WPVote Needs To Improve Published News Section

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a new social news site for WordPress, called WPVote. I’ve been using the site for a couple of days and while the concept is great, the quality of entries are poor at this early stage.

I’m a big believer in the idea of a social news site for WordPress. It’s a great way of pooling together all of the WordPress related posts out there, making it easy for people to find quality information about WordPress.

The Published News section should be the most valuable list of WordPress related articles around. Unfortunately however, to be quite frank, there’s a lot of crap in the Published News section at the moment.

There are the obligitory Top WordPress Plugins Lists that don’t add anything new (and seem to miss many of the essential plugins to boot), generic How To Blog posts with only a tenuous link to WordPress, and posts that don’t really help. For example, one post includes the point:

If you have added a new feature to your WP blog by writing some PHP code that executes SQL queries; make sure that you minimize the load on the server.

If you know what that means, you probably don’t need to be told. If you don’t know what that means, this doesn’t help you at all! If it had a link to a site that told you how to minimise the load on the server, then it would add value. Without such a link, it’s useless.

I won’t link to these entries here, as I’m not having a go at individuals and don’t want to single anyone out, but posts such as this don’t belong in the Published News section.

Now, I’m not saying that these articles are all bad (or that mine are better), or that there aren’t top quality posts there as well (see Perishable Press’ excellent and original article on .htaccess rules for permalinks), or that this doesn’t happen on other social news sites.

I’m not even saying that the poor quality entries shouldn’t be on WPVote. Of course they’re entitled to be! I just want to see better quality in the Published News section. How do we get that?

We all need to get behind WPVote. Submit quality WordPress articles when you find them. Vote on entries in the Upcoming News section. Add comments. Spread the word about WPVote, so the community grows.

I know this post sounds harsh, but it’s a call to action. I believe WPVote can be truly great – but the only way that will come to pass is if we all get behind it. Let’s make WPVote great!

Tags: social networks, web 2.0, WordPress