The BBC is adding automatically aggregated topic pages to its site covering specific events, people or organisations. It's very user friendly but also search friendly, partly because it puts the subject name in the URL.
The first few include India, anti-social behaviour and World War II for this trial, but it includes iPlayer content and news and will eventually be expanded to include content from external sites and blogs, as well as offering feeds of topic pages for use on external sites.
"No new content is produced for our topic pages, so we know that everything we link to meets editorial guidelines. Topic page editors can also add and remove content if necessary.
"BBC journalists and content producers use their judgement to assess their importance of their stories and content every time they write a story or publish some content. We're working on systems that will capture that wisdom, infer the relative editorial importance of a piece of content (for instance by checking whether it appeared on the News or iPlayer homepages) and then use this information to influence the ordering of content on the pages."
It's an important project this, because it presents the BBC's content in a coherent, efficient way that will become an important first point of reference for most people, just as the excellent BBC News country profiles have. That's the power of Wikipedia, because those single-subject pages give a useful overview in one page, rather than the piecemeal histories you get on single web pages if you search for a particularly topic.
