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

[Andreas K.]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:17 AM, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi at gmx.net> wrote:

> * 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 see our vision and mission as entirely service-focused. We are not doing
this for our own amusement:

*Vision: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share
in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.*
*
*
*Mission: The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage
people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a
free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and
globally.*
*
*
*Values: An essential part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is
encouraging the development of free-content educational resources that may
be created, used, and reused by the entire human community.*

It's about providing a service to the entire human community. Quality is
defined by the recipient of a service, not the producer.




> 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.
>



That's a fascinating piece of work. :) If I understand it correctly, the
colour of each rectangle reflects average number of page views per article
in this category (blue = low, orange = high), and the area of each rectangle
reflects the number of articles in that category. What do the dropdown menus
do? I can't figure them out. Do you have an FAQ for this application?


Best,
Andreas