I agree that creating an article should be much easier. Creating a wysiwyg editor would greatly facilitate that.
It would also help if we promoted a culture where people are invited to create new articles. Many hard code wikipedians seem to have adopted the attitude that red links are ugly - so red links are converted to normal text. But a red link is and should be an invitation to create an article. 2008/12/3 Milos Rancic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Nathan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Milos - you wrote: "To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful > > Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. > Serbian > > Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles > > than en.wp." Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes > > sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more > useful > > than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm > > curious to know what data changed your mind. > > I have to make one correction: Usually, when I say "Serbia", I think > "Belgrade". My "intuition" is connected to Belgrade and I am not so > able to analyze the whole Serbia. Belgrade develops similarly to other > European cities, while parts of Serbia may vary significantly > regionally. But, including Belgrade's "gravitation area", it includes > between 1/4 and 1/3 of population of Serbia (without Kosovo). > > I had social bias for a long time. For people around me, which means > fairly educated persons between their 20s and 50s, English Wikipedia > is indeed the most useful project. When some of them is trying to find > informations about [[Earth]], [[Alexander the Great]], [[Amazon]], > [[Arthur C. Clarke]], [[Mikhail Bulgakov]], [[Apache HTTP Server]] > etc., they are going to en.wp. A number of them are not able to > participate actively in English, but they are fully able to understand > what is written in one encyclopedic article. > > A couple of years passed from the time when I realized that it was my > social bias. I think that in 2005 I've started to have this kind of > conversations: "Wikipedia is very useful for me!" -- "You mean, > Wikipedia in English?" -- "No, Wikipedia in Serbian." > > One more personal bias which I had was a reason why I am using one > encyclopedia. I am using it to find informations which don't below to > something which may be called "a basic set of informations". I am > using Wikipedia to find informations which don't below to my general > knowledge. So, when I am searching for, let's say, some information > from astronomy, I am not going to the articles like [[Moon]] or > [[Jupiter]] are, but about newly discovered planets, [[Timeline of the > Big Bang]] or [[Ultimate fate of the universe]]. > > BUT, it seems that the most important role of Wikipedia is not to > cover those fields. The most important role is to cover the basic > educational fields, where pupils may find informations for their > classes. So, even I think that [[Ultimate fate of the universe]] is a > very important article, much more important than the article about > lesser known Serbian feudal ruler, like [[sr:Grgur Branković]] is, for > one pupil who learns history from the 5th grade of primary school > (while astronomy is a course just in some of the high schools at, I > think, 4th grade), this Serbian feudal ruler is much more important. > > There is no article about the ultimate fate of the universe on sr.wp, > while there is no article about Grgur Branković on en.wp. Conclusion > about usefulness is obvious: for the most of pupils and their parents > the article about Grgur Branković may be used (and it is in Serbian), > while speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are > comparable with watching Battlestar Galactica or Star Track (and it is > in English). > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
