Rather than comparing a convenient online copy of Wikipedia to a paper copy of Britannica ->0 of their readers have access to, or a deliberately-annoying Britannica website (see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-December/048231.html and thread), they compared it to the other answers sites on the net, most of which are collaborative. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122981801892624313.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 7:41 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-December/048231.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122981801892624313.html?mod=googlenews_wsj The article is mostly discussing an area where we're somewhat lacking: Users can't easily come to us with natural language questions ('why is the sky blue?') and easily get results. Usually the answer is already in Wikipedia, we're not not indexed in a way which is helpful for these queries. Of course, there is the reference desk… but it's not especially well advertised, especially instant gratification, or especially scalable. Though it does get fantastic answers. Perhaps we should create a Questions and Answers namespace where we create articles like [[QA:Why is the sky blue?]] which is a place for a quasi-disambiguation page that directs people to the correct parts of Wikipedia? Arguably a Q/A thing is a separate project from Wikipedia but I think we should approach it as a just another kind of indexing or poral system for the content we already have. On a less important note: "Mr. McAfee attributes Wikipedia's fact-checking prowess to its size; it is one of the 10 largest Web properties in the U.S., with 55 million visitors in August." 55 million is a sizeable understatement. "Traffic to English Wikipedia from the United States" is quite possibly around that number, but no one would guess that they were limiting the number so. Considering that we've been stating a much bigger number in the donation notice (which is either an actual measurement or a comscore number, in any case it appears to be basically in the right ballpark): no points for WSJ's fact-checking prowess. :) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Perhaps we should create a Questions and Answers namespace where we create articles like [[QA:Why is the sky blue?]] which is a place for a quasi-disambiguation page that directs people to the correct parts of Wikipedia?