[WikiEN-l] Citizendium dead?

[phoebe ayers]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 April 2010 20:47, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I don't agree.  It's better you admit you can't measure the thing you
>> want to talk about rather than passing off the measurement you can
>> make as something it isn't.
>
> I think how much people use something is a reasonable measure of how
> useful it is. Maybe it is only useful for entertaining people or
> useful for satisfying idle curiosity, but that is still a use. Perhaps
> you mean how useful something is for a particular purpose. If so, you
> need to say what purpose you are talking about.

Indeed. "Usefulness" is one of those terms that gets thrown around &
debated a lot in the library science literature, and it turns out that
usefulness is a deeply contextual concept that is difficult to measure
by any metric: a reference work that is useful for settling a bar bet
is not generally useful for writing one's thesis, and vice versa, even
when it's the same subject in both contexts.

This is actually often a helpful point to make to lay people who are
concerned about student use, etc. when discussing Wikipedia. What are
the useful functions of an encyclopedia?

-- phoebe

-- 
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *