Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Isaac Johnson]

A few updates from the last few months:

* The surveys successfully ran for one week. We were able to gather 63,000
responses across the 13 languages. I presented preliminary results about
this at Wikimania in August and have now added the high-level results to
Meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#June_2019_Results

* More data will be added to the results there as we can validate it.
Specifically, I am hoping to publish country-specific results where we have
sufficient responses as well as data regarding the cross-tabulation of
various questions from the survey and aspects of reader sessions.

* We are currently running a longer survey with lower sampling rates to
test if we are able to reach less-frequent readers of Wikipedia and whether
this changes any of our results. When we have analyzed this information, we
will update the results to indicate whether anything changes.

Best,
Isaac

On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 4:17 AM Leila Zia  wrote:

> An update on this thread:
>
> * We have launched the survey on 2019-06-26 in 15 languages and we
> intend to stop the surveys 7 days after launch time. The current flow
> of responses is as expected.
>
> * The participating languages are: ar, de, en (sampling from all
> countries), en (sampling from countries in Africa), es, fa, fr
> (sampling from all countries), fr (sampling from countries in Africa),
> he, hu, no, ro, ru, uk, zh. (A big thank you to the volunteers in
> these language communities who worked with us to make the translations
> and announcements on village pumps happen.)
>
> * Please watch
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases
> if you're interested to receive updates about the research as we go
> through the analysis. (Please expect, roughly, a monthly update
> frequency. If we can do more frequently, we will.)
>
> * If you want the survey to run in your language community, there is a
> chance that we run the same survey in a few weeks time in a few of
> more languages. You can express your interest by adding a line item as
> the last row of the table in
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
> . Priority is given to languages who have signed up prior to this
> announcement. We can't guarantee that we can run these extra surveys.
>
> And one logistical announcement: As some of you know, Isaac Johnson
> from the Research team is working heavily on this stage of the
> research (demographics+motivation/needs). As a result, some or all of
> the future announcements about this stage of the research may come
> from him instead of me. :)
>
> Best,
> Leila
>
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 11:07 PM David Goodman  wrote:
> >
> > Peter, all of these would be useful .  The most useful of all would be a
> > list of those that have been deleted as drafts that were not improved
> for 6
> > months--I havre a partial list, but there is no easy way of screening
> it. A
> > spreadsheet with links to the deleted versions and to the google scholar
> > and worldcat records would be an enormous help--I became an admin 12
> years
> > ago specifically to rescue deleted articles, but there is no systematic
> way
> > of finding them.
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 1:33 AM Peter Southwood <
> > peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> >
> > > David,
> > > Would your work be influenced by an analysis of the academic
> biographies
> > > which are most searched for that are not on Wikipedia yet? (assuming
> that
> > > such an targeted analysis was available)
> > > Cheers,
> > > Peter
> > >
> > > PS. An analysis that included a check of whether the topic was likely
> to
> > > be notable and a listing of possible sources would also save a lot of
> > > wasted effort. Also a check against articles that have been deleted for
> > > good reasons, and articles in other languages with a reasonable
> accessible
> > > reference list.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > -Original Message-
> > > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > > Behalf Of David Goodman
> > > Sent: 12 March 2019 07:15
> > > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
> > >
> > > "with popular topics cannibalizing resources."
> > >
> > > What resources can be cannibalized?   The limiting resource in WP is
> > > intere

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Leila Zia]

An update on this thread:

* We have launched the survey on 2019-06-26 in 15 languages and we
intend to stop the surveys 7 days after launch time. The current flow
of responses is as expected.

* The participating languages are: ar, de, en (sampling from all
countries), en (sampling from countries in Africa), es, fa, fr
(sampling from all countries), fr (sampling from countries in Africa),
he, hu, no, ro, ru, uk, zh. (A big thank you to the volunteers in
these language communities who worked with us to make the translations
and announcements on village pumps happen.)

* Please watch 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases
if you're interested to receive updates about the research as we go
through the analysis. (Please expect, roughly, a monthly update
frequency. If we can do more frequently, we will.)

* If you want the survey to run in your language community, there is a
chance that we run the same survey in a few weeks time in a few of
more languages. You can express your interest by adding a line item as
the last row of the table in
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
. Priority is given to languages who have signed up prior to this
announcement. We can't guarantee that we can run these extra surveys.

And one logistical announcement: As some of you know, Isaac Johnson
from the Research team is working heavily on this stage of the
research (demographics+motivation/needs). As a result, some or all of
the future announcements about this stage of the research may come
from him instead of me. :)

Best,
Leila

On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 11:07 PM David Goodman  wrote:
>
> Peter, all of these would be useful .  The most useful of all would be a
> list of those that have been deleted as drafts that were not improved for 6
> months--I havre a partial list, but there is no easy way of screening it. A
> spreadsheet with links to the deleted versions and to the google scholar
> and worldcat records would be an enormous help--I became an admin 12 years
> ago specifically to rescue deleted articles, but there is no systematic way
> of finding them.
>
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 1:33 AM Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > David,
> > Would your work be influenced by an analysis of the academic biographies
> > which are most searched for that are not on Wikipedia yet? (assuming that
> > such an targeted analysis was available)
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > PS. An analysis that included a check of whether the topic was likely to
> > be notable and a listing of possible sources would also save a lot of
> > wasted effort. Also a check against articles that have been deleted for
> > good reasons, and articles in other languages with a reasonable accessible
> > reference list.
> >
> >
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of David Goodman
> > Sent: 12 March 2019 07:15
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
> >
> > "with popular topics cannibalizing resources."
> >
> > What resources can be cannibalized?   The limiting resource in WP is
> > interested people writing, improving, and validating  articles.  People
> > choose their own topics.  This is different from an organization where
> > staff can be directed to work on what the management think is important.
> >
> > I, for example, almost totally avoid most aspects of what is popular
> > culture--I am neither competent nor interested. ) The topics I work on are
> > those that interest me, mainly academic biographies. I'm sure most  people
> > do not think them important.  We're volunteers, and must tolerate each
> > others interests.
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 5:06 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
> >
> > > We should be using a grid for what people are reading about, instead
> > > of using countries. That will give a better representation of large
> > > countries vs small countries. It will also better reflect local ethnic
> > > groups.
> > >
> > > On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:53 PM Amir E. Aharoni
> > >  wrote:
> > > >
> > > > ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת ‪Gerard Meijssen‬‏ <‪
> > > > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬
> > > >
> > > > > Hoi,
> > > > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> > > really
> > > > > why can we not have the data that allows us to se

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[David Goodman]

Peter, all of these would be useful .  The most useful of all would be a
list of those that have been deleted as drafts that were not improved for 6
months--I havre a partial list, but there is no easy way of screening it. A
spreadsheet with links to the deleted versions and to the google scholar
and worldcat records would be an enormous help--I became an admin 12 years
ago specifically to rescue deleted articles, but there is no systematic way
of finding them.

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 1:33 AM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> David,
> Would your work be influenced by an analysis of the academic biographies
> which are most searched for that are not on Wikipedia yet? (assuming that
> such an targeted analysis was available)
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> PS. An analysis that included a check of whether the topic was likely to
> be notable and a listing of possible sources would also save a lot of
> wasted effort. Also a check against articles that have been deleted for
> good reasons, and articles in other languages with a reasonable accessible
> reference list.
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of David Goodman
> Sent: 12 March 2019 07:15
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
>
> "with popular topics cannibalizing resources."
>
> What resources can be cannibalized?   The limiting resource in WP is
> interested people writing, improving, and validating  articles.  People
> choose their own topics.  This is different from an organization where
> staff can be directed to work on what the management think is important.
>
> I, for example, almost totally avoid most aspects of what is popular
> culture--I am neither competent nor interested. ) The topics I work on are
> those that interest me, mainly academic biographies. I'm sure most  people
> do not think them important.  We're volunteers, and must tolerate each
> others interests.
>
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 5:06 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > We should be using a grid for what people are reading about, instead
> > of using countries. That will give a better representation of large
> > countries vs small countries. It will also better reflect local ethnic
> > groups.
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:53 PM Amir E. Aharoni
> >  wrote:
> > >
> > > ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת ‪Gerard Meijssen‬‏ <‪
> > > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬
> > >
> > > > Hoi,
> > > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> > really
> > > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people
> are
> > > > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
> > proves
> > > > to be of interest [1] ?
> > > >
> > >
> > > Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some examples:
> > >
> > > 1. The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched searches in
> > > Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was done in
> > > 2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead to
> > some
> > > improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal search
> > > engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.
> > >
> > > 2. Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which people
> > often
> > > search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there are
> no
> > > articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program
> > >
> > > 3. Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in their
> > > language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find. You
> > can
> > > see a sample here:
> > >
> >
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-15
> > > . I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some time
> > soon.
> > >
> > > 4. The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find
> articles
> > > that are missing in some wikis:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
> > >
> > > 5. This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit better
> > than
> > > nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews
> tool,
> > > rather than just by language. It's documented at
> > > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I read the blogpost and it utterly misses the point. The point is that this
is NOT about English Wikipedia, for them another approach will work better.
At the same time when you read my blogpost, you will find that the elephant
in the room is that we consider articles to be synonymous with subjects.
They are not. We do not have an aggregated number of most popular subjects,
subjects on all Wikipedias. When we did, we would know what the world reads
and not what is served by a single Wikipedia, the English Wikipedia.

