"with popular topics cannibalizing resources."
What resources can be cannibalized? The limiting resource in WP is interested people writing, improving, and validating articles. People choose their own topics. This is different from an organization where staff can be directed to work on what the management think is important.
I, for example, almost totally avoid most aspects of what is popular culture--I am neither competent nor interested. ) The topics I work on are those that interest me, mainly academic biographies. I'm sure most people do not think them important. We're volunteers, and must tolerate each others interests.
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 5:06 PM John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
We should be using a grid for what people are reading about, instead of using countries. That will give a better representation of large countries vs small countries. It will also better reflect local ethnic groups.
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:53 PM Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>:
Hoi, I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
really
why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
proves
to be of interest [1] ?
Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some examples:
- The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched searches in
Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was done in 2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead to
some
improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal search engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.
- Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which people
often
search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there are no articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Progra...
- Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in their
language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find. You
can
see a sample here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-...
. I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some time
soon.
- The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find articles
that are missing in some wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
- This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit better
than
nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews tool, rather than just by language. It's documented at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207171 . The rationale for this is
that
the most popular English Wikipedia articles in the U.S., Nigeria, India, the Philippines, and South Africa are significantly different. The
English
Wikipedia is the most popular one in all these countries, but whereas it
is
sensible that it's popular in the U.S., it's a bit depressing that it's also the most popular in the other four countries, even though languages other than English are spoken there. The reason for this situation is, of course, that there is little content in the Wikipedias in the languages
of
these countries, and knowing what the most popular articles are can help people who write in these languages choose how to write that will be useful, and will hopefully raise the popularity of Wikipedias in these languages. The same is true for the most popular Russian Wikipedia
articles
in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, the most popular French Wikipedia articles in Benin and Mali, etc. This is only an idea, but maybe it will be
implemented
some day.
-- 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:
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