[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia’s Foundation Plans Expansion"

[Liam Wyatt]

On 13 July 2010 09:05, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>wrote:

> James Alexander wrote:
> > On a related note: someone brought this Times article to the meetup in
> > Boston Monday
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/business/media/12link.html.
> > There is some truth to it I think and the staffing changes reflect that
> some
> > with a larger focus on development outside en.
> >
> >
> Having discussed certain things with Liam Wyatt face-to-face after the
> British Museum workshop, I'm prepared to say that I disagree somewhat
> with him as a pundit (as distinct from an activist). It is so not true
> that enWP is "full" in any sense. We still don't get careful analysis of
> our "brand" in the media, though they make fewer complete blunders about
> WP in the past.
> <snip>
> Charles
>
> Just a quick reply - I also do not think WP (and especially en-wp) is
"full" in any sense. The quote from the article is: “By definition, as it
gets bigger, people don’t have as many places to start. It is a good problem
to have, but it is a problem.” And that's just one quote pulled from a much
wider conversation and therefore has a necessary lack of contextualisation.
As Noam's article put it, the community in general and the WMF are starting
to push (in a variety of ways) into engaging different kinds of people -
people in developing countries and also subject-area experts especially. I
think everyone agrees that it's no longer as easy to "just jump right in" to
en-wp as it used to be which is because we have much better content than we
used to - this is the "good problem". But I also think that we all agree
that there's definitely a long way to go before en-wp could be considered
"full". IMO we're only just scratching the surface of what we can eventually
achieve :-)

-Liam