No subject

free resource on which they can build what they want within broad limits.  A
community of academics will tend to build a resource for academics.  It may
be cloaked in "education", but the absence of any pressure to respond to or
anticipate the actual needs of actual users will cause major drift away from
making a useful resource for a broader population.

The difficulty I perceive is that the wiki concept de facto depends on
contributors being not too dissimilar from users.  There are many design and
presentation considerations (especially at wikt) for which contributors have
no good model of user behavior other than introspection and a little
anecdotal experience with others. The life experience of academics does not
make them the perfect behavioral model for the young portion of the user
base and may give them an excessively controlling or dismissive attitude
toward newbies and people not educated to their preferred standard.

Below is an excerpt from a recent discussion at en.wikt that betrays some of
the attitudinal tendencies that concern me:
Uhm sorry but I don't think it's acceptable to confine ourselves with the
user vulgaris, which is by definition semi-literate imbecile :) Our target
audience are primarily reasonably intelligent people who'd be using
Wiktionary as an educational resource, and are willing to spend something
like max 5 minutes learning how to effectively use the structure of the
entries, and language-specific policy pages. I.e. *not* the type of folks
who come by Google searches and leave comments such as "I can't find the
definition" [<http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Wiktionary:Feedback&diff=6632516&oldid=6632209>

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Henning Schlottmann
<h.schlottmann at gmx.net>wrote:

> Milos Rancic wrote:
> > In all cases we need to think seriously how to educate younger
> > generations about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
>
> Thanks for all the data and the number crunching. But I think you are
> wrong in your assumptions and therefore in your analysis at least
> regarding de-WP. Here we are not looking at 15 year olds, we are looking
> at retired academics as the future of our user base.
>
> Quite frankly, a 15 years old can't contribute to de-WP anymore. Not
> even 20 years olds can. De-WP has reached a level where undergraduates
> can do vandal fighting and stuff like that, but writing and improving
> articles needs access to academic literature and experience in academic
> writing. 25 to 45 years olds usually have other priorities, they build a
> career and a family.
>
> It is the logical step to look for retired academics, because they have
> the expertise needed. The demographics in the 15-35 range therefore are
> completely irrelevant for de-WP.
>
> Ciao Henning
>
>
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-- 
Dennis C. During

Cynolatry is tolerant so long as the dog is not denied an equal divinity
with the deities of other faiths. - Ambrose Bierce

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cynolatry