Mark,
I appreciate your input to this discussion as well as I believe you regarding your contribution to en:WP.
Both of us (you and me) know that there are "bright" young people (geeks etc.) and ... not so bright. Besides I'm willing not to be snobbish geek and I trust that people (whatever their age are) who do not care about science but love fun are *NOT* "bad"/"wrong" etc. people. We, Wikipedians, love fun as well - though our fun is very ... wikiish :-P
Exact figures of people of both kind (fun oriented and other) as well as volumes of their contribution are yet to come as age disclosure (as well as real names etc.) is more exception than rule.
From another point of view I do respect such contribution like
entertainment stuff - I care about balance between those and articles about science and technology. I'm 'old school guy' so for me encyclopedia is about science and technology first of all.
P.S. I'm going to question you about you contribution as I failed to discover it myself. I will do that by private mailing to safe everything that you would like to keep not so public.
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Mark Williamsonnode.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Do you have data to back this up? For the record, I'll be 20 in August and the main areas I edited were pages about cultures, countries, and languages since I was about 15.
There are lots of intelligent young people scattered across the globe, I don't know how much they are able to contribute to de.wp but when it comes to en.wp, you will find some of the brightest young people (in addition to some not-so-bright ones (-: perhaps)
Mark
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Pavlo Shevelopavlo.shevelo@gmail.com wrote:
Here we are not looking at 15 year olds, we are looking at retired academics as the future of our user base.
That's right point!
If Wikipedia is education tool we should (!) think about something more than "cross-education" of teenagers and students
As a matter od fact teenagers contribute mainly to articles about sports, movies and other entertainment staff. Almost only exception is computers hardware and software stuff.
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Henning Schlottmannh.schlottmann@gmx.net wrote:
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
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