On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 7:41 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Rather than comparing a convenient online copy of
Wikipedia to a paper
copy of Britannica ->0 of their readers have access to, or a
deliberately-annoying Britannica website (see
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-December/048231.html
and thread), they compared it to the other answers sites on the net,
most of which are collaborative.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122981801892624313.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
The article is mostly discussing an area where we're somewhat lacking:
Users can't easily come to us with natural language questions ('why
is the sky blue?') and easily get results. Usually the answer is
already in Wikipedia, we're not not indexed in a way which is helpful
for these queries.
Of course, there is the reference desk… but it's not especially well
advertised, especially instant gratification, or especially scalable.
Though it does get fantastic answers.
Perhaps we should create a Questions and Answers namespace where we
create articles like [[QA:Why is the sky blue?]] which is a place for
a quasi-disambiguation page that directs people to the correct parts
of Wikipedia?
Arguably a Q/A thing is a separate project from Wikipedia but I think
we should approach it as a just another kind of indexing or poral
system for the content we already have.
On a less important note:
"Mr. McAfee attributes Wikipedia's fact-checking prowess to its size;
it is one of the 10 largest Web properties in the U.S., with 55
million visitors in August."
55 million is a sizeable understatement. "Traffic to English Wikipedia
from the United States" is quite possibly around that number, but no
one would guess that they were limiting the number so. Considering
that we've been stating a much bigger number in the donation notice
(which is either an actual measurement or a comscore number, in any
case it appears to be basically in the right ballpark): no points for
WSJ's fact-checking prowess. :)