[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 09:14, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
> Quote:Many volunteers don't have a lot to write.
> This sounds like an opinion, not like a fact. Even on English wikipedia, we
> still have about two hundred thousand plant species to describe, and
> millions of animal species. And then I'm not talking about fungi and other
> kingdoms

"Many" means "many", not "all"; "don't have a lot" means "don't have a
lot", not "nothing". That includes the most of those who are not
experts, but amateurs with good general knowledge and ability to find
sources. It is one thing when you are able to write about some event
from the history and completely other when you have to write about
biological species.

Regarding to that and in favor of specific part of your position,
community decline on German Wikipedia *before* English Wikipedia.
However, articles on English Wikipedia usually have more information,
as well as there are more articles on English Wikipedia. (But, it is
likely that articles on German Wikipedia are better written.) So,
simple answer "there is nothing more to write" is not correct.

But, "many people don't have a lot to write" is more precise [than
"nothing more to write"].

Take my example... I used to relax by writing articles about
sub-Antarctic islands on English Wikipedia. I usually wrote or updated
article with a couple of sources and one or two NOAA photos. I stopped
doing that when I realized that sources about islands are more and
more obscure. It was not relaxing anymore, it became a real research.
So, I have to find new way for useful relaxation. And the choice after
that was not Wikipedia.

> I do agree with some of your remarks about motivation. One way to motivate
> people might be to provide more information on the process that google maps
> uses to locate wikipedia artciles to its maps. It's much nicer if lots of
> people actually read 'your' article.

We could start Meta or Strategy article with the list of ideas for motivation.