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]
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:26 PM Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt(a)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(a)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(a)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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