Vito, I do not agree with you, but that may be because we edit differently. I write about what I am interested in, and know enough about to be reasonably efficient. There is enough of it to keep me busy indefinitely. I read the topics that interest me and I don't know enough about to write. I copyedit anywhere I see a need while I am reading. I fix what I see to be broken if I can. I do not think I am unique, or even unusual. What do you write about? Is it greatly affected by what other people choose to read? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Vi to Sent: Monday, March 11, 2019 11:07 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three sports, some TV series and three or four music topics. These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war", "near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late XX century".
The way we self-identify as a project deeply affects our results: promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to diversity and quality.
Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which will gain a complete influence over us.
To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not *information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.
If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"
Vito
Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman dggenwp@gmail.com ha scritto:
The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or want that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what they want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see what they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice our writing skills for our own benefit.
On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to vituzzu.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 😱
Vito
Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> ha scritto:
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] ? Thanks, GerardM
[1]
https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it...
On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
If your language community is interested to have statistics on the distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on
how
much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this
is
your chance to indicate interest at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reade...
I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating
some
of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
As always: this call is primarily a service to your language community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action is needed. :)
Best, Leila
[1]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
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-- David Goodman
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