[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
How does a list of most read articles on any Wikipedia give a clue on what
is of interest in the Swahili Wikipedia ??? Would they really be interested
in subjects like "Sarah Palin" ?? If the idea is to have user driven
content, let it be driven by the community it is written for. It is more
likely that they are interested in an article about Mwai Kibaki or Raila
Odinga and sure enough both gentlemen have their sw.wp article.

The only way in which you infer information about what might be of interest
for another language is when you look at the articles read from the area
where the language for a particular language is spoken. Another approach to
our data that would be beneficial.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2009/8/25 Jonathan Hall <jonathan at sinewave42.com>

> 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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