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Dear Anthony,
probably this is less practical than it might seem on first sight. Entries here grow, if they grow, organically and erratically, driven by the personal whims of whoever happens to feel an urge to invest into them. Essentially every entry is open-ended and eternally unfinished.They all deserve to be further polished and all deserve to be expanded in a multitude of directions.
From time to time somebody comes here and voices a request, such as “I’d be really interested in seeing xyz spelled out further” and sometimes these requests even find a reaction. But if we were to make formal assignments on what needs to be done, it would probably begin to feel like a chore.
The Lab is driven by an intrinsic and mostly mysterious desire of the few contributors it has to record knowledge, unpaid both by monetary or social benefits. It’s like a reclusion of esoteric monks who go on copying and commenting Aristotle, remote from human issues, just because a mysterious urge tells them to make this the business of their short time on Earth. Elsewhere in the noisy cities the trade companies hand out to-do lists to their employees, for the greater good of the revenue, but inside the monestary only God hands out to-do lists, by planting curiosity and a faint idea of eternal truth into the hearts of the monks, making them get up each morning with another idea of what they should explore this day of their finite lifes.
If you open a random entry titled by a keyword of your expertise, a variety of its deficiencies should jump out at you right away. If you go and make one or two of these your responsibility every now and then, the gratitude of this community will be with you.
If you are really unsure about what you could do, then probably it would be helpful to ask more concrete questions. Point us to a particular entry that you are interested in and let us know where you are unsure about how to improve it.
I actually think Anthony has the germ of a good idea. No one should feel obligated to do anything like this, since no one is ever obligated to do anything regarding the nLab, but I think it might be helpful to have a “To Do” section as one of the standard page-sections that a page author could choose to include alongside “Idea”, “Definition”, “References”, etc. There are certainly times when I want to record something like “I wanted to write more about X, but I ran out of time” — mainly for my own future reference when returning to the page, but in keeping with the “group lab book” spirit someone else could then come along and do it for me. I do already sometimes add such notes in random places on the page, or in query boxes, but there could be a benefit to standardizing their location.
It could even be helpful for the casual reader to be told at least some keywords relating to things that aren’t mentioned on a page but ideally “ought” to be. Certain nLab pages present a very unbalanced view of their subject, just because whoever wrote them happened to be scratching a certain itch and didn’t feel like writing about other aspects of the subject — which is okay, but briefly mentioning the “missing parts” in a “To Do” section would be an easy and quick way that anyone could partially improve the situation without spending a lot of time.
I think Mike’s point is a good one. There are several groups of pages that I started and, now, when looking for something else I find them and think ’I should add ….’ or ’that needs some more work’ but then I go and forget the point. However if I just added a ’To Do’ section near the end of the page I could search on To do when I have a (rare) day without a long To do list of its own!!!! and perhaps I would add the needed sections.
Just to avoid misunderstanding: I will certainly not object if anyone adds such lists to entries, if you think it’s useful.
What I expressed in #2 is just the feeling that this isn’t going to be too useful, since anyone who has something to add/to improve with some entry, will realize this right away from a look at the entry.
Of course a different aspect is that readers should be warned if (as long as) an entry omits important aspects of its topic. But for this purpose I imagine that in most cases a mentioning right away in the Idea-section would be preferable.
Anyway, I suspect Anthony was asking mainly because he was wondering where he could help right now. If that is the case, I’d re-iterate that Anthony should give us a few more coordinates about which entries he is interested in editing, and where he needs advice on what to do.
I agree that there may be people who would be able to improve an entry but might not realize it, or might not feel as comfortable doing it, without a To Do section. Speaking for myself, when I edit or create pages in the future I may add a To Do section if something occurs to me that could be put there. However, it’s true that such a change in future behavior won’t help someone looking for a way to contribute right now.
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