Reminding is easy, it's analyzing that it's complex.
I suspect that editors and readers are probably a little bit smarter than generally assumed. It's quite "obvious" that editors understand what is an encyclopedia, after years. When I make an informal survey, statistically the "smarter" students in the class or in the group of people in front of me at an event are those who already edited something or who want to know more or are willing to compile a form to state their opinion or similar.
Plus, every topic is multifaceted somehow, it's the same for the most popular ones. It's strange when long-time editors seem to miss this aspect. There is always a specific disease, an historical event, a place or a person in a family history linked to a most searched topic. You can detect many missing specific things just focusing on a core topic and starting from there. Again, maybe it's worth reminding also how our editors are quite good at doing this, and this type of information is therefore a starting point. In some of this comments, it always look like an end per se.
Seriously, if someone is so superficial to just edit something with no depth because it's on a list, (s)he will just do something equally superficial somewhere else. Clinically, I might state that it's probably a good thing if this occur in an area with huge focus, it actually lowers the possible long-term disfunctionalities induced by a rigid approach, something that it's more subtle to detect in less supervised areas.
in any case, these lists can change a lot from area to area so it is not even driven by the "mass", if you give a country in South America or Asia the same focus on a western country you end up with very unusual guideline. it's nice to know that you expertise in an area even if less taken into account in the average community around you, it's useful in a different part of the word.
Il lunedì 11 marzo 2019, 13:32:12 CET, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il ha scritto:
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