I agree with Jane that it is great that one of us gets to write in the NY Times. But I
would slightly disagree with Andrew. Yes smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, and for
smartphone users Wikipedia is a broadcast medium not an interactive one. That's not
great, especially for those languages where Wikipedia is far less written than in English.
But I'm not seeing this as an existential threat. I'm sure the WMF has some clue
full people trying to make the site as mobile friendly as possible, I'd put money on
the smartphone industry trying to cram yet more PCfunctionality into their hardware, I
know that the smartphone generation are capable of doing things with their phones that I
can barely comprehend - and that the kids growing up with smartphones will be more
proficient still; and whilst we are seeing PC and Laptop sales fall, an element of that is
market stabilisation and commodification - why worry that PC sales are falling if that
just means people are replacing their PCs less frequently?
If ownership of PCs was falling, people were moving all their internet activity to the
smartphone, and Wikipedia was pretty much the only bit of the Internet left behind when
you migrate to smartphone, then I would be worried.
As it is I just see this as a change to the environment we are in, a change that makes
things more difficult for us, but not one that threatens our survival.
Regards
Jonathan
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 11:59:25 +0200
From: Jane Darnell <jane023(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] "Can Wikipedia Survive?" op-ed
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What I absolutely *love* in this piece is that it's by our own GLAM-Wiki
podcast host Andrew Lih and it's in the New York f***ing Times! Yay!
Plus I totally agree with his lead point, which holds for all languages: "One
of the biggest threats it faces is the rise of smartphones as the dominant
personal computing device." If I had to pick the one thing that would stop
me editing Wikipedia projects, then yes, this *is* that thing. Though I
truly love Wikidata and I do feel strongly about the Gendergap, I agree
with him and feel that the biggest threat to the Wikiverse is the demise of
the desktop.