The biggest benefit is that it will provide us with a list with less of an
Anglo-American bias. One subset of this list will be what the world reads
and is not available on English. Subjects that feature high in the world
indicate a particular kind of notability. It will be really interesting to
see how these subjects will be appreciated by the public and the "wiki
gnomes". Finding authors can be done in a similar way as the "gender bias"
approach.

Another thing where the blogpost misses the point is that is concentrates
on English Wikipedia. The only line left for the small Wikipedias is
that the gem-to-dung ratio may differ. As English has never been my
objective of this approach, it disqualifies the results. By posting this
blogpost, you make it plain you have not read or understood what it is that
I propose in my blogpost [1].

First I want the search extension by Magnus active on every Wikipedia. This
will expose all subjects known to us as a result, not just the articles on
a Wikipedia. It is save to log such an interest. All we want is a
timestamp, the language and the Qid. This is exactly what we do for
articlesl so there is no privacy issue here. I also want to invite people
to add labels and false friends in their language.

For any Wikipedia, the approach what is the most read article that you do
not have, is a valid approach to propose the writing of a new article. Some
will use this list, most will not and again, the English Wikignomes do not
know the language elsewhere.

We know what articles are receiving what traffic. It is just a data
question for us to know what new articles received what traffic in a full
month. Exposing this, highlighting their success is a powerful way to
provide recognition.

In conclusion, there is a very strong bias for English Wikipedia in the
attention given to the exclusion of others. English is less than fifty
percent of our traffic. It gets more than eighty percent of attention. As
you read in the comments of your blogpost, I am happy to collaborate but so
far it has not fit your agenda.
Thanks,
  GerardM



[1]
https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/sharing-in-sum-of-all-knowledge-from.html

On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 at 18:28, Ed Erhart  wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> Trey authored a Wikimedia blog post on this as well:
> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/12/12/failed-queries-fear-of-missing-out/
>
> --Ed
>
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 11:34 AM Dan Garry (Deskana) 
> wrote:
>
> > The topic of zero-result search queries comes up from time to time. The
> > logic is generally this: if we can see the top queries that got no
> results,
> > then we can figure out what users are looking for but not finding, and
> add
> > it to the encyclopedia. Wonderful user-centred thinking, and it sounds
> > great! The problem is, sadly, the data doesn't help us achieve this at
> all.
> >
> > The sheer volume of requests means that a lot of the top zero-results
> > queries are junk. Trey Jones, an engineer on the Search Platform Team,
> > wrote a comprehensive analysis
> > <
> >
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Survey_of_Zero-Results_Queries
> > >
> > a
> > few years ago of the top zero-result queries based on an analysis of a
> > 500,000 multi-lingual sample. It was quite enlightening in some senses—we
> > found out a lot about the things that people are doing with the search
> > system, found some bugs in other products, and so on—but it didn't
> actually
> > help us understand what people were looking for and not finding.
> >
> > Dan
> >
> > On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 23:12, Leila Zia  wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Gerard,
> > >
> > > On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 2:26 PM Gerard Meijssen
> > >  wrote:
> > > > but really
> > > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people
> are
> > > > actually looking for and do not find..
> > >
> > > Please open a Phabricator task for this request at
> > > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org . Please add Research as a tag and
> > > add me as one of the subscribers. I'd like to work with you on a
> > > concrete proposal. A few items to consider as you're expanding the
> > > description of the task:
> > >
> > > * We won't be able to release raw search queries as they come to
> > > Wikimedia servers. That is for privacy reasons.
> > >
> > > * You also likely don't need raw search queries. If you can be
> > > specific about what you want to have access to, as much as possible,
> > > that can help us get 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Ed Erhart]

Hey folks,

Trey authored a Wikimedia blog post on this as well:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/12/12/failed-queries-fear-of-missing-out/

--Ed

On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 11:34 AM Dan Garry (Deskana) 
wrote:

> The topic of zero-result search queries comes up from time to time. The
> logic is generally this: if we can see the top queries that got no results,
> then we can figure out what users are looking for but not finding, and add
> it to the encyclopedia. Wonderful user-centred thinking, and it sounds
> great! The problem is, sadly, the data doesn't help us achieve this at all.
>
> The sheer volume of requests means that a lot of the top zero-results
> queries are junk. Trey Jones, an engineer on the Search Platform Team,
> wrote a comprehensive analysis
> <
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Survey_of_Zero-Results_Queries
> >
> a
> few years ago of the top zero-result queries based on an analysis of a
> 500,000 multi-lingual sample. It was quite enlightening in some senses—we
> found out a lot about the things that people are doing with the search
> system, found some bugs in other products, and so on—but it didn't actually
> help us understand what people were looking for and not finding.
>
> Dan
>
> On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 23:12, Leila Zia  wrote:
>
> > Hi Gerard,
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 2:26 PM Gerard Meijssen
> >  wrote:
> > > but really
> > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > > actually looking for and do not find..
> >
> > Please open a Phabricator task for this request at
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org . Please add Research as a tag and
> > add me as one of the subscribers. I'd like to work with you on a
> > concrete proposal. A few items to consider as you're expanding the
> > description of the task:
> >
> > * We won't be able to release raw search queries as they come to
> > Wikimedia servers. That is for privacy reasons.
> >
> > * You also likely don't need raw search queries. If you can be
> > specific about what you want to have access to, as much as possible,
> > that can help us get started with scoping the problem. I'm looking for
> > something along these lines: "I want to be able to see a monthly list
> > of top n search terms in language x that result in 0 search results or
> > results where the user does not click on any of the search results
> > offered." The more specific, the better. If you are in doubt, put some
> > description and we can iterate on it.
> >
> > Best,
> > Leila
> > p.s. The goal of this exercise is to have an open question ready (with
> > all the details one needs to know) for the next time we will have a
> > volunteer researcher to work with us.
> >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
> ___
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> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 



-- 
[image: Wikimedia-logo black.svg] *Ed Erhart* (he/him)

Senior Editorial Associate

Wikimedia Foundation 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Benjamin Ikuta]

I also don't see why it would be such a problem to have more articles about 
Pokemon. 

Volunteer effort is certainly not zero sum. 

Contributing to one area doesn't necessarily mean contributing less to another. 

Speaking from personal experience now, one of my earliest Wikipedia edits was 
about Pokemon. 

It was reverted. 

Luckily, I was not discouraged, but I know that many people would be, and that 
is a real problem. 

I think there's a bias on Wikipedia when weighing the pros and cons of policy, 
because it's easy to overlook the absence of something that never was there to 
begin with. 




On Mar 13, 2019, at 5:01 PM, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l 
 wrote:

> We certainly could do editatons about Naruto and Pokemon and it would 
> actually be quite useful. As Paulo said, a well written "pop" page has a good 
> influence. People can understand easily how a complex and multifaceted 
> article with appropriate navboxes, infoboxed, is structured for a trivial 
> topic, and think how they can help for other topics.
> I repeat the concept: I have friends who work at the top of their fields, 
> some of them have also their own wikipedia article (I am not telling which 
> one because of respect of their privacy) and they leave edits on complex 
> topic sometimes but it's their everyday job so they are bored to do even on 
> wiki in their free time. Still, they do a little bit and they learned how to 
> do it visiting other pages about the most trivial topics you can imagine. 
> They showed me their first edits as IPs sometimes and they are as diverse as 
> you can imagine. Obscure dialects, silly TV series, things like that.
> 
> Also, since we are talking about PokemonI can show something directly 
> like Paulo did.This is the history of the article Cronologia delle modifiche 
> di "Ulva lactuca" - Wikipedia Ulva Lactuca. HisuiSama and Adriana Hariuc who 
> added more text on January the 20th are the same students who are comparing 
> the very same morning a plant at the botanical garden to a Pokemon in this 
> gallery: https://twitter.com/Alexmar983/status/1087119134058516480
> So, Go Pokemon... I know about the "pokemon test" but in the end I actually 
> wish we had more Pokemon pages, it would probably be fine.
> Alex
> 
> 
> | 
> | 
> | 
> |  |  |
> 
> |
> 
> |
> | 
> |  | 
> Cronologia delle modifiche di "Ulva lactuca" - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> |
> 
> |
> 
> |
> 
> 
> 
> 
>Il giovedì 14 marzo 2019, 00:14:57 CET, Benjamin Ikuta 
>  ha scritto:  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I, for one, would indeed go so far as to say we should be doing editatons 
> about Naruto and Pokemon. 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mar 12, 2019, at 10:10 AM, Paulo Santos Perneta  
> wrote:
> 
>> I would not go as far as saying we should be doing edithatons about Naruto
>> and Pokemons,
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I have written another blogpost [1] where I express a different approach to
our data. It achieves two things

