Although using reputation alone as a guide to good nodes works well it has a few problems :
- Not all good wus have very high rep. Particularly if they are recent or about slightly obscure subjects.
- Some nodes have higher rep than other, possibly better, nodes simply because they have been around for longer.
- Particularly for lower level users it may only yield a few really good writeups.
- Not all nodes with a C! are good.
Of course this depends on what you class as a good node. You could define "good" in any number of ways but the common feature (as far as I'm concerned) that all good nodes have is that they are well written regardless of their subject matter. So one way to find good nodes is to find good
noders
But how to find good noders?
Until comparatively recently it was difficult but now there is a way thanks to the Honor Roll. All you need to do is find a user with a high merit.
Now unfortunately merit isn’t a public statistic so you can’t see a users merit on their homenode but… you can see the effect of their LF.
So to find a good user and hence find good nodes all you need to do is surf through the
other users nodelet and find someone who has significantly fewer wus than the number set for their level.
For example: a user who is level 3 and yet only has 36 wus (as opposed to the required 70) has got a LF under 0.52 and therefore has a merit of at least 19 so they must be doing something right!
Once you have found such a user all you need to do is sit back and read everything they have written, knowing you will get quality writing.
I think the best thing about this method is that it not only provides you with lots of good stuff but it also gets you to read stuff you wouldn’t normally have searched for. This way you can learn a lot about things that you aren’t usually interested in and that, I think, is what this site is all about.