Ahhhh it's always nice to quote someone other than Mike Godwin and it seems Betteridge's law of headlines is alive and well. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:26 PM Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Frederick.
sure, I know. I am mostly writing about Russia, and I know there are a lot of topics which are not covered. I am usually the first one who says that there are many topics to even start an article on, and way more to improve.
But let us face it - if an English-speaking person looks for something in the English Wikipedia they are most likely to find it. The articles I create are definitely useful, but they get dozens of views per year.This is one of the reason we lose editors.
But my point is that we are about to lose most of our editors - at least in the first world countries which produce the most contribution in the English Wikipedia, USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. I guess India is different, but the trend is global, I think it is just a matter of time when it comes to that in India as well. And if Wikipedia would die in these countries, it will die in India as well.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:14 PM Frederick Noronha < fredericknoronha@gmail.com> wrote:
However, as a general guideline, it is not so much incorrect to state that all important things in Wikipedia have
been
already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia
or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first
hit
— they are likely to find what they need with more than 99%
chance.
Yaroslav, Which world are you talking about? North America and Europe?
When it comes to Asia (which I'm part of) and Africa, possibly Latin America too, we haven't even written down 1% of the diversity of these places. Leave aside getting it up onto the Wikipedia!
Of course, I agree with the suggestion for new approaches (if I read you right). This is particularly true in a part of the world where much of
the
discussion is still in the oral domain, is often not in print; when it's
in
print, it is not digitised. Even when digitised, chances are that it's
in a
non-English language, which is very hard to find very search engines. (No wonder that some of the prominent people from our regions are continually getting dismissed as non-notable, which I see as another form of
'systemic
bias').
Give it a thought, please.
Frederick Noronha Goa
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 03:05, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want
to
comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The
target
audience I was thinking about was general (not necessarily Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the
first
several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I apologize in advance.
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