   - an understanding what subjects not articles are most popular in
   Wikipedia
   - a tool that identifies what subjects we are looking for as missing in
   any Wikipedia

the tool is based on existing functionality, it just needs additional
functionality to support people in adding new items and statements for a
Wikidata item that represents the missing subject.
I will write another blogpost where I expand on opportunities to expand
search to share in the sum of all knowledge and not on what only one
Wikipedia has to offer.
Thanks,
   GerardM

[1]
https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/sharing-in-sum-of-all-knowledge-from.html

On Wed, 13 Mar 2019 at 00:12, Leila Zia  wrote:

> Hi Gerard,
>
> On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 2:26 PM Gerard Meijssen
>  wrote:
> > but really
> > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > actually looking for and do not find..
>
> Please open a Phabricator task for this request at
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org . Please add Research as a tag and
> add me as one of the subscribers. I'd like to work with you on a
> concrete proposal. A few items to consider as you're expanding the
> description of the task:
>
> * We won't be able to release raw search queries as they come to
> Wikimedia servers. That is for privacy reasons.
>
> * You also likely don't need raw search queries. If you can be
> specific about what you want to have access to, as much as possible,
> that can help us get started with scoping the problem. I'm looking for
> something along these lines: "I want to be able to see a monthly list
> of top n search terms in language x that result in 0 search results or
> results where the user does not click on any of the search results
> offered." The more specific, the better. If you are in doubt, put some
> description and we can iterate on it.
>
> Best,
> Leila
> p.s. The goal of this exercise is to have an open question ready (with
> all the details one needs to know) for the next time we will have a
> volunteer researcher to work with us.
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l]

 I think, Benjamin, that sometimes some users don't get the experience of other 
people. I met so many smart men and women with very trivial hobbies that the 
idea of such separation sounds simply wrong or odd.  I have never edited on 
"pop" topic on purpose, I have no interest for cartoons or TV series, mostly 
"serious" stuff, still I don't see the issue here.

Maybe on some local communities this will remain accepted as general truth, 
that "opposing" focus or research on "pop" topics is good for the image or the 
balance of energies of the Wikimedia projects but when you move on the global 
scale I don't think it holds very well. 

It sounds simple to say so, but based on my experience I don't think it's 
actually correct. Again, I am willing to read any peer-reviewed publication 
where something related to the opposite is stated, but so far if these are just 
opinions, than I stick to my perception, and I remain generally favorable 
toward this sort of interest.
   Il giovedì 14 marzo 2019, 01:08:57 CET, Benjamin Ikuta 
 ha scritto:  
 
 



I also don't see why it would be such a problem to have more articles about 
Pokemon. 

Volunteer effort is certainly not zero sum. 

Contributing to one area doesn't necessarily mean contributing less to another. 

Speaking from personal experience now, one of my earliest Wikipedia edits was 
about Pokemon. 

It was reverted. 

Luckily, I was not discouraged, but I know that many people would be, and that 
is a real problem. 

I think there's a bias on Wikipedia when weighing the pros and cons of policy, 
because it's easy to overlook the absence of something that never was there to 
begin with. 




On Mar 13, 2019, at 5:01 PM, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l 
 wrote:

> We certainly could do editatons about Naruto and Pokemon and it would 
> actually be quite useful. As Paulo said, a well written "pop" page has a good 
> influence. People can understand easily how a complex and multifaceted 
> article with appropriate navboxes, infoboxed, is structured for a trivial 
> topic, and think how they can help for other topics.
> I repeat the concept: I have friends who work at the top of their fields, 
> some of them have also their own wikipedia article (I am not telling which 
> one because of respect of their privacy) and they leave edits on complex 
> topic sometimes but it's their everyday job so they are bored to do even on 
> wiki in their free time. Still, they do a little bit and they learned how to 
> do it visiting other pages about the most trivial topics you can imagine. 
> They showed me their first edits as IPs sometimes and they are as diverse as 
> you can imagine. Obscure dialects, silly TV series, things like that.
> 
> Also, since we are talking about PokemonI can show something directly 
> like Paulo did.This is the history of the article Cronologia delle modifiche 
> di "Ulva lactuca" - Wikipedia Ulva Lactuca. HisuiSama and Adriana Hariuc who 
> added more text on January the 20th are the same students who are comparing 
> the very same morning a plant at the botanical garden to a Pokemon in this 
> gallery: https://twitter.com/Alexmar983/status/1087119134058516480
> So, Go Pokemon... I know about the "pokemon test" but in the end I actually 
> wish we had more Pokemon pages, it would probably be fine.
> Alex
> 
> 
> | 
> | 
> | 
> |  |  |
> 
> |
> 
> |
> | 
> |  | 
> Cronologia delle modifiche di "Ulva lactuca" - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> |
> 
> |
> 
> |
> 
> 
> 
> 
>    Il giovedì 14 marzo 2019, 00:14:57 CET, Benjamin Ikuta 
> ha scritto:  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I, for one, would indeed go so far as to say we should be doing editatons 
> about Naruto and Pokemon. 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mar 12, 2019, at 10:10 AM, Paulo Santos Perneta  
> wrote:
> 
>> I would not go as far as saying we should be doing edithatons about Naruto
>> and Pokemons,
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Benjamin Ikuta]

I, for one, would indeed go so far as to say we should be doing editatons about 
Naruto and Pokemon. 



On Mar 12, 2019, at 10:10 AM, Paulo Santos Perneta  
wrote:

> I would not go as far as saying we should be doing edithatons about Naruto
> and Pokemons,

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Leila Zia]

Hi Gerard,

On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 2:26 PM Gerard Meijssen
 wrote:
> but really
> why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> actually looking for and do not find..

Please open a Phabricator task for this request at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org . Please add Research as a tag and
add me as one of the subscribers. I'd like to work with you on a
concrete proposal. A few items to consider as you're expanding the
description of the task:

* We won't be able to release raw search queries as they come to
Wikimedia servers. That is for privacy reasons.

* You also likely don't need raw search queries. If you can be
specific about what you want to have access to, as much as possible,
that can help us get started with scoping the problem. I'm looking for
something along these lines: "I want to be able to see a monthly list
of top n search terms in language x that result in 0 search results or
results where the user does not click on any of the search results
offered." The more specific, the better. If you are in doubt, put some
description and we can iterate on it.

Best,
Leila
p.s. The goal of this exercise is to have an open question ready (with
all the details one needs to know) for the next time we will have a
volunteer researcher to work with us.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Leila Zia]

Ciao Ilario,

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 12:16 PM Ilario valdelli  wrote:
>
> Any study is interesting, but if it could be country-based, it would be
> better.

We agree with you that the country component is quite important. There
is some ongoing engineering work to make the feature available in
QuickSurvey [1] which is the extension we use. If it gets ready, we
will include at least some sampling by country.

Let me give you a couple of reasons why from our perspective sampling
by country is key:
* Understanding readers from countries such as Nigeria is hard through
English Wikipedia as the traffic in enwiki is dominated by other
countries. In order to get enough responses from Nigeria, we have to
ask many more questions from the rest of the world which is not
something we want to do.
* Many chapters are organized by geographical regions and learning
about the readers in their geography can empower them in new ways.
* If we have enough responses from different countries, we can have
more accurate debiasing steps. For example, if we have enough data
from country x, we can look at the age distribution of respondents and
see if that age distribution matches the age distribution from that
country based on external databases available. If not, we can try to
correct for the differences, or at least be aware of the caveats.

Best,
Leila
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:QuickSurveys

> Kind regards
>
>
> On 06/03/2019 22:12, Leila Zia wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> >
> > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on how
> > much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this is
> > your chance to indicate interest at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
> >
> > I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
> > then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating some
> > of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
> > needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
> >
> > As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
> > community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
> > is needed. :)
> >
> > Best,
> > Leila
> >
> > [1] 
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
> >
> > ___
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> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 
> > 

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

Hi Vito,

I believe it depends on the way it is done. An edithaton on rappers & pop
stars with high-school students could be a great way to get them into the
project in a fun way. Then as they keep developing and diversifying their
interests, as generally happens with growing kids, they have a never ending
source of inspiration at Wikipedia, even to use as a train ground for
school/university.

I would like to note that, contrary to what seems to be happening in other
projects, and possibly related with some kind of Internet boom in Brazil,
Angola and other Portuguese-speaking countries, the Wikipedia in Portuguese
shows (at least empirically) a very high proportion of kids, mostly teens,
but some as young as 10 or 11, mostly editing in animation series &
computer games initially, and then progressing into other fields as they
grow. I've been watching this for 10 years already. A significant number of
those little kids that were there in 2009 are now sysops and regular
editors on Wikipedia, and part of the regular community. In a number of
cases I know Wikipedia was decisive to develop their skills at school,
sometimes even in their lives in general. It is a good thing. And it all
started with pokemons, Naruto, Saint Seiya and all the stuff that is often
derided as mostly useless in an encyclopedia, but that worked as a learning
school for that young generation, helping them learning how to edit
Wikipedia in a fun way.

