[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia

[Jonathan Hall]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 09:26:18AM +0200, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
<snip>
> For the second there are two approaches. We create a 100/1000 list of must
> have articles. While there is merit in many of the subjects selected, do you
> really think American Football is relevant in Upper Volta (I do not know).
> The other is write what people want. We do not know what people want. If we
> did we had a list of most looked for articles that could not be found for
> each project. Now THAT would be user driven and THAT would motivate people
> to write not only the article but possibly also the wiki network around such
> articles.
Actually, there are no sportspeople and very few sports articles in
[[meta:List of articles every Wikipedia should have]]. That said, some of
the articles in the philosophy section do tend a little towards the
abstract - an article on the concept of beauty is all well and good, but
how often will it actually be looked up.

Maybe we could gain an idea of the sort of articles that are wanted by
looking at which articles are accessed in other languages with larger
Wikipedias (en, simple, fr, maybe de would probably be the best ones to
start with) from IPs in the areas where the language in question is
spoken. 

--
Jonathan G Hall <jonathan at sinewave42.com>
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