[Foundation-l] About the low-hanging fruit

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> You are interested in this topic; many users (or most, I am afraid) are
> not.
> 
> You have an expert knowledge in this topic, namely the knowledge of
> Russian language. Most of English Wikipedia editors don't.
> 
> There is a plenty of low-hanging fruits in classical music articles
> (especially in Russian Wikipedia). With a use of Grove Dictionary of
> Music and Musicians, one could add more than 1000 paragraphs of text
> into Wikipedia by just retelling its content. Grove has a basic
> coverage of topics, and it has 29 volumes in it; I think that
> describes the breadth of the topic well. Anyone claiming there is
> nothing to write about there must be kidding.
> 
> The reason nobody writes them are:
> 1. Nobody cares;
> 2. Nobody understands the terms (most of which are fairly easy to
learn).
> 

Well, I think you just confirm my points. For a given topic, most of the
readers and most of the editors shown no interest. I am interested in may
be 10 topics but do not care about 90 more. This is perfectly fine.
Moreover, I am in this context just an average wikimedian, who happens to
have just one advantage - speaking a foreign language (with respect to the
project I am contributing to). There are plenty of these walking around.
And I did not have any difficulties finding a topic where I can contribute,
where very few people can contribute, and which is in principle needed (not
a luxury or excessive). There would be a different story if I were
contributing to the topic of my professional interest, but like this I
could easily find a dozen of more topics I can work on. (May be when I
retire and Wikipedia is still around, I will also work on those). Which
means there is plenty of fruit around, and much of this fruit is actually
low-hanging. That was my point.

For the usability, last time I checked the usability wiki was dead as well
as the Wikiproject Usability on en.wp. If someone can show me what would be
an appropriate place to list my issues (meaning there is somebody there who
can use them), I would do it, otherwise I would not bother to spend an hour
describing them.

Cheers 
Yaroslav