[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Lars Aronsson]

Marcus Buck wrote:

> What I want to say: please everybody get away from calling 
> projects "failure", "worse", "weak" or whatever. It's all 
> subjective. And it's entirely meaningless,

I disagree, it's neither subjective nor meaningless.  Wikipedia 
has a mission to disseminate free knowledge.  It's an important 
mission and a powerful project.  The general public and mainstream 
media have a geniune interest in knowing how we are doing.  The 3 
millionth article in the English Wikipedia was a global news item, 
as was the PARC research that showed Wikipedia might not be 
growing so fast anymore.  The problem is that both reports are 
based on article counts, as if all articles were equal, and they 
aren't.

For Wikipedia's future growth, we learned early on to use a 
wishlist, a list of red links to not yet existing articles.  But 
the items on that list are not equally important.  And the 
improvement of some existing articles can be more important than 
the addition of any new article.  We need better tools to help us 
understand which improvements are needed.  And we need to know how 
much we improved Wikipedia, even if no new articles were created. 
This is meaningful.

We might have to go out to the people in Nigeria (or New York) and 
ask them what knowledge they need, and what tools are best suited. 
Perhaps it's the English Wikipedia that is best for them.  Then we 
might conclude that the Yoruba Wikipedia was a failed attempt, 
that never even reached 10,000 articles, and instead of 270 
languages we should only have 269 (or 41) languages of Wikipedia. 
Or on the other hand, we might discover some basic mistake that we 
did with the Yoruba Wikipedia, and once we fix that mistake its 
size and usefulness will start to grow faster.

> If 988 people had no interest in looking up Michael Jackson, 
> then that's okay. We still served the 12 who had.

Sure, but it's not likely that the interest for Michael Jackson is 
far lower in Denmark than in neighboring Sweden and Germany.  I 
still think the Danish Wikipedia has some trivial flaw that can be 
fixed.  I just don't know what it is.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se