[Wikimedia-l] Apparently, Wikipedia is ugly

[Svip]

On 14 July 2012 19:37, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Svip <svippy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It is strange to me, that whenever we talk about Wikipedia edit
>> activity being down, we never discuss the fact that most of the basic
>> human knowledge articles have already been written.
>
> I remember this claim being made when we had 2 million articles, and again
> when we had 3 million, and again now that we have 4 million.  It wasn't
> correct then, and it isn't correct now -- there are millions of perfectly
> "basic" articles that still need to be written.
>
> Consider, for example, article number 4 million:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izbat_Al_Burj.  It's a city of some 70,000
> people -- is anyone really going to claim that this is a "specialized"
> topic?

I still stand by my statement, because I did not rule out that there
could be more general articles missing, but they would still be far
more specialised than an article on Stone or any capital city in the
world (which by the way is more specialised to begin than an article
on Stone).

And furthermore, while it was quite coincidental that it was article
number 4 million, how often do new articles of this sort occur?  And
how do we convince people that they can still write an article about a
subject we haven't written about?

I don't think we can, because it is hardly excited for most people to
write an article about Izbat Al Burj.  I mean no offence, but that's
how it is.  There are far more people interested in writing on the
Stone article.  Or an article, one might consider to be more
specialised than Izbat Al Burj, such as OR Gates.

Again; I don't believe there is a problem with the amount of editors
on Wikipedia, or at least not a problem we can fix.  It's like the
natural evolution in everything, sooner or later people were going to
stop using telegraphs, because something better arrived.  Not that
something has arrived to replace Wikipedia in purpose, but probably in
interest.  And you can't do anything about that.

But if there is a problem about people being unable to read articles
probably, then we _should_ do something about that.

Oh and here is a fun fact I have discovered over the years; reading
large texts of a serif typeface is a lot easier than a sans-serif
typeface.