuss.
 * Recruit people who know lots of articles!
 * Figure out whether it's worth making a WP:Interesting articles group with the same kind of structure as WP:Good articles.