[WikiEN-l] What is happening to the community

[geni]

On 06/03/2008, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/03/2008, Wily D <wilydoppelganger at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > Even today, as a vetern user of a couple years, I find it very easy to
>  >  edit articles and only run into helpful, friendly people.  I just
>  >  follow a few simple rules.
>
>
>
> I've been creating articles. It's fun. Today I started [[List of Ecma
>  standards]], which (a) needs completion (b) needs articles on each
>  standard.
>
>  It's not a matter of Wikipedia having all the "low-hanging fruit" - we
>  have all the fruit that's fallen off the tree. Twenty million topics
>  have been identified as being within arms' reach ...
>
>  Two million? We've barely started.


Maybe but rather a lot of that 2 million was built on knowledge people
held in their heads. Very few people with solid internet access hold
information about the unfilled entries in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_name:_F

In their head (indeed I suspect even professional linguists won't
offhand know much about rather a lot of those).

Thus we are moving from what people know to what people can find out.
This is problematical since while there are a reasonable number of
people online prepared to write about what they know about there are
rather fewer who are interested in digging through dead tree sources
to see what they can find out.

Incidentally we need a sound recording of the proper pronunciation of "!kung".

-- 
geni