[Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing

[Lars Aronsson]

Milos Rancic wrote:

> A couple of years passed from the time when I realized that it 
> was my social bias. I think that in 2005 I've started to have 
> this kind of conversations: "Wikipedia is very useful for me!" 
> -- "You mean, Wikipedia in English?" -- "No, Wikipedia in 
> Serbian."


At the Wikipedia Academy conference in Sweden some weeks ago, many 
of the 100+ participants were librarians or teachers in social 
sciences, and a smaller number were into natural sciences and 
technology.  All presentations were in Swedish and on the first 
day's workshops we used the Swedish Wikipedia as our playground. 
On the second day, one of the presentations was made by an 
astronomer, Dainis Dravins, who talked about his experience from 
letting undergraduate college students do their project 
presentations either as posters or as Wikipedia articles.

This picture is from his lecture,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LA2_Wikipedia_Academy_2008_lecture_by_Dainis_Dravins.jpg

Only after a while did it become apparent that he was talking of 
the English Wikipedia.  Some surprised librarian asked "are you 
now talking of the English Wikipedia?"  His answer was something 
like "yes, the Swedish is almost completely useless" (for advanced 
astronomy). In the undergraduate astronomy classes he was 
teaching, all literature is in English.  This seemed like an 
unknown planet to the Swedish librarians.  And I guess that their 
surprise came as an equal surprise to the astronomer.

I think one of the greatest values of Wikipedia Academy is when 
the attendees get to see each other's reactions to Wikipedia.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se