Liam Wyatt wrote:
On 13 July 2010 09:05, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com mailto:charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
James Alexander wrote: > On a related note: someone brought this Times article to the meetup in > Boston Monday http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/business/media/12link.html. > There is some truth to it I think and the staffing changes reflect that some > with a larger focus on development outside en. > > Having discussed certain things with Liam Wyatt face-to-face after the British Museum workshop, I'm prepared to say that I disagree somewhat with him as a pundit (as distinct from an activist). It is so not true that enWP is "full" in any sense. We still don't get careful analysis of our "brand" in the media, though they make fewer complete blunders about WP in the past. <snip> CharlesJust a quick reply - I also do not think WP (and especially en-wp) is "full" in any sense. The quote from the article is: “By definition, as it gets bigger, people don’t have as many places to start. It is a good problem to have, but it is a problem.” And that's just one quote pulled from a much wider conversation and therefore has a necessary lack of contextualisation. As Noam's article put it, the community in general and the WMF are starting to push (in a variety of ways) into engaging different kinds of people - people in developing countries and also subject-area experts especially. I think everyone agrees that it's no longer as easy to "just jump right in" to en-wp as it used to be which is because we have much better content than we used to - this is the "good problem". But I also think that we all agree that there's definitely a long way to go before en-wp could be considered "full". IMO we're only just scratching the surface of what we can eventually achieve :-)
Of course I'm well aware of the perils of believing anything in the press. But even so, I don't see the point in that way. Remember that it is _easier_ to add to an existing article than to start a new one. Remember that it is easier to more-or-less clone something others have done (a template, say) than to figure it out for yourself. Remember that the existence of a WikiProject in an area gives a starting point for contact, that is easier by far to use than searching around for other editors who share your interests. It may be harder to add to articles that are already reasonably complete, but there are a couple of million that are nothing like complete.
We didn't really settle our differences when we talked at the Museum Tavern. (Fortunately it wasn't a question of going outside the pub to do so - we already were outside the pub!) There were two strands I remember that seemed to be tangled. "Jump right in" is actually the attitude of the young and technically-minded: that is not going to change, and so the key issue is that the learning curve, for the learn-by-doing editors, should not be spoiled by harshness. But there is the "adult learner" issue, and this is a major part of the "different kinds of people" front. If the potential reader-turning-editor is saying "I wouldn't know where to start", i.e. the complementary attitude, then (yes) we get to the usability issues that got us the Vector skin. But there should be brief but good versions of what you need to know to get started, which is why I asked recently on this list about how we were doing with cheatsheets.
I feel a kind of frustration every time one of these discussions goes flatly one-sided and omits what seem to me to be some basic distinctions.
Charles