On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:17 AM, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi(a)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