On one hand Nielsen Online says Wikipedia U.S. growth is decreasing while a professor at British Columbia University is advocating for its use. By the way, Guy Chapman says that "Wikipedia is headed to court soon".
That is the story about Wikipedia. We strive to do our best but there would always be someone unhappy for a happy one. If I have to agree with something here it would be with the fact that we have to review our approach toward newcomers. I know, yes... that would not solve sockpuppetry problems - afterall, sockpuppetry harms our NPOV label and subsequently harms the reader in terms of the quality of the material they are getting. So, yes Marc, we think about our readers and i don't believe we are taking the issue from a marketing side. No, because we are volunteer encyclopaedists and nobody here is a marketer.
And yes, the foundation needs to take some actions. Do we have a kind of a guideline designed for the media? There's a press kit but it is vague. Does the media know about the 5 pillars? How many hits the Wikimedia press room page gets a day/month? It appears that the media is misunderstanding our processes out here and something needs to be done - but not necessarily changing our philisophy or the way we work.
Fayssal F.
On Fri, 16 May 2008 17:34:57 +0100 "Andrew Gray" shimgray@gmail.com wrote: Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia has PR Problems To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: f3fedb0d0805160934q7426ba59v21e10e6bb9ce61b6@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
2008/5/16 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net:
Everyone may hate Wikipedia, but they still use it, and that's what matters.
Once again, the product is more important than the people.
I really don't understand why you keep saying this as if it's a scandalous revelation.
Surely it's self-evident that a community of volunteers, who have gathered together *to work on a specific goal*, will elevate that aim over and above the process of community formation?
[Yes, we as a culture treat people badly, especially newcomers. Yes, we need to improve our default interactions with the outside world. But this doesn't mean we need to consider the community as more important than the encyclopedia... without the encyclopedia, the community is an ill-matched and purposeless crowd of people, and would implode fairly quickly]
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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End of WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 58, Issue 32