Pointy? I think you may misunderstand my use of the term “hostage”. I don’t use it with
the meaning of abducting people for ransom, but in the sense of “subject to things beyond
our control”.
I agree entirely that Wikipedia should serve its readers and to that end “To do” lists are
compiled with the intention of giving adequate coverage of topics perceived to be needed.
Yet, many of those “To do” lists are full of redlinks years later because we have
volunteer contributors whose interests / expertise may not align with the perceived needs.
Whereas if Wikipedia employed its writers, it could direct them to write articles about
required topics. It would be a wonderful thing if we could harness the volunteer energy
that goes into largely unproductive activities like endless category reorganisation (given
studies show readers rarely look below the reference section and don’t see or use the
categories) into writing content that is actually needed. But alas it is not so.
Kerry
From: Ziko van Dijk [mailto:zvandijk@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, 16 December 2018 3:32 AM
To: Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>om>; Research into Wikimedia content and
communities <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Readers of Wikipedia
Hello,
Thanks for the link and the comments, Leila!
Am Fr., 14. Dez. 2018 um 00:44 Uhr schrieb Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com
<mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com> >:
hostage to the interests of their contributors (unless they actively remove the material).
That is, you get the topics that the contributors are willing and able to write, no matter
what the intention might be.
That's a very pointy expression: "Hostage to the interests of their
contributors"! In fact, WP should serve recipients, but the reality is often
different. We alreday saw that Article Feedback Tool as a means to find out what
recipients think. I would be happy with a new, less ambitious approach, where we don't
expect recipients to contribute to the improvement of content but just want to know their
opinion.
By the way, the distincion of large and short articles I have found in Collison's
"Encyclopedias through the ages" (or similar) from 1966. It is not very
prominent in there, but I have elaborated on the idea in 2015, with a distinction of
definition articles, exposition articles, longer articles and dissertations.
An encyclopedia with "short" articles - or a meaningful combination of the four
types above - would fit well to the original concept of hypertext not being an actual set
of texts (or nodes), but being an individual's specific learning strategy or reading
path.
Federico: remember, most of the oldest German texts (Old High German) deal with Biblical
topics... :-)
Kind regards
Ziko