I would not go as far as saying we should be doing edithatons about Naruto
and Pokemons, but I do believe we should be helping those kids editing
those articles, instead of chasing them away as "useless newbies only
interested in pop stuff" as often happens. They are the future generations
of Wikipedians.

Best,
Paulo - DarwIn
Wikimedia Portugal


Vi to  escreveu no dia terça, 12/03/2019 à(s) 10:22:

> Il giorno mar 12 mar 2019 alle ore 06:16 David Goodman 
> ha scritto:
>
> > "with popular topics cannibalizing resources."
> >
> > What resources can be cannibalized?   The limiting resource in WP is
> > interested people writing, improving, and validating  articles.  People
> > choose their own topics.  This is different from an organization where
> > staff can be directed to work on what the management think is important.
>
>
> I was exactly making reference to this.
> Editors' interests are hard to change and, actually, it wouldn't be
> auspicable to do it.
>
> The only resources which can be moved are those related to outreaching,
> editathons, various kinds of online and offline projects.
>
> Keeping it short I disagree with choosing topics for editathons and similar
> initiatives basing on topic popularity since this will be in contrast with
> any commitment to diversity, even more it will push a wrong model of
> encyclopedia.
>
>
> When you state that Mr Trump does not know about Indian-Pakistan conflicts,
> > does he know that a Nigerian governor outspends presidents of
> neighbouring
> > countries.. There are elections for Nigerian governors...
> >
>
> I didn't wrote this actually, inaccurate quoting of others' opinions can
> poison any discussion.
> Trying to rephrase, I wrote it would be better to cover things which suits
> more the mission of an encyclopedia and which get less attention by media,
> as Indian-Paki conflicts background, rather than mr. Trump's covfefes.
>
>
> >
> > What is the propblem with providing what people are looking for?
> >
> > I often look for bus schedule 
>
> Vito
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Paulo Santos Perneta]

Hi,

I absolutely agree with the idea of finding some way to know what is more
popular / wanted by readers. And if we identify with it/want to invest some
time in it / whatever, then we can have a good criteria to follow about
what to create first, or invest more in.

I have created myself a number of high-demand pop articles with which I do
not identify at all, as k-pop start Suga -
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suga and late rapper Lil Peep
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_Peep , because I understood that a lot of
people was searching information about them, and it would be a win-win for
everyone if they would find reliable information in Wikipedia, and possibly
act as an anchor for those readers to better now and join our projects.

I have also done exactly the same with one of the most vandalized and used
in vandalism terms in Portuguese, an horrible swearing word, turning that
not only into an encyclopedic article, but into a featured article:
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caralho . A lot of people was absolutely
shocked by the amount of time apparently "lost" into collecting such stuff
and building it into a proper article, but I see that as an investment:
Turning something apparently hideous into a magnet for History, Medieval
Literature and Folk Culture. The result is that, as you can see, the
article is not even protected. I believe that kids and vandals find it so
educative (that is: boring) they simply turn away. Or they keep reading,
and actually learn something useful. :)

Other experiments I've been doing is writing, following and developing
news-like articles about current events, with high popular demand ATM, such
as shipwrecks, earthquakes and fires, and monitor their visibility and the
way they drive new people into the projects.

Finally, I would like to point the interesting case of encyclopedic article
on Brazilian pastry papo-de-anjo -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papo-de-anjo , which was created by
encyclopedic academic "most highly cited computer scientist in Brazil"
Jorge Stolfi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Stolfi

Why is Stolfi editing about cakes and Brazilian pastry instead of computer
science? Because he feels like it. Would you go to Solfi and say he should
be writing about computer science, instead of pastry, he would probably
leave and you end up with no computer science and no pastry. Why sometimes
I create pop articles instead of concentrating in more "encyclopedic"
stuff? Because this is supposed to be fun, and also a way to learn new
stuff. I do not identify at all with k-pop and rappers, but I found it
funny to write about them, and a way to learn about something that is
absolutely exotic to me. And still write a lot about Literature, History
and Science. But when people come to me saying that I'm loosing my time
writing about those pop subjects, and that I should write about this and
that, what I answer is: If you believe someone should write about that,
then YOU should write, not came asking others to do your stuff.

Please, bring on that popularity study, I'm certainly very interested in it.

Best,
Paulo - DarwIn
Wikimedia Portugal

Gerard Meijssen  escreveu no dia terça,
12/03/2019 à(s) 08:26:

> Hoi,
> The point is EXACTLY that this list will be different per language. What
> there is, what is needed differs as a consequence. What specific Wikipedias
> covers is as different.
>
> There are multiple objectives to be gained:
>
>- as we gain more articles, we will gain a bigger presence for a
>Wikipedia in Google
>- a bigger presence will give us more eye balls.
>- more people who edit a Wikipedia means that any and all subjects of
>their choosing become better covered
>
> When we choose for an approach like this, it is very much in the true Wiki
> spirit. When the argument is about "supervision", the question is how that
> would work. In my opinion, you are likely not to know the other language
> and Google translate is unlikely to function for all the 280+ languages.
>
> The point of this approach is very much that there is no solution for all
> of Wikipedia.. It is weird to suggest that would work in the first place.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 14:08, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l <
> wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > Reminding is easy, it's analyzing that it's complex.
> >
> > I suspect that editors and readers are probably a little bit smarter than
> > generally assumed. It's quite "obvious" that editors understand what is
> an
> > encyclopedia, after years. When I make an informal survey, statistically
> > the "smarter" students in the class or in the group of people in front of
> > me at an event are those who already edited something or who want to know
> > more or are willing to compile a form to state their opinion or similar.
> >
> > Plus, every topic is multifaceted somehow, it's the same for the most
> > popular ones. It's strange when long-time editors seem to miss this
> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Vi to]

Il giorno mar 12 mar 2019 alle ore 06:16 David Goodman 
ha scritto:

> "with popular topics cannibalizing resources."
>
> What resources can be cannibalized?   The limiting resource in WP is
> interested people writing, improving, and validating  articles.  People
> choose their own topics.  This is different from an organization where
> staff can be directed to work on what the management think is important.


I was exactly making reference to this.
Editors' interests are hard to change and, actually, it wouldn't be
auspicable to do it.

The only resources which can be moved are those related to outreaching,
editathons, various kinds of online and offline projects.

Keeping it short I disagree with choosing topics for editathons and similar
initiatives basing on topic popularity since this will be in contrast with
any commitment to diversity, even more it will push a wrong model of
encyclopedia.


When you state that Mr Trump does not know about Indian-Pakistan conflicts,
> does he know that a Nigerian governor outspends presidents of neighbouring
> countries.. There are elections for Nigerian governors...
>

I didn't wrote this actually, inaccurate quoting of others' opinions can
poison any discussion.
Trying to rephrase, I wrote it would be better to cover things which suits
more the mission of an encyclopedia and which get less attention by media,
as Indian-Paki conflicts background, rather than mr. Trump's covfefes.


>
> What is the propblem with providing what people are looking for?
>
> I often look for bus schedule 

Vito
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Benjamin Ikuta]

I agree, we should not be deleting useful articles. 

https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism




On Mar 11, 2019, at 4:52 AM, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l 
 wrote:

> I know people in many fields with great technical expertise. people who 
> published articles on Science and Nature basically, and in the end I think 
> they are probably qualified to have an idea of what a good encyclopedia 
> should be. The point is that these people open wiki for topics far away from 
> their area, most of the time they look also for "pop" topics. Finding pop 
> culture is what makes them stay and grow interest as much as everything else. 
> It's when they find a deleted ye useful page of something of interest for 
> some internal reason they think wikipedia it's not worth spending time on. 
> 
> Based on that experience, in all the discussions when people who claim that 
> this focus on such pop information lower our image or damage our workflow, I 
> always question where these opinions come from and if they are peer-reviewed. 
> I am a scientist, I look at data. it has been years people are claiming the 
> "popmaggedon" of wikipedia is soon, and in the meantime its overall quality 
> on very specific topic is still increasing.
> 
> A balanced encyclopedia comes from trying to fill the gaps, all information 
> are useful in that direction. As long as someone else is studying missing 
> links, pages existing in other languages, encouraging what editors want and 
> so on, your idea is just part of patchwork. I cannot peer-review such 
> statement, but at least i can tell you it is said by someone who never edited 
> a "pop" article in all his wikipedia life and manage projects of outreach in 
> organic chemistry or biophysics, to name the last ones. So I hope that it 
> gives a hint that is probably fine.
> Go on and explore.
> 
> 
> 
>Il lunedì 11 marzo 2019, 10:08:23 CET, Vi to  ha 
> scritto:  
> 
> That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics
> cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three
> sports, some TV series and three or four music topics.
> These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start
> focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no
> resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war",
> "near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late
> XX century".
> 
> The way we self-identify as a project  deeply affects our results:
> promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the
> free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to
> diversity and quality.
> 
> Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a
> very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which
> will gain a complete influence over us.
> 
> To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not
> *information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information
> people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.
> 
> If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the
> ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know
> the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"
> 
> Vito
> 
> Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman 
> ha scritto:
> 
>> The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or
>> want  that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what they
>> want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see what
>> they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
>> see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader
>> interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice
>> our writing skills for our own benefit.
>> 
>> On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to  wrote:
>> 
>>> The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
>>> 
>>> Vito
>>> 
>>> Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
>>> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
>>> 
 Hoi,
 I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
>> really
 why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
 actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
>> proves
 to be of interest [1] ?
 Thanks,
   GerardM
 
 [1]
 
 
>>> 
>> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
 
 On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
 
> Hi all,
> 
> As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> demographics and user motivations and 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The point is EXACTLY that this list will be different per language. What
there is, what is needed differs as a consequence. What specific Wikipedias
covers is as different.

