[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Lars I completely agree that the failure of a Wikipedia IS meaningful. But
it is only meaningful if we are interested in learning what causes these
failures, what we can do to remedy these situations and when we are willing
to act upon our findings.

I mentioned earlier that the Danish localisation is less developed compared
with the Norwegian, Nynorsk and Swedish Wikipedias. What should the
consequence be for the WMF when this is the one significant factor that is
different ? Would it be reasonable to remedy such issues because it will
lower the inflection point where projects take off autonomously? When we do
not invest in language support and language technonlogy would it make sense
to enrich the content about a country in the English Wikipedia?

My question is: is it reasonable to dissect our "failed" projects and not
act upon our findings? Is it reasonable to leave finding solutions to
volunteers when there are none at present? Is it reasonable to expect people
to volunteer for complex tasks when they typically exist only in out more
mature communitees?
Thanks,
      GerardM


2009/8/20 Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>

> Marcus Buck wrote:
>
> > What I want to say: please everybody get away from calling
> > projects "failure", "worse", "weak" or whatever. It's all
> > subjective. And it's entirely meaningless,
>
> I disagree, it's neither subjective nor meaningless.  Wikipedia
> has a mission to disseminate free knowledge.  It's an important
> mission and a powerful project.  The general public and mainstream
> media have a geniune interest in knowing how we are doing.  The 3
> millionth article in the English Wikipedia was a global news item,
> as was the PARC research that showed Wikipedia might not be
> growing so fast anymore.  The problem is that both reports are
> based on article counts, as if all articles were equal, and they
> aren't.
>
> For Wikipedia's future growth, we learned early on to use a
> wishlist, a list of red links to not yet existing articles.  But
> the items on that list are not equally important.  And the
> improvement of some existing articles can be more important than
> the addition of any new article.  We need better tools to help us
> understand which improvements are needed.  And we need to know how
> much we improved Wikipedia, even if no new articles were created.
> This is meaningful.
>
> We might have to go out to the people in Nigeria (or New York) and
> ask them what knowledge they need, and what tools are best suited.
> Perhaps it's the English Wikipedia that is best for them.  Then we
> might conclude that the Yoruba Wikipedia was a failed attempt,
> that never even reached 10,000 articles, and instead of 270
> languages we should only have 269 (or 41) languages of Wikipedia.
> Or on the other hand, we might discover some basic mistake that we
> did with the Yoruba Wikipedia, and once we fix that mistake its
> size and usefulness will start to grow faster.
>
> > If 988 people had no interest in looking up Michael Jackson,
> > then that's okay. We still served the 12 who had.
>
> Sure, but it's not likely that the interest for Michael Jackson is
> far lower in Denmark than in neighboring Sweden and Germany.  I
> still think the Danish Wikipedia has some trivial flaw that can be
> fixed.  I just don't know what it is.
>
>
>
> --
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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