On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:17 AM, Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoermi@gmx.net wrote:
- Andreas K. wrote:
Satisfying most users is a laudable aim for any service provider, whether revenue is involved or not. Why should we not aim to satisfy most our
users,
or appeal to as many potential users as possible?
Many Wikipedians would disagree that they or Wikipedia as a whole is a "service provider". The first sentence on the german language version for instance is "Wikipedia ist ein Projekt zum Aufbau einer Enzyklopädie aus freien Inhalten in allen Sprachen der Welt." That's about creating something, not about providing some service to others, much less trying to satisfy most people who might wish to be serviced.
I see our vision and mission as entirely service-focused. We are not doing this for our own amusement:
*Vision: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.* * * *Mission: The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.* * * *Values: An essential part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is encouraging the development of free-content educational resources that may be created, used, and reused by the entire human community.*
It's about providing a service to the entire human community. Quality is defined by the recipient of a service, not the producer.
I invite you to have a look at http://katograph.appspot.com/ which shows the category system of the german Wikipedia at the end of 2009 with in- formation about how many articles can be found under them and the number of views of articles in the category over a three day period. You will find for instance that there are many more articles on buildings than on movies, many times more, but articles on movies get more views in total.
That's a fascinating piece of work. :) If I understand it correctly, the colour of each rectangle reflects average number of page views per article in this category (blue = low, orange = high), and the area of each rectangle reflects the number of articles in that category. What do the dropdown menus do? I can't figure them out. Do you have an FAQ for this application?
Best, Andreas