On Mar 10, 2005, at 5:33 AM, David Gerard wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
On Mar 9, 2005, at 7:52 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
What about people who speak Hopi as their first language and would like to read about Milwaukee?
What about the vast majority of our readers who have needs that are being ignored while certain individuals ride their private hobby horses? The major challenge of wikipedia is to make sure that the community's activities push towards the best possible knowledge source while restricting the ability of organized groups of users to slant the pedia. After hundreds of posts on the arguments over hypothetical wikis, I am going to invoke the NPOV requirement that points of view be represented in proportion to their importance. Overwhelmingly our readers are in major languages, and the challenges facing these large wikipedias should be occupying far more of the discussion than is currently the case.
That assumes it's zero-sum - that someone paying attention to a Hopi or Cantonese Wikipedia is automatically subtracted from the attention paid to the English or Mandarin Wikipedia - which you haven't demonstrated at all is the case, and which I really think isn't the case.
- d.
No, I'm pointing out that the discussion here has lopsidedly been involved with issues that are of interest to small groups of readers, rather than the large group of readers. And there is a limited amount of discussion bandwidth, therefore a zero sum situation is in effect. The question "what if someone wants to read in Hopi" is much less of a problem then "what if someone wants to read comprehensive and unbiased articles."
If the wikiprocess is working, then there will be writers for where there are readers, that is, in fact, one of the things wikipedia offers: readers for writers.