There are multiple objectives to be gained:

   - as we gain more articles, we will gain a bigger presence for a
   Wikipedia in Google
   - a bigger presence will give us more eye balls.
   - more people who edit a Wikipedia means that any and all subjects of
   their choosing become better covered

When we choose for an approach like this, it is very much in the true Wiki
spirit. When the argument is about "supervision", the question is how that
would work. In my opinion, you are likely not to know the other language
and Google translate is unlikely to function for all the 280+ languages.

The point of this approach is very much that there is no solution for all
of Wikipedia.. It is weird to suggest that would work in the first place.
Thanks,
GerardM

On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 14:08, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l <
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Reminding is easy, it's analyzing that it's complex.
>
> I suspect that editors and readers are probably a little bit smarter than
> generally assumed. It's quite "obvious" that editors understand what is an
> encyclopedia, after years. When I make an informal survey, statistically
> the "smarter" students in the class or in the group of people in front of
> me at an event are those who already edited something or who want to know
> more or are willing to compile a form to state their opinion or similar.
>
> Plus, every topic is multifaceted somehow, it's the same for the most
> popular ones. It's strange when long-time editors seem to miss this aspect.
> There is always a specific disease, an historical event, a place or a
> person in a family history linked to a most searched topic. You can detect
> many missing specific things just focusing on a core topic and starting
> from there. Again, maybe it's worth reminding also how our editors are
> quite good at doing this, and this type of information is therefore a
> starting point. In some of this comments, it always look like an end per
> se.
>
> Seriously, if someone is so superficial to just edit something with no
> depth because it's on a list, (s)he will just do something equally
> superficial somewhere else. Clinically, I might state that it's probably a
> good thing if this occur in an area with huge focus, it actually lowers the
> possible long-term disfunctionalities induced by a rigid approach,
> something that it's more subtle to detect in less supervised areas.
>
> in any case, these lists can change a lot from area to area so it is not
> even driven by the "mass", if you give a country in South America or Asia
> the same focus on a western country you end up with very unusual guideline.
> it's nice to know that you expertise in an area even if less taken into
> account in the average community around you, it's useful in a different
> part of the word.
>
>
>
> Il lunedì 11 marzo 2019, 13:32:12 CET, Amir E. Aharoni <
> amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> ha scritto:
>
>  ‬
>
> > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> >
> >
> I agree, although I'd make it a bit more focused: an encyclopedia that is
> *only* popularity-driven is indeed scary. It's good to mention this, and
> not once, but repeatedly.
>
> However, providing Wikipedia editors with information about what *is* in
> demand is useful, as long as the editors clearly know that they have the
> choice to write what is *important* and that "important" is not equal to
> "popular".
>
> While I haven't ran a proper survey about this, conversations that with
> Wikipedia editors from various "big" and "small" languages tell me that
> most of them already understand it, and this is good. Nevertheless,
> reminding people that Wikipedia is not supposed to be just about covering
> popular topics won't hurt.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> ___
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> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
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> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
You will not see me write about subjects I do not care about. So the notion
that anyone writing about subjects you care about is a fallacy. It takes
horses for courses, you will write about what you care about and so will I.
Others may look into what is missing and find that their subject matter
expertise is called for.

When you state that Mr Trump does not know about Indian-Pakistan conflicts,
does he know that a Nigerian governor outspends presidents of neighbouring
countries.. There are elections for Nigerian governors...

When Mr Trump does not know, and we do not either, we EXACTLY find a spike
in a subject people are looking for..
Thanks,
   GerardM

On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 10:07, Vi to  wrote:

> That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics
> cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three
> sports, some TV series and three or four music topics.
> These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start
> focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no
> resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war",
> "near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late
> XX century".
>
> The way we self-identify as a project  deeply affects our results:
> promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the
> free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to
> diversity and quality.
>
> Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a
> very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which
> will gain a complete influence over us.
>
> To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not
> *information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information
> people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.
>
> If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the
> ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know
> the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"
>
> Vito
>
> Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman 
> ha scritto:
>
> > The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or
> > want  that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what
> they
> > want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see
> what
> > they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
> > see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader
> > interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice
> > our writing skills for our own benefit.
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to  wrote:
> >
> > > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> > >
> > > Vito
> > >
> > > Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
> > > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> > >
> > > > Hoi,
> > > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> > really
> > > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people
> are
> > > > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
> > proves
> > > > to be of interest [1] ?
> > > > Thanks,
> > > >  GerardM
> > > >
> > > > [1]
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
> > > >
> > > > On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Hi all,
> > > > >
> > > > > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > > > > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > > > > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > > > > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > > > > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> > > > >
> > > > > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > > > > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > > > > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on
> > how
> > > > > much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this
> > is
> > > > > your chance to indicate interest at:
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
> > > > >
> > > > > I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up.
> Since
> > > > > then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating
> > some
> > > > > of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
> > > > > needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
> > > > >
> > > > > As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
> > > > > community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no
> action
> > > > > is needed. :)
> > > > >
> > > > > Best,
> > > > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[James Salsman]

Bamyers99's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:POPULARLOWQUALITY
weekly list linked from the Community Portal "Help out" section
addresses the issue directly, thanks to ORES. It would be great if
that were adopted by the Foundation for Wikipedias other than English.

Also, the links from the numbers on WP:BACKLOG which used to sort the
backlog categories by pageviews are broken again. I thought
Dispenser's categorder got moved to Toolforge years ago, but
apparently it's no longer maintained?

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 5:53 AM Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
>
> ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת ‪Gerard Meijssen‬‏ <‪
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬
>
> > Hoi,
> > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but really
> > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what proves
> > to be of interest [1] ?
> >
>
> Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some examples:
>
> 1. The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched searches in
> Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was done in
> 2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead to some
> improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal search
> engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.
>
> 2. Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which people often
> search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there are no
> articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program
>
> 3. Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in their
> language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find. You can
> see a sample here:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-15
> . I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some time soon.
>
> 4. The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find articles
> that are missing in some wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
>
> 5. This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit better than
> nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews tool,
> rather than just by language. It's documented at
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207171 . The rationale for this is that
> the most popular English Wikipedia articles in the U.S., Nigeria, India,
> the Philippines, and South Africa are significantly different. The English
> Wikipedia is the most popular one in all these countries, but whereas it is
> sensible that it's popular in the U.S., it's a bit depressing that it's
> also the most popular in the other four countries, even though languages
> other than English are spoken there. The reason for this situation is, of
> course, that there is little content in the Wikipedias in the languages of
> these countries, and knowing what the most popular articles are can help
> people who write in these languages choose how to write that will be
> useful, and will hopefully raise the popularity of Wikipedias in these
> languages. The same is true for the most popular Russian Wikipedia articles
> in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, the most popular French Wikipedia articles in
> Benin and Mali, etc. This is only an idea, but maybe it will be implemented
> some day.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 
> 

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
What is it that scares youi? When you want to write about the subject that
you care about do. If it is popular good. That is all.

What scares me is that people define what others want to / need to know.
What is the propblem with providing what people are looking for? In the big
Wikipedias almost everything is there including pokemon, soccer and ice
hockey...
Thanks,
GerardM

On Sun, 10 Mar 2019 at 23:58, Vi to  wrote:

> The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
>
> Vito
>
> Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
>
> > Hoi,
> > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but really
> > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what proves
> > to be of interest [1] ?
> > Thanks,
> >  GerardM
> >
> > [1]
> >
> >
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
> >
> > On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> > >
> > > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on how
> > > much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this is
> > > your chance to indicate interest at:
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
> > >
> > > I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
> > > then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating some
> > > of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
> > > needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
> > >
> > > As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
> > > community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
> > > is needed. :)
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Leila
> > >
> > > [1]
> > >
> >
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
> > >
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > 
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Peter Southwood]

David,  
Would your work be influenced by an analysis of the academic biographies which 
are most searched for that are not on Wikipedia yet? (assuming that such an 
targeted analysis was available)
Cheers,
Peter

PS. An analysis that included a check of whether the topic was likely to be 
notable and a listing of possible sources would also save a lot of wasted 
effort. Also a check against articles that have been deleted for good reasons, 
and articles in other languages with a reasonable accessible reference list.



