We can consider this an opportunity, e.g. popular media often touches on diverse cultural and political themes, and international sports tournaments give people a reason to learn about different countries. If people find our project this way then so be it, we can just try and make sure those articles great starting points for further exploration https://xkcd.com/214/.
Ed
On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 12:31, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 😱
I agree, although I'd make it a bit more focused: an encyclopedia that is *only* popularity-driven is indeed scary. It's good to mention this, and not once, but repeatedly.
However, providing Wikipedia editors with information about what *is* in demand is useful, as long as the editors clearly know that they have the choice to write what is *important* and that "important" is not equal to "popular".
While I haven't ran a proper survey about this, conversations that with Wikipedia editors from various "big" and "small" languages tell me that most of them already understand it, and this is good. Nevertheless, reminding people that Wikipedia is not supposed to be just about covering popular topics won't hurt.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe