Debatepedia finished making its site fully categorized, searchable, usable by categorizing all of its more than 2,000 pro/con articles into over 1,200 categories. This allows readers to browse the site, find areas of interest, dig in, and become active contributors.
Washington, DC June 30, 2009 — Debatepedia finished on June 30th a complete overhaul of its site organization. This started with a highly ambitious effort to categorize its more than 2,000 articles into over 1,200 categories. Categories range from politics to security, international law, bioethics, animal welfare, climate change, history, entertainment, personal choices, culture, United States, Latin America, Taiwan, to any range of possible categories that a debate article could fit within. All categories are organized into a topical hierarchy, so that, for example, the category on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict falls under International Politics. This ensures that users can narrow their search for topics of interest by first starting with the international politics category and then moving to such categories as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One objective of this effort is to make every page on Debatepedia find-able within three clicks of the main page. This is actually really challenging, but it is also a wonderful rule of thumb for organizing a site and optimizing for search engines, as search engine “crawlers” make page-rank judgments based on links from the main page (and many argue it’s “within three clicks” that is Google’s rule of thumb).
The importance of this effort also reflects the fact that Debatepedia has grown massively, proliferating from around 500 articles to over 2,000 articles in just over a year. With such a large swath of articles, it has become increasingly unappealing for users to rely on basic categories such as politics or law or for alphabetical listings in their searches. A robust categorization of all of Debatepedia’s articles was inevitable and necessary.
Debatepedia is a global wiki encyclopedia of public debates, pro and con arguments, and supporting quotations. A project of the International Debate Education Association (IDEA), Debatepedia is something like “the Wikipedia of pros and cons”. It aims to engage you and other citizen-editors in centralizing your original arguments – as well as arguments and quotations found in millions of articles, essays, and books – into a single encyclopedia. This helps you and other citizens better weigh the pros and cons in important public debates and make decisions.
Related links:
Home page (for category browser): http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Welcome_to_Debatepedia!
Media kit: http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Debatepedia:Media_Kit
Categories: http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php?title=Special:Categories&limit=500&offset=0
Community portal: http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Community_portal
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Debatepedia
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http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Welcome_to_Debatepedia!
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