-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
David Goodman
Sent: 12 March 2019 07:15
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

"with popular topics cannibalizing resources."

What resources can be cannibalized?   The limiting resource in WP is
interested people writing, improving, and validating  articles.  People
choose their own topics.  This is different from an organization where
staff can be directed to work on what the management think is important.

I, for example, almost totally avoid most aspects of what is popular
culture--I am neither competent nor interested. ) The topics I work on are
those that interest me, mainly academic biographies. I'm sure most  people
do not think them important.  We're volunteers, and must tolerate each
others interests.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 5:06 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:

> We should be using a grid for what people are reading about, instead
> of using countries. That will give a better representation of large
> countries vs small countries. It will also better reflect local ethnic
> groups.
>
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:53 PM Amir E. Aharoni
>  wrote:
> >
> > ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת ‪Gerard Meijssen‬‏ <‪
> > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬
> >
> > > Hoi,
> > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> really
> > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
> proves
> > > to be of interest [1] ?
> > >
> >
> > Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some examples:
> >
> > 1. The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched searches in
> > Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was done in
> > 2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead to
> some
> > improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal search
> > engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.
> >
> > 2. Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which people
> often
> > search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there are no
> > articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program
> >
> > 3. Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in their
> > language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find. You
> can
> > see a sample here:
> >
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-15
> > . I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some time
> soon.
> >
> > 4. The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find articles
> > that are missing in some wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
> >
> > 5. This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit better
> than
> > nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews tool,
> > rather than just by language. It's documented at
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207171 . The rationale for this is
> that
> > the most popular English Wikipedia articles in the U.S., Nigeria, India,
> > the Philippines, and South Africa are significantly different. The
> English
> > Wikipedia is the most popular one in all these countries, but whereas it
> is
> > sensible that it's popular in the U.S., it's a bit depressing that it's
> > also the most popular in the other four countries, even though languages
> > other than English are spoken there. The reason for this situation is, of
> > course, that there is little content in the Wikipedias in the languages
> of
> > these countries, and knowing what the most popular articles are can help
> > people who write in these languages choose how to write that will be
> > useful, and will hopefully raise the popularity of Wikipedias in these
> > languages. The same is true for the most popular Russian Wikipedia
> articles
> > in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, the most popu

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[David Goodman]

"with popular topics cannibalizing resources."

What resources can be cannibalized?   The limiting resource in WP is
interested people writing, improving, and validating  articles.  People
choose their own topics.  This is different from an organization where
staff can be directed to work on what the management think is important.

I, for example, almost totally avoid most aspects of what is popular
culture--I am neither competent nor interested. ) The topics I work on are
those that interest me, mainly academic biographies. I'm sure most  people
do not think them important.  We're volunteers, and must tolerate each
others interests.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 5:06 PM John Erling Blad  wrote:

> We should be using a grid for what people are reading about, instead
> of using countries. That will give a better representation of large
> countries vs small countries. It will also better reflect local ethnic
> groups.
>
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:53 PM Amir E. Aharoni
>  wrote:
> >
> > ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת ‪Gerard Meijssen‬‏ <‪
> > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬
> >
> > > Hoi,
> > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> really
> > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
> proves
> > > to be of interest [1] ?
> > >
> >
> > Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some examples:
> >
> > 1. The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched searches in
> > Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was done in
> > 2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead to
> some
> > improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal search
> > engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.
> >
> > 2. Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which people
> often
> > search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there are no
> > articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program
> >
> > 3. Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in their
> > language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find. You
> can
> > see a sample here:
> >
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-15
> > . I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some time
> soon.
> >
> > 4. The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find articles
> > that are missing in some wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
> >
> > 5. This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit better
> than
> > nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews tool,
> > rather than just by language. It's documented at
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207171 . The rationale for this is
> that
> > the most popular English Wikipedia articles in the U.S., Nigeria, India,
> > the Philippines, and South Africa are significantly different. The
> English
> > Wikipedia is the most popular one in all these countries, but whereas it
> is
> > sensible that it's popular in the U.S., it's a bit depressing that it's
> > also the most popular in the other four countries, even though languages
> > other than English are spoken there. The reason for this situation is, of
> > course, that there is little content in the Wikipedias in the languages
> of
> > these countries, and knowing what the most popular articles are can help
> > people who write in these languages choose how to write that will be
> > useful, and will hopefully raise the popularity of Wikipedias in these
> > languages. The same is true for the most popular Russian Wikipedia
> articles
> > in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, the most popular French Wikipedia articles in
> > Benin and Mali, etc. This is only an idea, but maybe it will be
> implemented
> > some day.
> >
> > --
> > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> > http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> > ‪“We're living in pieces,
> > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 
>
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[John Erling Blad]

We should be using a grid for what people are reading about, instead
of using countries. That will give a better representation of large
countries vs small countries. It will also better reflect local ethnic
groups.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:53 PM Amir E. Aharoni
 wrote:
>
> ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת ‪Gerard Meijssen‬‏ <‪
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬
>
> > Hoi,
> > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but really
> > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what proves
> > to be of interest [1] ?
> >
>
> Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some examples:
>
> 1. The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched searches in
> Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was done in
> 2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead to some
> improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal search
> engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.
>
> 2. Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which people often
> search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there are no
> articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program
>
> 3. Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in their
> language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find. You can
> see a sample here:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-15
> . I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some time soon.
>
> 4. The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find articles
> that are missing in some wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
>
> 5. This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit better than
> nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews tool,
> rather than just by language. It's documented at
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207171 . The rationale for this is that
> the most popular English Wikipedia articles in the U.S., Nigeria, India,
> the Philippines, and South Africa are significantly different. The English
> Wikipedia is the most popular one in all these countries, but whereas it is
> sensible that it's popular in the U.S., it's a bit depressing that it's
> also the most popular in the other four countries, even though languages
> other than English are spoken there. The reason for this situation is, of
> course, that there is little content in the Wikipedias in the languages of
> these countries, and knowing what the most popular articles are can help
> people who write in these languages choose how to write that will be
> useful, and will hopefully raise the popularity of Wikipedias in these
> languages. The same is true for the most popular Russian Wikipedia articles
> in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, the most popular French Wikipedia articles in
> Benin and Mali, etc. This is only an idea, but maybe it will be implemented
> some day.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and 
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Ilario valdelli]

Hi Leila,

I have put my own but the problem we have in Switzerland is connected to 
the multi-lingualism.


Italian, for instance, which is one big language in WIkipedia, is at the 
opposite a minority in Switzerland.


Any study is interesting, but if it could be country-based, it would be 
better.


Kind regards


On 06/03/2019 22:12, Leila Zia wrote:

Hi all,

As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
demographics and user motivations and characteristics).

If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on how
much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this is
your chance to indicate interest at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages

I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating some
of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.

As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
is needed. :)

Best,
Leila

[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Yaroslav Blanter]

Peter,

I am also writing about what I am (sometimes mildly) interested in, and I
am sure there will be enough materials for me to edit until I die, but you
would be surprised to learn how many people have no idea on what they
could/should edit, and are happy to take suggestions.

Cheers
Yaroslav

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 6:31 PM Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Vito,
> I do not agree with you, but that may be because we edit differently. I
> write about what I am interested in, and know enough about to be reasonably
> efficient. There is enough of it to keep me busy indefinitely. I read the
> topics that interest me and I don't know enough about to write. I copyedit
> anywhere I see a need while I am reading. I fix what I see to be broken if
> I can. I do not think I am unique, or even unusual. What do you write
> about? Is it greatly affected by what other people choose to read?
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Vi to
> Sent: Monday, March 11, 2019 11:07 AM
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
>
> That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics
> cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three
> sports, some TV series and three or four music topics.
> These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start
> focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no
> resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war",
> "near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late
> XX century".
>
> The way we self-identify as a project  deeply affects our results:
> promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the
> free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to
> diversity and quality.
>
> Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a
> very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which
> will gain a complete influence over us.
>
> To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not
> *information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information
> people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.
>
> If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the
> ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know
> the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"
>
> Vito
>
> Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman 
> ha scritto:
>
> > The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or
> > want  that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what
> they
> > want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see
> what
> > they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
> > see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader
> > interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice
> > our writing skills for our own benefit.
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to  wrote:
> >
> > > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> > >
> > > Vito
> > >
> > > Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
> > > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> > >
> > > > Hoi,
> > > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> > really
> > > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people
> are
> > > > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
> > proves
> > > > to be of interest [1] ?
> > > > Thanks,
> > > >  GerardM
> > > >
> > > > [1]
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
> > > >
> > > > On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Hi all,
> > > > >
> > > > > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > > > > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > > > > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > > > > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > > > > demographics and user motivations and characteristic

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Peter Southwood]

Vito, 
I do not agree with you, but that may be because we edit differently. I write 
about what I am interested in, and know enough about to be reasonably 
efficient. There is enough of it to keep me busy indefinitely. I read the 
topics that interest me and I don't know enough about to write. I copyedit 
anywhere I see a need while I am reading. I fix what I see to be broken if I 
can. I do not think I am unique, or even unusual. What do you write about? Is 
it greatly affected by what other people choose to read?
Cheers, 
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Vi to
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2019 11:07 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics
cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three
sports, some TV series and three or four music topics.
These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start
focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no
resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war",
"near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late
XX century".

