Lars makes excellent points here.
We need to include in our community
- experienced professional reference-work writers (and we should help them find ways to sustain themselves, particularly in niche markets -- one way is by distributing the underlying work needed to find and organize data). there is room in the world-of-WP for effective, sustainable POV and specialist works
- bright teenagers everywhere. They have ample time and energy to research topics of interest in great detail, at least some are interested in any conceivable topic, and as they pass through higher education they will develop more specific skills and knowledge that they will then know how to share with the world
- retired educators and researchers. They have deep knowledge of certain topics and a love of finding the right reference work for the job. They have time and interest in broadening subjects they love, and can often make personal contact with experts in those fields
- the person living down your street. everyone lives near something notable or of interest, from a small village to a lake or canyon to a statue, building, or event that others may want to know about. and many people work with notable volunteer projects, organizations, or works of art that deserve coverage.
Having a bit more structure to new user induction seems to be the inevitable direction to go to elicit breadth on the projects. Out existing low-structure approaches need to be supplemented with attractive more-structured paths.
+1
SJ
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Henning Schlottmann wrote:
Who are our actual users?
This is a good question, not only with respect to level (youth or academic), but also for topics (academic subjects like medicine, or popular culture). Retired academics might provide useful input on how to treat cancer, but might be out of touch with trends in manga or cooking. If we discourage teenagers from writing about their favorite artists, they will find Wikipedia less useful.
It is also a question of what alternatives to Wikipedia our users have. Even if we fail to produce a good encyclopedia (in many smaller languages, it will take a long time to build something useful), we might succeed in killing all competition, especially printed reference works. This is a problem for Wikipedia as well, as we could be running out of sources to cite.
I have written many short articles based on information found in reference works like "who's who" from earlier decades. But many such titles are no longer produced, because printed reference works are no longer profitable, especially in smaller markets (smaller languages). The Swedish "Vem är det" was published every 2nd year, but had a 6 year gap from 2001 to 2007, and I don't know if there will ever be another edition.
Many printed reference works were financially supported by buyers who thought they were necessary to have, but seldom used them. Today the same people still use reference works very seldom. The difference is they now think (wrongly) that everything is online, and they don't need to buy printed reference works anymore.
Another traditional "must have" is the daily newspaper, which many young people are now abandoning, resulting in the current crisis. Revenue from ads on newspaper websites isn't covering the loss of subscription revenue from the printed editions.
We could be entering a period of scarcity of good reference information, as counterintuitive as that might seem. There is a huge gap for Wikipedia to fill.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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