The retired academics trend is apparent at en.wikt too. There are many valuable depth and quality contributions that they can make and few others can.
It might be possible to rely on a population of academics as contributors but there needs to be a mechanism to make sure that the needs of our actual users have appropriate weight in decision making
From the point of view of a major content contributor, a wiki is largely a
free resource on which they can build what they want within broad limits. A community of academics will tend to build a resource for academics. It may be cloaked in "education", but the absence of any pressure to respond to or anticipate the actual needs of actual users will cause major drift away from making a useful resource for a broader population.
The difficulty I perceive is that the wiki concept de facto depends on contributors being not too dissimilar from users. There are many design and presentation considerations (especially at wikt) for which contributors have no good model of user behavior other than introspection and a little anecdotal experience with others. The life experience of academics does not make them the perfect behavioral model for the young portion of the user base and may give them an excessively controlling or dismissive attitude toward newbies and people not educated to their preferred standard.
Below is an excerpt from a recent discussion at en.wikt that betrays some of the attitudinal tendencies that concern me: Uhm sorry but I don't think it's acceptable to confine ourselves with the user vulgaris, which is by definition semi-literate imbecile :) Our target audience are primarily reasonably intelligent people who'd be using Wiktionary as an educational resource, and are willing to spend something like max 5 minutes learning how to effectively use the structure of the entries, and language-specific policy pages. I.e. *not* the type of folks who come by Google searches and leave comments such as "I can't find the definition" [http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Wiktionary:Feedback&diff=6632516&oldid=6632209
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.netwrote:
Milos Rancic wrote:
In all cases we need to think seriously how to educate younger generations about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
Thanks for all the data and the number crunching. But I think you are wrong in your assumptions and therefore in your analysis at least regarding de-WP. Here we are not looking at 15 year olds, we are looking at retired academics as the future of our user base.
Quite frankly, a 15 years old can't contribute to de-WP anymore. Not even 20 years olds can. De-WP has reached a level where undergraduates can do vandal fighting and stuff like that, but writing and improving articles needs access to academic literature and experience in academic writing. 25 to 45 years olds usually have other priorities, they build a career and a family.
It is the logical step to look for retired academics, because they have the expertise needed. The demographics in the 15-35 range therefore are completely irrelevant for de-WP.
Ciao Henning
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l