The way we self-identify as a project  deeply affects our results:
promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the
free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to
diversity and quality.

Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a
very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which
will gain a complete influence over us.

To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not
*information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information
people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.

If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the
ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know
the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"

Vito

Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman 
ha scritto:

> The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or
> want  that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what they
> want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see what
> they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
> see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader
> interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice
> our writing skills for our own benefit.
>
> On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to  wrote:
>
> > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
> > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> >
> > > Hoi,
> > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> really
> > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
> proves
> > > to be of interest [1] ?
> > > Thanks,
> > >  GerardM
> > >
> > > [1]
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
> > >
> > > On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > > > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > > > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > > > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > > > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> > > >
> > > > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > > > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > > > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on
> how
> > > > much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this
> is
> > > > your chance to indicate interest at:
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
> > > >
> > > > I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
> > > > then, we have run a pilot te

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Peter Southwood]

We edit what we choose to edit. Usually the is things we are interested in and 
know something about. 2 billion people can go search for something I have no 
interest in and it will not move me to edit that topic. However, if a fairly 
substantial number of people look for something I am interested in and it is 
not covered, I may well spend some time improving coverage of the missing 
material, assuming I can find reliable sources. I don't think I am unique in 
this attitude, so I predict that getting good feedback on what is missing will 
inspire the people who would edit those subjects anyway, to improve them. It is 
very interesting and useful to me to know what readers are missing from my 
special interest areas and a complete waste of my time nd everyone else's to 
flood me with information on what people don’t find on topics I have no 
interest in editing. I will go to the trouble of trying to add information on a 
topic if even one person clearly and politely asks for it on a talk page. Also 
if someone does not understand what is written I will try to clarify, as that 
also improves the encyclopaedia. Clear, well targeted feedback is good, floods 
of garbage is not. Cheers, 
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2019 1:53 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

 I know people in many fields with great technical expertise. people who 
published articles on Science and Nature basically, and in the end I think they 
are probably qualified to have an idea of what a good encyclopedia should be. 
The point is that these people open wiki for topics far away from their area, 
most of the time they look also for "pop" topics. Finding pop culture is what 
makes them stay and grow interest as much as everything else. It's when they 
find a deleted ye useful page of something of interest for some internal reason 
they think wikipedia it's not worth spending time on. 

Based on that experience, in all the discussions when people who claim that 
this focus on such pop information lower our image or damage our workflow, I 
always question where these opinions come from and if they are peer-reviewed. I 
am a scientist, I look at data. it has been years people are claiming the 
"popmaggedon" of wikipedia is soon, and in the meantime its overall quality on 
very specific topic is still increasing.

A balanced encyclopedia comes from trying to fill the gaps, all information are 
useful in that direction. As long as someone else is studying missing links, 
pages existing in other languages, encouraging what editors want and so on, 
your idea is just part of patchwork. I cannot peer-review such statement, but 
at least i can tell you it is said by someone who never edited a "pop" article 
in all his wikipedia life and manage projects of outreach in organic chemistry 
or biophysics, to name the last ones. So I hope that it gives a hint that is 
probably fine.
Go on and explore.



Il lunedì 11 marzo 2019, 10:08:23 CET, Vi to  ha 
scritto:  
 
 That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics
cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three
sports, some TV series and three or four music topics.
These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start
focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no
resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war",
"near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late
XX century".

The way we self-identify as a project  deeply affects our results:
promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the
free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to
diversity and quality.

Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a
very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which
will gain a complete influence over us.

To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not
*information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information
people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.

If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the
ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know
the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"

Vito

Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman 
ha scritto:

> The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or
> want  that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what they
> want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see what
> they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
> see no reason why s

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Leila Zia]

Hi all,

This is a very interesting discussion. I'm going to fork this thread in the
next 2 hours (unless one of you do this in the meantime) for us to continue
the conversation around using search as a signal for improving Wikipedia in
there. It would be best, for current and future readability, to keep the
focus of the current thread on the original topic.

Thanks,
Leila

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 7:51 AM Edward Saperia  wrote:

> We can consider this an opportunity, e.g. popular media often touches on
> diverse cultural and political themes, and international sports tournaments
> give people a reason to learn about different countries. If people find our
> project this way then so be it, we can just try and make sure those
> articles great starting points for further exploration
> .
>
> Ed
>
>
> On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 12:31, Amir E. Aharoni <
> amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>
> wrote:
>
> > ‬
> >
> > > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> > >
> > >
> > I agree, although I'd make it a bit more focused: an encyclopedia that is
> > *only* popularity-driven is indeed scary. It's good to mention this, and
> > not once, but repeatedly.
> >
> > However, providing Wikipedia editors with information about what *is* in
> > demand is useful, as long as the editors clearly know that they have the
> > choice to write what is *important* and that "important" is not equal to
> > "popular".
> >
> > While I haven't ran a proper survey about this, conversations that with
> > Wikipedia editors from various "big" and "small" languages tell me that
> > most of them already understand it, and this is good. Nevertheless,
> > reminding people that Wikipedia is not supposed to be just about covering
> > popular topics won't hurt.
> >
> > --
> > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> > http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> > ‪“We're living in pieces,
> > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Edward Saperia]

We can consider this an opportunity, e.g. popular media often touches on
diverse cultural and political themes, and international sports tournaments
give people a reason to learn about different countries. If people find our
project this way then so be it, we can just try and make sure those
articles great starting points for further exploration
.

Ed


On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 12:31, Amir E. Aharoni 
wrote:

> ‬
>
> > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> >
> >
> I agree, although I'd make it a bit more focused: an encyclopedia that is
> *only* popularity-driven is indeed scary. It's good to mention this, and
> not once, but repeatedly.
>
> However, providing Wikipedia editors with information about what *is* in
> demand is useful, as long as the editors clearly know that they have the
> choice to write what is *important* and that "important" is not equal to
> "popular".
>
> While I haven't ran a proper survey about this, conversations that with
> Wikipedia editors from various "big" and "small" languages tell me that
> most of them already understand it, and this is good. Nevertheless,
> reminding people that Wikipedia is not supposed to be just about covering
> popular topics won't hurt.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l]

Reminding is easy, it's analyzing that it's complex. 

I suspect that editors and readers are probably a little bit smarter than 
generally assumed. It's quite "obvious" that editors understand what is an 
encyclopedia, after years. When I make an informal survey, statistically the 
"smarter" students in the class or in the group of people in front of me at an 
event are those who already edited something or who want to know more or are 
willing to compile a form to state their opinion or similar. 

Plus, every topic is multifaceted somehow, it's the same for the most popular 
ones. It's strange when long-time editors seem to miss this aspect. There is 
always a specific disease, an historical event, a place or a person in a family 
history linked to a most searched topic. You can detect many missing specific 
things just focusing on a core topic and starting from there. Again, maybe it's 
worth reminding also how our editors are quite good at doing this, and this 
type of information is therefore a starting point. In some of this comments, it 
always look like an end per se. 

Seriously, if someone is so superficial to just edit something with no depth 
because it's on a list, (s)he will just do something equally superficial 
somewhere else. Clinically, I might state that it's probably a good thing if 
this occur in an area with huge focus, it actually lowers the possible 
long-term disfunctionalities induced by a rigid approach, something that it's 
more subtle to detect in less supervised areas.

in any case, these lists can change a lot from area to area so it is not even 
driven by the "mass", if you give a country in South America or Asia the same 
focus on a western country you end up with very unusual guideline. it's nice to 
know that you expertise in an area even if less taken into account in the 
average community around you, it's useful in a different part of the word. 



Il lunedì 11 marzo 2019, 13:32:12 CET, Amir E. Aharoni 
 ha scritto:  
 
 ‬

> The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
>
>
I agree, although I'd make it a bit more focused: an encyclopedia that is
*only* popularity-driven is indeed scary. It's good to mention this, and
not once, but repeatedly.

However, providing Wikipedia editors with information about what *is* in
demand is useful, as long as the editors clearly know that they have the
choice to write what is *important* and that "important" is not equal to
"popular".

While I haven't ran a proper survey about this, conversations that with
Wikipedia editors from various "big" and "small" languages tell me that
most of them already understand it, and this is good. Nevertheless,
reminding people that Wikipedia is not supposed to be just about covering
popular topics won't hurt.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

‫בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת ‪Gerard Meijssen‬‏ <‪
gerard.meijs...@gmail.com‬‏>:‬

> Hoi,
> I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but really
> why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what proves
> to be of interest [1] ?
>

Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some examples:

1. The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched searches in
Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was done in
2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead to some
improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal search
engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.

2. Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which people often
search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there are no
articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program

3. Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in their
language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find. You can
see a sample here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-15
. I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some time soon.

4. The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find articles
that are missing in some wikis: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder

5. This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit better than
nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews tool,
rather than just by language. It's documented at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207171 . The rationale for this is that
the most popular English Wikipedia articles in the U.S., Nigeria, India,
the Philippines, and South Africa are significantly different. The English
Wikipedia is the most popular one in all these countries, but whereas it is
sensible that it's popular in the U.S., it's a bit depressing that it's
also the most popular in the other four countries, even though languages
other than English are spoken there. The reason for this situation is, of
course, that there is little content in the Wikipedias in the languages of
these countries, and knowing what the most popular articles are can help
people who write in these languages choose how to write that will be
useful, and will hopefully raise the popularity of Wikipedias in these
languages. The same is true for the most popular Russian Wikipedia articles
in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, the most popular French Wikipedia articles in
Benin and Mali, etc. This is only an idea, but maybe it will be implemented
some day.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

‬

> The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
>
>
I agree, although I'd make it a bit more focused: an encyclopedia that is
*only* popularity-driven is indeed scary. It's good to mention this, and
not once, but repeatedly.

However, providing Wikipedia editors with information about what *is* in
demand is useful, as long as the editors clearly know that they have the
choice to write what is *important* and that "important" is not equal to
"popular".

While I haven't ran a proper survey about this, conversations that with
Wikipedia editors from various "big" and "small" languages tell me that
most of them already understand it, and this is good. Nevertheless,
reminding people that Wikipedia is not supposed to be just about covering
popular topics won't hurt.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l]

 I know people in many fields with great technical expertise. people who 
published articles on Science and Nature basically, and in the end I think they 
are probably qualified to have an idea of what a good encyclopedia should be. 
The point is that these people open wiki for topics far away from their area, 
most of the time they look also for "pop" topics. Finding pop culture is what 
makes them stay and grow interest as much as everything else. It's when they 
find a deleted ye useful page of something of interest for some internal reason 
they think wikipedia it's not worth spending time on. 

Based on that experience, in all the discussions when people who claim that 
this focus on such pop information lower our image or damage our workflow, I 
always question where these opinions come from and if they are peer-reviewed. I 
am a scientist, I look at data. it has been years people are claiming the 
"popmaggedon" of wikipedia is soon, and in the meantime its overall quality on 
very specific topic is still increasing.

A balanced encyclopedia comes from trying to fill the gaps, all information are 
useful in that direction. As long as someone else is studying missing links, 
pages existing in other languages, encouraging what editors want and so on, 
your idea is just part of patchwork. I cannot peer-review such statement, but 
at least i can tell you it is said by someone who never edited a "pop" article 
in all his wikipedia life and manage projects of outreach in organic chemistry 
or biophysics, to name the last ones. So I hope that it gives a hint that is 
probably fine.
Go on and explore.



Il lunedì 11 marzo 2019, 10:08:23 CET, Vi to  ha 
scritto:  
 
 That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics
cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three
sports, some TV series and three or four music topics.
These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start
focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no
resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war",
"near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late
XX century".

The way we self-identify as a project  deeply affects our results:
promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the
free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to
diversity and quality.

Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a
very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which
will gain a complete influence over us.

To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not
*information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information
people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.

If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the
ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know
the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"

Vito

Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman 
ha scritto:

> The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or
> want  that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what they
> want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see what
> they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
> see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader
> interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice
> our writing skills for our own benefit.
>
> On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to  wrote:
>
> > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
> > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> >
> > > Hoi,
> > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> really
> > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
> proves
> > > to be of interest [1] ?
> > > Thanks,
> > >      GerardM
> > >
> > > [1]
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
> > >
> > > On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > > > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > > > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > > > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > > > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> > > >
> > > > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > > > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > > > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on
> how
> > > > much data we collect in your language, 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Vi to]

That's an unstable process on a long-term, with popular topics
cannibalizing resources. Top read articles are already about two or three
sports, some TV series and three or four music topics.
These are also the most popular topics among editors but if you'll start
focusing energies on these already popular topics you'll end up having no
resources to be spent on "female combatants during Russian civil war",
"near to extinction languages in Brazil", "computational chemestry in late
XX century".

The way we self-identify as a project  deeply affects our results:
promoting the idea of Wikipedia as "the pop encyclopedia" (instead of "the
free encyclopedia embedding pop topics") will weaken our commitment to
diversity and quality.

Also, topic popularity is mutable on a daily basis and it's driven by a
very narrow number of media (basically Google/YouTube and Facebook) which
will gain a complete influence over us.

To me the mission of an encyclopedia is providing the *knowledge* (not
*information*) which is worth collecting and preserving. The information
people need/want is likely to be a subset of this.

If Wikipedia is also an educational medium we should find a way to ask the
ordes of people looking for new mr. Trump's bizarreness "hey, do you know
the background of India-Pakistan conflicts?"

Vito

Il giorno lun 11 mar 2019 alle ore 06:19 David Goodman 
ha scritto:

> The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or
> want  that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what they
> want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see what
> they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
> see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader
> interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice
> our writing skills for our own benefit.
>
> On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to  wrote:
>
> > The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
> > gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> >
> > > Hoi,
> > > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
> really
> > > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what
> proves
> > > to be of interest [1] ?
> > > Thanks,
> > >  GerardM
> > >
> > > [1]
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
> > >
> > > On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > > > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > > > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > > > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > > > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> > > >
> > > > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > > > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > > > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on
> how
> > > > much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this
> is
> > > > your chance to indicate interest at:
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
> > > >
> > > > I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
> > > > then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating
> some
> > > > of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
> > > > needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
> > > >
> > > > As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
> > > > community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
> > > > is needed. :)
> > > >
> > > > Best,
> > > > Leila
> > > >
> > > > [1]
> > > >
> > >
> >
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
> > > >
> > > > ___
> > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Unsubscribe:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > > 
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
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> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[David Goodman]

The idea of an encyclopedia is to provide the information people need or
want  that's appropriate to the format. It would be useful to see what they
want that is appropriate but we do not have -- and also useful to see what
they look for that isn't appropriate for us. Within what's appropriate, I
see no reason why selection of topics should not be driven by reader
interests as much as by editor interests. Our purpose is not to practice
our writing skills for our own benefit.

On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 6:58 PM Vi to  wrote:

> The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 
>
> Vito
>
> Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
> gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:
>
> > Hoi,
> > I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but really
> > why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> > actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what proves
> > to be of interest [1] ?
> > Thanks,
> >  GerardM
> >
> > [1]
> >
> >
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
> >
> > On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> > >
> > > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on how
> > > much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this is
> > > your chance to indicate interest at:
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
> > >
> > > I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
> > > then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating some
> > > of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
> > > needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
> > >
> > > As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
> > > community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
> > > is needed. :)
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Leila
> > >
> > > [1]
> > >
> >
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
> > >
> > > ___
> > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > > 
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
> ___
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> 



-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Vi to]

The idea of a popularity-driven encyclopaedia scares 

Vito

Il giorno dom 10 mar 2019 alle ore 22:26 Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> ha scritto:

> Hoi,
> I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but really
> why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
> actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what proves
> to be of interest [1] ?
> Thanks,
>  GerardM
>
> [1]
>
> https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html
>
> On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> > surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> > reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> > their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> > demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
> >
> > If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> > distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> > geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on how
> > much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this is
> > your chance to indicate interest at:
> >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
> >
> > I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
> > then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating some
> > of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
> > needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
> >
> > As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
> > community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
> > is needed. :)
> >
> > Best,
> > Leila
> >
> > [1]
> >
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
> >
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but really
why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what people are
actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote what proves
to be of interest [1] ?
Thanks,
 GerardM

[1]
https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-marketing-approach-to-what-it-is-that.html

On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 22:13, Leila Zia  wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> As I mentioned in an earlier thread [1], we will be running reader
> surveys across a number of Wikipedia languages to learn about the
> reader needs and motivations in these languages as well as some of
> their demographic information (and perhaps the correlations between
> demographics and user motivations and characteristics).
>
> If your language community is interested to have statistics on the
> distribution of reader gender, age, education, native language, and
> geographic region (rural/urban) in your language (and depending on how
> much data we collect in your language, perhaps more insights), this is
> your chance to indicate interest at:
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases#Interested_languages
>
> I initially communicated 2019-02-15 as the deadline to sign up. Since
> then, we have run a pilot test on enwiki and we are investigating some
> of the results to see if any changes in the survey questions are
> needed. You have now time until 2019-03-15 to indicate interest.
>
> As always: this call is primarily a service to your language
> community. If you like it, take action on it. If you don't, no action
> is needed. :)
>
> Best,
> Leila
>
> [1]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2019-February/091762.html
>
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
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