[Foundation-l] Are we useful yet?

[David Gerard]

2008/9/8 Dennis During <dcduring at gmail.com>:

> How would we KNOW that our efforts were pleasing to anyone other than
> ourselves?  We have very little information about how valuable our
> users fee about any of the projects in any language.  In the name of
> some definition of privacy we have created a world where our efforts
> face virtually no broad reality check.


wikipedia.org being #8 site on Alexa internationally and top 10 in
many individual countries suggests we're doing *something* useful.

Andrew Cates from SOS Children just posted to wikimediauk-l about the
success of the 2007 SOS Children Wikipedia Selection for Schools,
which they produced for use in their own schools but has been very
popular.

The German Wikipedia Lexicon is due out in a week or two, we'll see
how that goes!

In terms of people knowing what the Foundation is, what it does, the
750 projects other than en:wp ... at present, I think we're still
trying to get across that Wikipedia is run by a charity, not a private
company. (Having no ads helps in this regard, I think.)

[Note that I personally think a couple of Google text ads would do
wonders for our finances and not hurt the encyclopedia, but I
recognise that large chunks of the community would just get up and
*leave*, so don't consider it a good idea at this time.]


> Presumably the foundations and corporate funders know how to evaluate
> us, whether it is on some statistical basis, on some good-intentions
> test, on a feel-good basis, or based on how it contributes to their
> own objectives.


Wikipedia is popular, useful and people like it lots. It's unreliable
but has a lot of good will - when the WikiScanner hit the news, the
media and public were outraged at the organisations POV-pushing on
Wikipedia, not at us.


> As to volunteers, who knows what the diversity of motivations is, but
> we seem to get a fair amount of help, albeit not quite enough
> disinterested, yet expert help that has the patience to stay with the
> projects.


Yeah, we don't have more than anecdotal reports on that. There's a
survey in the works to try to get a more solid idea.


- d.