On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Ben Kovitz bkov...@acm.org wrote:
On Feb 16, 2009, at 2:10 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
We could discuss why [CZ] failed but I think the real answer is
simply that Wikipedia is good enough so there is very little
interest in a new project doing the same thing.
Gwern Branwen wrote:
User:MBisanz has charted the number of new accounts registered per
month, which tells a very similar story: March 2007 recorded the
largest number of new accounts, and the rate of new account creation
has fallen significantly since then. Declines in activity have also
On Feb 16, 2009, at 12:20 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed
predecessor Nupedia, who left the fold because of differences over the
question of the proper role of experts.
Strange, I thought it was because he stopped being paid for it.
On Feb 16, 2009, at 2:10 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
We could discuss why [CZ] failed but I think the real answer is
simply that Wikipedia is good enough so there is very little
interest in a new project doing the same thing.
I think you have pegged it exactly right. In most large markets, the
In general, about article creation, this has obviously slowed quite a lot.
However, I think that is a good thing, as that means that article writers now
have a chance to catch up to all the new articles. That is why the precentage
of articles that are GAs, FAs, or FLs is rising, and will
Mark Nilrad wrote:
I'm curious, as the growth in Wikipedia has slowed, has the numbers of ACTIVE
users slowed as well?
If you're talking about the demographics of editors - I think it is now
more three years since WP attracted a very large group of people,
arriving over a few months only, who
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Mark Nilrad marknil...@yahoo.com wrote:
In general, about article creation, this has obviously slowed quite a lot.
However, I think that is a good thing, as that means that article writers now
have a chance to catch up to all the new articles. That is why the
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
[outside views of Wikipedia among general public]
One thing that is not at all obvious to me is that there is any really
really credible reporting on this or other aspects of Wikipedia. It's
anecdotal at
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
(I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
know I have often thought I should ask the question.)
Does anyone know how many
On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
(I honestly forget if I have broached this subject
Does anyone know the answer to the opposite question? How many
articles on the English Wikipedia lack interwiki links? It is possible
(but less likely) that the articles exist in both places, but haven't
been linked with an interwiki yet. I find examples of that fairly
regularly, but am not
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen schreef:
Would there be any workable way to create a big (huge?) Missing
Articles project by somehow mass generating a list of the
various non-English language articles still not translated
to the English language wikipedia?
I did something like this, four years ago.
Charles Matthews wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:
1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit
quality.
2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.
3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.
4.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Charles Matthews wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
potential as a comprehensive reference. My main hope is that life
around the
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/17 Matthew Brown mor...@gmail.com:
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com
wrote:
Those sources will give you stubs, will they give you much more? I
guess it depends on how specific a field guide you have.
Stubs
2009/2/19 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/17 Matthew Brown mor...@gmail.com:
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com
wrote:
Those sources will give you stubs, will they give you much more? I
guess it depends on how
Gwern Branwen wrote:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
cimonav...@gmail.com wrote:
Personally I think this is a very interesting point. You will
forgive if I have asked this before, and not gotten a reply.
(I honestly forget if I have broached this subject before, I
2009/2/19 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com:
If I read that correctly the upshot seemed to be that just by
translating articles from the non-English language wikipedias
(presuming they would not be deleted immediately because of
a lack of English language web-sources :-( that is)
Presumably whether something is worth doing in the wikipedia could be
defined to depend on whether anybody appreciates us doing it.
So I wonder if these location articles were translated whether they would
see much traffic? Do we have any evidence from any that have been translated
how much they
2009/2/19 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com:
Does anyone know how many unique (that is not reproduced
around other languages) articles there are in toto in the
non-English language wikipedias, which do not have a
corresponding English language wikipedia article? Can
even a rough
2009/2/16 Guettarda guetta...@gmail.com:
True, the stuff that you
could add off the top of your head may be gone, but grab a good field guide
to plants, or grab a historical dictionary, and you could add hundreds of
articles. To me it always seems like time is the major constraint, not
stuff
2009/2/17 Matthew Brown mor...@gmail.com:
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com
wrote:
Those sources will give you stubs, will they give you much more? I
guess it depends on how specific a field guide you have.
