General Announcement – 6 August 2023
The Situation:
Recent reader comments have reminded us, once again, that in the WUWT Archives there are a lot of really good, even important, pieces that have unfortunately become buried in the “mists of time” – and are now only partially remembered. The majority of them are basic education on topics, basic explainers, and even many of the more general posts are just as timely today as they were when originally published – some even more timely now than then.
And while we have a “pretty good” search engine installed, it can often be hard for long-time readers to find that one particular post that they have in mind – they only remember that it was about “some certain subject” but not the one tagged at the top. There have been, after all, over 30,000 posts here since 2006 – averaging 33 per week for 17 years – averaging, long-term, 4 per day. [These are, admittedly, gross estimates from the basic total number but fairly accurate none the less.] In more recent times, we have tried to maintained a schedule calling for about 6 new original posts per day — a grueling demand on authors, editors, sys admins and moderators.
And, like your email account, as more and more new things pour in, the older things sink to the bottom of the page, the bottom of the stack, the bottom of the archive. Further and further down under the weight of the new.
This is unfortunate. WUWT attracts new readers every day. They haven’t had the opportunity to read the previous deeply explanatory posts on important topics. Long-time authors often allude to previous posts — “As I have explained many times….” — but authors just can’t link to ten past posts published over a period of years…and even if they did, most readers following the links would discover they have been assigned a week’s homework reading! And not all of the links would be of the same quality or value.
What We Propose:
The idea, still in its infancy, is to create a new section of the site that would appear in the navigation banner at the top—alongside of About, ClimateTV, Books, etc—named something-along-the-lines-of The Best of WUWT. That link would lead to a list of posts nominated by our readers as the most informative, most useful, most readable, most whatever you readers classify as “best”. These would be probably broken into categories by subject – Best Posts on Sea Level, Best Posts on Surface Temperature, etc.
As “Best” is a judgement call, who better to make those judgements than our readers.
The Rules:
There are no rules.
How to nominate:
Readers only need leave a comment and nominate posts for inclusion. The most useful way would be by URL. If not that then with the post Title (Headline).
Example:
This is a URL — https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/06/01/anthony-on-livestream-what-climate-emergency/
The post title was: “Anthony on LiveStream – ‘What Climate Emergency?’
After that, you can try a post description, but we probably will not have the time or the energy to do the searching for you – so, make your nomination count: give us a URL or Title.
Hint: In recovering the URL for a WUWT post, it can also be useful to use one of the major web search engines which might find your favorite post with a search such as — “by Kip Hansen” Wasting Time WUWT which returns a recent post by that author on that subject as the first item on the list.
It would be helpful if you gave a short statement on why you are nominating a post: “I use this time and time again to show my students….”, “I found this post exceptionally educational.”, “Best primer on the topic I’ve ever seen.” You get the idea. Readers can also suggest a “section” in which the post might be included: “Global Average Surface Temperature”, “ENSO”, Climate Sensitivity”, and the like.
Nominations Are Now Open!
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