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

[teun spaans]

I agree that creating an article should be much easier. Creating a wysiwyg
editor would greatly facilitate that.

It would also help if we promoted a culture where people are invited to
create new articles. Many hard code wikipedians seem to have adopted the
attitude that red links are ugly - so red links are converted to normal
text. But a red link is and should be an invitation to create an article.

2008/12/3 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>

> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Milos - you wrote: "To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful
> > Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong.
> Serbian
> > Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles
> > than en.wp." Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes
> > sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more
> useful
> > than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm
> > curious to know what data changed your mind.
>
> I have to make one correction: Usually, when I say "Serbia", I think
> "Belgrade". My "intuition" is connected to Belgrade and I am not so
> able to analyze the whole Serbia. Belgrade develops similarly to other
> European cities, while parts of Serbia may vary significantly
> regionally. But, including Belgrade's "gravitation area", it includes
> between 1/4 and 1/3 of population of Serbia (without Kosovo).
>
> I had social bias for a long time. For people around me, which means
> fairly educated persons between their 20s and 50s, English Wikipedia
> is indeed the most useful project. When some of them is trying to find
> informations about [[Earth]], [[Alexander the Great]], [[Amazon]],
> [[Arthur C. Clarke]], [[Mikhail Bulgakov]], [[Apache HTTP Server]]
> etc., they are going to en.wp. A number of them are not able to
> participate actively in English, but they are fully able to understand
> what is written in one encyclopedic article.
>
> 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."
>
> One more personal bias which I had was a reason why I am using one
> encyclopedia. I am using it to find informations which don't below to
> something which may be called "a basic set of informations". I am
> using Wikipedia to find informations which don't below to my general
> knowledge. So, when I am searching for, let's say, some information
> from astronomy, I am not going to the articles like [[Moon]] or
> [[Jupiter]] are, but about newly discovered planets, [[Timeline of the
> Big Bang]] or [[Ultimate fate of the universe]].
>
> BUT, it seems that the most important role of Wikipedia is not to
> cover those fields. The most important role is to cover the basic
> educational fields, where pupils may find informations for their
> classes. So, even I think that [[Ultimate fate of the universe]] is a
> very important article, much more important than the article about
> lesser known Serbian feudal ruler, like [[sr:Grgur Branković]] is, for
> one pupil who learns history from the 5th grade of primary school
> (while astronomy is a course just in some of the high schools at, I
> think, 4th grade), this Serbian feudal ruler is much more important.
>
> There is no article about the ultimate fate of the universe on sr.wp,
> while there is no article about Grgur Branković on en.wp. Conclusion
> about usefulness is obvious: for the most of pupils and their parents
> the article about Grgur Branković may be used (and it is in Serbian),
> while speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are
> comparable with watching Battlestar Galactica or Star Track (and it is
> in English).
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