We edit what we choose to edit. Usually the is things we are interested in and know
something about. 2 billion people can go search for something I have no interest in and it
will not move me to edit that topic. However, if a fairly substantial number of people
look for something I am interested in and it is not covered, I may well spend some time
improving coverage of the missing material, assuming I can find reliable sources. I
don't think I am unique in this attitude, so I predict that getting good feedback on
what is missing will inspire the people who would edit those subjects anyway, to improve
them. It is very interesting and useful to me to know what readers are missing from my
special interest areas and a complete waste of my time nd everyone else's to flood me
with information on what people don’t find on topics I have no interest in editing. I will
go to the trouble of trying to add information on a topic if even one person clearly and
politely asks for it on a talk page. Also if someone does not understand what is written I
will try to clarify, as that also improves the encyclopaedia. Clear, well targeted
feedback is good, floods of garbage is not. Cheers,
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Alessandro
Marchetti via Wikimedia-l
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2019 1:53 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
I know people in many fields with great technical expertise. people who published
articles on Science and Nature basically, and in the end I think they are probably
qualified to have an idea of what a good encyclopedia should be. The point is that these
people open wiki for topics far away from their area, most of the time they look also for
"pop" topics. Finding pop culture is what makes them stay and grow interest as
much as everything else. It's when they find a deleted ye useful page of something of
interest for some internal reason they think wikipedia it's not worth spending time
on.
Based on that experience, in all the discussions when people who claim that this focus on
such pop information lower our image or damage our workflow, I always question where these
opinions come from and if they are peer-reviewed. I am a scientist, I look at data. it has
been years people are claiming the "popmaggedon" of wikipedia is soon, and in
the meantime its overall quality on very specific topic is still increasing.
A balanced encyclopedia comes from trying to fill the gaps, all information are useful in
that direction. As long as someone else is studying missing links, pages existing in other
languages, encouraging what editors want and so on, your idea is just part of patchwork. I
cannot peer-review such statement, but at least i can tell you it is said by someone who
never edited a "pop" article in all his wikipedia life and manage projects of
outreach in organic chemistry or biophysics, to name the last ones. So I hope that it
gives a hint that is probably fine.
Go on and explore.
Il lunedì 11 marzo 2019, 10:08:23 CET, Vi to <vituzzu.wiki(a)gmail.com> ha
scritto:
That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics
cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three
sports, some TV series and three or four music topics.
These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start
focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no
resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war",
"near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late
XX century".
The way we self-identify as a project deeply affects our results:
promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the
free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to
diversity and quality.
Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a
very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which
will gain a complete influence over us.
To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not
*information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information
people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.
If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the
ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know
the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"
Vito
Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman <dggenwp(a)gmail.com>
ha scritto:
The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the
information people need or
want that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what they
want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see what
they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader
interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice
our writing skills for our own benefit.
On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to <vituzzu.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia
scares 😱
Vito
Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> ha scritto:
> Hoi,
> I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
really
> why can we not have the data that allows us
to seek out what people are
> actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
proves
to be of
interest [1] ?
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-i…
>
> On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> >
> > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on
how
> > much data we collect in your language,
perhaps more insights), this
is
your chance to indicate interest at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Read…
> >
> > I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
> > then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating
some
of the results to see if any changes in the survey
questions are
needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
is needed. :)
Best,
Leila
[1]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> >
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> >
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
--
David Goodman
DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>