Stubs aren't bad things.
Indeed, but there are
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
snip
Yes, but once you're using one source to find other sources and
hunting for them, you're not really in the realms of low-hanging
fruit.
Some of the so-called low-hanging fruit are articles that have never
been
2009/2/17 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:
If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
general, overview articles are: (a) difficult to write well; and (b)
experts tend to prefer to write more
2009/2/17 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:
If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
general, overview articles are: (a) difficult to write well; and (b)
experts tend to prefer to write
On 17/02/2009, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
I love a good metaphor! You're absolutely right, writing articles
about very general topics is very difficult. I think the problem comes
in trying to balance breadth, depth and conciseness. There isn't an
obvious solution - it just
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:39 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/17 Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com:
If these all count as low-hanging fruit, they may have been picked,
but they haven't really ripened yet. Part of the trouble is that truly
general, overview articles are:
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Carcharoth
carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote:
I might try and do a personalised listing at some
point, bringing out the areas I'm interested in and slicing up the FA
cake in a different way. Such as identifying the more general ones
and the more niche ones,
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/17 Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.com:
That would be interesting. I wonder if this could be something that
could be integrated into the 1.0 rating scheme... another, parallel
rating for scope or
Carl Beckhorn wrote:
Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be
worth reading even if the author were anonymous. In particular, the
following claim is quite accurate to my experience:
Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a
K. Peachey wrote:
Just a Heads Up slashdot has new article about wikipedia up and it's
use of experts - The Role of Experts In Wikipedia
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/0210251
Sanger says the main reason that Wikipedia's articles are as good as
they are is that they are
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
In that sentence there are buried assumptions as follows:
1. There are people on wikipedia who will not permit
quality.
2. People who won't permit quality are aggressive.
3. There is a clear unambiguous metric for quality.
4. Aggressive people who won't
What Citizendium's Homeopathy article shows more than anything is that a
wide base of editors, and therefore a wide audience, is essential for the
success of Wikipedia or any similar project. The article shows a distinct
lack of the cleansing effects of sunlight; few people read it, few people
Nathan wrote:
I say, let them congregate on Citizendium. We should have a template
{{trycitizendium}} that we can post on the pages of our more aggressive POV
pushers.
The template need not limit itself to Citizendium, though the symbolism
of having it in the template name has a certain
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote:
Nathan wrote:
I say, let them congregate on Citizendium. We should have a template
{{trycitizendium}} that we can post on the pages of our more aggressive POV
pushers.
The template need not limit itself to
Charles Matthews schreef:
Guess what - sometimes you have to put up with the pesky
business of people needing to argue the matter out on talk pages.
I've been following CZ for some time, and one gets the feeling that
Larry Sanger doesn't really like arguementsi, or open discussion.
One of the
2009/2/16 Eugene van der Pijll eug...@vanderpijll.nl:
Charles Matthews schreef:
Guess what - sometimes you have to put up with the pesky
business of people needing to argue the matter out on talk pages.
I've been following CZ for some time, and one gets the feeling that
Larry Sanger doesn't
Carcharoth schreef:
Weirdly, most of the history is not there:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Homeopathyaction=history
But has been moved to a draft page:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki?title=Homeopathy/Draftaction=history
That's how they do that there. The approved page is a
Thomas Dalton schreef:
I've been following the CZ statistics page for some time, and I get
the feeling that it doesn't matter because activity on CZ is shrinking
(even Sanger doesn't seem very active) and it will never reach a size
where anyone actually uses it.
I've had a bit of an argument
Thomas Dalton schreef:
I don't see a claim of exponential growth (which would be complete
rubbish), just good news. I don't think linear growth (even slightly
below linear) is good news, personally.
I exaggerated somewhat. But he has spoken about ongoing exponential
growth before, so it
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
They've been going for over two years, if they were going to have a
big recruitment push wouldn't they have done so by now? But really,
trying to recruit writers is the wrong way round, they need to recruit
readers,
2009/2/16 George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com:
We've picked off a lot of low hanging fruit, approaching all of it. Things
We've picked up all the fruit that's actually on the ground with neon
signs pointing to it. There's lots of low hanging fruit, e.g.:
A month-ish ago, I spent a week
2009/2/16 Eugene van der Pijll eug...@vanderpijll.nl:
My calculations come out as about 1/10 the size by articles and 1/3
the size by words (so their articles must be longer on average).
About 30% of the volume of WP at the time consisted of Rambot articles,
which aren't too interesting as a
George Herbert wrote:
There are
whole fields of engineering and science that we have barely scratched the
surface of at the moment.
I think that's right. Engineering is not one of Wikipedia's strong
areas, I believe, though I hardly spend time on that.
I do spend time on history -
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
potential as a comprehensive reference. My main hope is that life
around the wiki stays dull enough so that the job largely gets done.
Indeed. Current predictions show
Sage Ross wrote:
I don't disagree. I'm just saying we should think of Citizendium as
another (small) place for people to produce free content similar to
the kind Wikipedia produces, as a potential collaborator with
Wikipedia rather than a competitor (which isn't realistic, if it ever
was).
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
potential as a comprehensive reference. My main hope is that life
around the wiki stays dull enough so that the job largely gets done.
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
I believe we have another decade before Wikipedia lives up to its
potential as a comprehensive reference. My main hope is that life
around the wiki
2009/2/16 Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com:
Yeah, well, my reaction to the whole fruit discussion is that it is
systemic-bias-lite.
Maybe but that doesn't address the problem. Wikipedia has already
reached the point where most people find it includes most of the stuff
they carry
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote:
I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements based
on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic
curve which levels out at around 3.5 million articles in around
2013-14.
This isn't actually accurate. Wikipedia may have reached the point where
most people find it includes most of the stuff *that has been traditionally
found in encylopedias* they carry around in their heads.
Wikipedia is not paper.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:50 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/16 Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.com:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com
wrote:
I'm just going by the statistics, I'm not making any judgements based
on anything else. At the moment, we seem to be following a logistic
curve which levels out at
2009/2/16 Phil Nash pn007a2...@blueyonder.co.uk:
I think that this was bound to happen; any venture based on describing the
known universe has an inherent limit in any case, and it seems obvious that
once you've reached some level of coverage, what happens then is more
determined by the pace
Another example is that the vast majority of our articles on US
Counties have next to nothing about the county history. That is, when
was the county formed? What land was it formed out of? Did the
boundaries change over time? What was the first city laid out? Who
were the first few
2009/2/16 wjhon...@aol.com:
Another example is that the vast majority of our articles on US
Counties have next to nothing about the county history. That is, when
was the county formed? What land was it formed out of? Did the
boundaries change over time? What was the first city laid out? Who
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/16 Phil Nash pn007a2...@blueyonder.co.uk:
I think that this was bound to happen; any venture based on
describing the known universe has an inherent limit in any case,
and it seems obvious that once you've reached some level of
coverage, what happens then is more
2009/2/16 Phil Nash pn007a2...@blueyonder.co.uk:
I think the downside might be exactly what is covered by [[WP:NOT]] at
present, and especially [[WP:NOR]]; I've seen several articles that were
extremely worthy as research projects, but offended against those policies,
and [[WP:SYNTH]] in
I wonder about how much of the fruit we've gathered. The plant WikiProject
has about 30,000 articles, which include a mixture of articles about plant
species, plant morphology and anatomy, and plant biologists. There are
close to 300,000 plant species in the world. If we're only in the 5-10%
I'm just starting adding a list of the members of the (US) National
Academy of Engineering. we have only about 1% of them covered by
articles. there are dozens of fields like that where we haven't even
begun on the obvious. We have probably a similar coverage for pre 1990
US state legislators in
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 7:56 PM, George Herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Thomas Dalton
thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote:
We're shrinking because we've already written most of the stuff we
want to include.
This is orthogonal to the main conversation
K. Peachey wrote:
Just a Heads Up slashdot has new article about wikipedia up and it's
use of experts - The Role of Experts In Wikipedia
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/0210251
Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed
predecessor Nupedia, who left the
Regardless of the history, Sanger does have a viewpoint that would be
worth reading even if the author were anonymous. In particular, the
following claim is quite accurate to my experience:
Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a
random walk around the highest
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