[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> Lars I completely agree that the failure of a Wikipedia IS meaningful. But
> it is only meaningful if we are interested in learning what causes these
> failures, what we can do to remedy these situations and when we are willing
> to act upon our findings.
>   

Interesting data points outside of Wikipedia entirely, are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Store_Danske_Encyklop%C3%A6di

and;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalencyklopedin

with a further interesting contrast offered by:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susning.nu

The Danish commercially published (but with direct funding
subsidy from the government) Ensyklopedia did not excite
the Danish public. It is very hard to credit this lack of interest
20 years before wikipedia came into existence to the lack
of adequate MediaWiki localizations.

In contrast the Swedish Nationalencylopedin was gobbled
up by the public at large, and even was able to pay back
the government in full all the money loaned for the production
as  a guarantee against losses.

There must be some difference in national character or
something else to explain this. But I certainly don't
claim to have the answer, except to state that since this all
happened before there was a Wikipedia, the "problem"
must also predate Wikipedia.

A further wrinkle in the current situation is that currently
Nationalencyklopedin (the Swedish one) is behind a paywall
with the nearest competitor to Wikipedia in the "free as in
beer" stakes being susning.nu, run by Lars Aronsson; while
the Danish "Den Store Danske Encyklopaedi" has been
liberated and can be freely accessed. Thus, quite unlike
the current Swedish situation, Wikipedia and the formerly
government subsidized but commercially published (and
very professionally edited) encyclopaedia are nearly level
pegging on the internet, in terms of amount of content
and ease of access, as far as the Danish encyclopaedia
reading public are concerned. This can't but have an
effect.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen