David,
Would your work be influenced by an analysis of the academic biographies which are most
searched for that are not on Wikipedia yet? (assuming that such an targeted analysis was
available)
Cheers,
Peter
PS. An analysis that included a check of whether the topic was likely to be notable and a
listing of possible sources would also save a lot of wasted effort. Also a check against
articles that have been deleted for good reasons, and articles in other languages with a
reasonable accessible reference list.
-----Original Message-----
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of David
Goodman
Sent: 12 March 2019 07:15
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
"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(a)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(a)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:
1. 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.
2. 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_Progr…
3. 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.
4. The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find articles
that are missing in some wikis:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
5. 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
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