G'day Mark,
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
[snip: who is a customer?]
Perhaps that isn't quite the right word, but they're living people with whom, by choosing to write about them in our encyclopedia, we have initiated a relationship.
Right. It's probably a very "American" way of putting it. "Good customer service" in the case of Wikipedia should apply to everyone we are in contact with in any way.
Yes, but this absolutely cannot be done at the expense of our primary customers---people who are looking for information.
Like Hell! We've got thousands of articles yet to be written. The other night I finally got 'round to writing [[Raymond Garrett]], which I'd been planning to do for three months (and which, even now, isn't really that good). I recall that Wikipedia's been around since at least late 2001 (if not before), and yet ... nobody has complained that "you don't have any information about Raymond Garrett!" Not once, in all that time. And, here's the thing: now that Raymond Garrett has an article, he (and his colleague, Vasey Houghton) stands alone on the list of MLCs from the 50s, 60s and 70s Who Have Wikipedia Articles. There's dozens more people from that era who deserve articles and don't have them. Somehow, however, nobody is rushing to write the articles, and nobody is crying out in horror at the idea that some student might try to look up information and be faced with a redlink.
Wikipedia is a work in progress. It's in beta. It's under construction. It really needs those 1995-esque yellow digger GIFs and blinkenlights, as David Gerard likes to point out with a bit of a humorous lilt in his pommy-sounding voice every time he appears on the radio. And if we can use this excuse to explain why such-and-such article is poorly-written and full of lies and defamation, we can *surely* use it to explain why such-and-such article doesn't exist, and won't exist until someone gets around to writing it properly.
-- Mark Gallagher "What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!" - Danger Mouse