[Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content

[Bjoern Hoehrmann]

* Andreas K. wrote:
>Satisfying most users is a laudable aim for any service provider, whether
>revenue is involved or not. Why should we not aim to satisfy most our users,
>or appeal to as many potential users as possible?

Many Wikipedians would disagree that they or Wikipedia as a whole is a
"service provider". The first sentence on the german language version
for instance is "Wikipedia ist ein Projekt zum Aufbau einer Enzyklopädie
aus freien Inhalten in allen Sprachen der Welt." That's about creating
something, not about providing some service to others, much less trying
to satisfy most people who might wish to be serviced.

I invite you to have a look at http://katograph.appspot.com/ which shows
the category system of the german Wikipedia at the end of 2009 with in-
formation about how many articles can be found under them and the number
of views of articles in the category over a three day period. You will
find for instance that there are many more articles on buildings than on
movies, many times more, but articles on movies get more views in total.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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