Talk:World Wide Web/2006 major rewrite

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[edit] Rewriting the World Wide Web article

Several wikipedians agree that the World Wide Web article needs a serious overhaul. This page aims to gather rough consensus on how it should be structured, what should be included/excluded/expanded/minimized, and where we can find the relevant bits and pieces. All improvement ideas are welcome, please share your thoughts here. -- JFG 04:39, 22 April 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Structure

The lead paragraph should be a non-technical definition, gently explaining the various meanings and components of the World Wide Web: a universe of information, made of static and dynamic documents or resources, connected by links, published through servers and databases, accessed via browsers and other tools, transmitted over networks. An appropriate illustration would be useful, if we can make it simple.

Basic terms should expand a little over components introduced in the lead, branching out to relevant articles for deeper coverage, and introducing a few technical terms and some alphabet soup (URI, HTTP, ...). It could be renamed Components of the World Wide Web and moved after the proposed Under the hood section.

How the Web works currently tries to explain what goes on under the hood when someone browses the Web. This is interesting but does not describe the act of browsing itself (it feels obvious now, but try to remember the first time you discovered the Web or the first time you showed it to someone else). This section should be split into:

  • Browsing the Web (aka surfing) describing the browsing experience for a human being
  • Under the hood explaining the tasks that computers and networks perform to enable this experience, using the terms defined in the Components section.

Origins should be reduced to a couple of paragraphs and point to History of the World Wide Web for more detail (not History of the Internet of much wider scope). Relevant historical information currently included here should be merged into the history article.

Naming, spelling and pronunciation should explain the naming and spelling usage (World Wide Web, World-Wide Web, WorldWideWeb, WWW, www, Web, web, W3) and give some pronunciation hints. Funny anecdotes could be moved to a Trivia section. Pronunciation in other languages should move to a separate page.

Web usage should list the most frequent uses of the Web, as in Website#Types_of_websites. It would be great to point to current studies of usage patterns by the general public, and how this usage evolved over the years (see for example early GVU user surveys).

Web publishing should explain what it takes to publish something on the Web, from a single personal page to a heavy e-commerce site, mentioning the gradual move to simpler publishing tools and collective authorship as originally envisioned.

Size and growth should give some global statistics of users, sites and contents, perhaps by country and language, with a few graphs. It could also mention never-fulfilled collapse predictions and the issue of link rot, partly solved by public archives.

Sociological implications should be renamed Social impact and furiously toned down. The current text drowns valid and interesting sociological observations in grandiloquent prose; we can do better.

Web technologies should list the most important technologies used on the Web and point to their own articles. A first draft is included in the Related pages section below.

Standards could stay as is or be moved to a separate page, which could then be expanded to include numerous other relevant standards from the proposed Technologies section.

See also, References and External links should be reviewed and trimmed/expanded as needed.

[edit] Related pages

When these subjects are mentioned, they should link to their relevant pages. Specialized content should be moved there. Incidentally this list can be used as a starting point for the See also section which is kind of useless now.

[edit] Concepts

[edit] Technologies

This could be a section, see structure proposal above.

[edit] Relevant bits and pieces

[edit] Discussion

The stuff above is a technologist's perspective on the Web, and ignores several subjects I think important. But if we put all the stuff I want into the article, it

would fill a whole book? ;-) I totally agree on de-emphasizing the technology aspects (Wikipedia is biased enough on tech), and because the current article does not say a word about using the web, we must start with basics: first the user experience, then what people do with it, history, culture, economy... However I chose to list the main enabling tech, towards the end, because the WWW article can be used as a reference springboard to delve into specific components. Detailed explanations on how it works could go to a separate page. -- JFG 23:21, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

What about making the WWW article into more-or-less an index, and make subsidiary articles with most of the meat? For instance:

  • Web technologies (this sketch is good for that)
  • Web history
  • Web culture (the producer/consumer/sharer vs the traditional "publisher/consumer" model)
  • Web standards
  • Web organizations
  • Web economy (who pays for the web, and why)
  • Web future developments (Web 2.0, WhatWG, semantic web, mobile web....)

You get the drift.... perhaps.... --Alvestrand 07:28, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

The Web is indeed a vast subject and Wikipedia eventually needs to include all the specialized angles you suggest, and more. I say, let's first write a proper naïve overview of reasonable quality, then deeper insights will follow. -- JFG 23:21, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
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