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.