Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, Lars I completely agree that the failure of a Wikipedia IS meaningful. But it is only meaningful if we are interested in learning what causes these failures, what we can do to remedy these situations and when we are willing to act upon our findings.
Interesting data points outside of Wikipedia entirely, are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Store_Danske_Encyklop%C3%A6di
and;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalencyklopedin
with a further interesting contrast offered by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning.nu
The Danish commercially published (but with direct funding subsidy from the government) Ensyklopedia did not excite the Danish public. It is very hard to credit this lack of interest 20 years before wikipedia came into existence to the lack of adequate MediaWiki localizations.
In contrast the Swedish Nationalencylopedin was gobbled up by the public at large, and even was able to pay back the government in full all the money loaned for the production as a guarantee against losses.
There must be some difference in national character or something else to explain this. But I certainly don't claim to have the answer, except to state that since this all happened before there was a Wikipedia, the "problem" must also predate Wikipedia.
A further wrinkle in the current situation is that currently Nationalencyklopedin (the Swedish one) is behind a paywall with the nearest competitor to Wikipedia in the "free as in beer" stakes being susning.nu, run by Lars Aronsson; while the Danish "Den Store Danske Encyklopaedi" has been liberated and can be freely accessed. Thus, quite unlike the current Swedish situation, Wikipedia and the formerly government subsidized but commercially published (and very professionally edited) encyclopaedia are nearly level pegging on the internet, in terms of amount of content and ease of access, as far as the Danish encyclopaedia reading public are concerned. This can't but have an effect.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen