[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Wjhonson]

I'm hoping I'm not understanding this criticism:


' that it is unduly oriented to topics of interest to
the masses",'

Are you stating that Peter is stating that a general encyclopedia should not be oriented to topics of interest to the masses?
Who exactly is the audience if not the masses?









-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thu, Sep 16, 2010 12:59 pm
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?


On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Peter Damian
peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:
 Putting this in context.  If I were to donate, say £1,500 of gross income to
 WMF, it would be reasonable to ask what this money was for: how it was
 helping. The WMF goal is to "collect and developing educational content and
 to disseminate it effectively and globally".  Wikipedia is the main engine
 of this project, and is the reason I imagine most people want to donate
 money.  Would I donate such a sum of money if I thought that it was not
 actually helping develop educational content?  Hence my question: has
 Wikipedia actually changed since 2005?  Has any educational content been
 added (I am not including porn star bios as educational content, clearly).

 I had three answers:

 1.  The first that this was seriously off-topic.  I don't understand why
 not.

 2.  The second compared Wikipedia to going to the barbers, getting a nice
 trim, and then the hair getting all messy again.  That is clearly not a
 reason for donating money, quite the reverse.  How is the money actually
 going to help, if it all is going to be a mess again in 6 months?  I
 appreciate a lot of it goes to support the servers and IT and things, but
 wouldn't it be more efficient simply to stop people editing, clear up some
 of the mess, and lock Wikipedia down?  That would be much cheaper.  And I
 would be willing to fund a clean-up effort.

 3.  I wasn't quite sure of Phil Nash's objection, I think he was trying to
 say that there is no evidence of Wikipedia failing to develop or grow.  To
 that, I say that if I am going to donate money, I would like clear evidence
 that Wikipedia is progressing in the direction I would hope.

 I would like to point out I do support a number of charities.  I help the
 Warburg institute with its library acquisition fund.  This makes hard-to-get
 books available to students.  I don't support WMF, and I won't until there
 is clear evidence the money would be used for a good purpose.  What do
 others think?  Why do people donate to WMF?

 Peter



eter, a few points. You misunderstood my comment, but I'll let that go.
People who donate to Wikimedia do so for a number of reasons, chief
mong them (I suspect) is to support keeping the lights on. That is,
he ongoing maintenance of the project in its current form. Most
onors are probably aware that the content is generated by volunteers
ho will not receive donated funds. I'm not sure why you infer that
onors are, or should be, expecting to see some content improvement as
 result of their funding. A related point is that the Wikimedia
rojects are not just fancy concepts that might be useful someday down
he road; they are highly useful right now, which is why they have
een used by hundreds of millions of people.
Finally, cherry picking a few articles to determine if the English
ncyclopedia has improved in the last 5 years is not exactly an
nalytically robust method. I suspect any such method would find that
here has been an enormous increase in both the volume and the quality
f content since 2005.
You are, and have been, committed to several conclusions about
ikipedia - that the idea of an editable encyclopedia itself is
atally flawed, that it is unduly oriented to topics of interest to
the masses", and that the community and its bureaucracy are hopefully
orrupt and ineffective. That, combined with an absolute disregard for
ommunity norms and rules, makes you both a steadfast and imperfect
ritic. So I don't imagine anyone expects you to donate or is
urprised that you don't. Few banned editors do.
Nathan
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