[Foundation-l] Analysis of statistics

[Lars Aronsson]

Henning Schlottmann wrote:

> Who are our actual users?

This is a good question, not only with respect to level (youth or 
academic), but also for topics (academic subjects like medicine, 
or popular culture).  Retired academics might provide useful input 
on how to treat cancer, but might be out of touch with trends in 
manga or cooking.  If we discourage teenagers from writing about 
their favorite artists, they will find Wikipedia less useful.

It is also a question of what alternatives to Wikipedia our users 
have.  Even if we fail to produce a good encyclopedia (in many 
smaller languages, it will take a long time to build something 
useful), we might succeed in killing all competition, especially 
printed reference works.  This is a problem for Wikipedia as well, 
as we could be running out of sources to cite.

I have written many short articles based on information found in 
reference works like "who's who" from earlier decades. But many 
such titles are no longer produced, because printed reference 
works are no longer profitable, especially in smaller markets 
(smaller languages).  The Swedish "Vem är det" was published every 
2nd year, but had a 6 year gap from 2001 to 2007, and I don't know 
if there will ever be another edition.

Many printed reference works were financially supported by buyers 
who thought they were necessary to have, but seldom used them. 
Today the same people still use reference works very seldom. The 
difference is they now think (wrongly) that everything is online, 
and they don't need to buy printed reference works anymore.

Another traditional "must have" is the daily newspaper, which many 
young people are now abandoning, resulting in the current crisis. 
Revenue from ads on newspaper websites isn't covering the loss of 
subscription revenue from the printed editions.

We could be entering a period of scarcity of good reference 
information, as counterintuitive as that might seem.  There is a 
huge gap for Wikipedia to fill.


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