Pointy? I think you may misunderstand my use of the term “hostage”. I don’t use it with the meaning of abducting people for ransom, but in the sense of “subject to things beyond our control”.
I agree entirely that Wikipedia should serve its readers and to that end “To do” lists are compiled with the intention of giving adequate coverage of topics perceived to be needed. Yet, many of those “To do” lists are full of redlinks years later because we have volunteer contributors whose interests / expertise may not align with the perceived needs. Whereas if Wikipedia employed its writers, it could direct them to write articles about required topics. It would be a wonderful thing if we could harness the volunteer energy that goes into largely unproductive activities like endless category reorganisation (given studies show readers rarely look below the reference section and don’t see or use the categories) into writing content that is actually needed. But alas it is not so. Kerry From: Ziko van Dijk [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, 16 December 2018 3:32 AM To: Kerry Raymond <[email protected]>; Research into Wikimedia content and communities <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Readers of Wikipedia Hello, Thanks for the link and the comments, Leila! Am Fr., 14. Dez. 2018 um 00:44 Uhr schrieb Kerry Raymond <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >: hostage to the interests of their contributors (unless they actively remove the material). That is, you get the topics that the contributors are willing and able to write, no matter what the intention might be. That's a very pointy expression: "Hostage to the interests of their contributors"! In fact, WP should serve recipients, but the reality is often different. We alreday saw that Article Feedback Tool as a means to find out what recipients think. I would be happy with a new, less ambitious approach, where we don't expect recipients to contribute to the improvement of content but just want to know their opinion. By the way, the distincion of large and short articles I have found in Collison's "Encyclopedias through the ages" (or similar) from 1966. It is not very prominent in there, but I have elaborated on the idea in 2015, with a distinction of definition articles, exposition articles, longer articles and dissertations. An encyclopedia with "short" articles - or a meaningful combination of the four types above - would fit well to the original concept of hypertext not being an actual set of texts (or nodes), but being an individual's specific learning strategy or reading path. Federico: remember, most of the oldest German texts (Old High German) deal with Biblical topics... :-) Kind regards Ziko _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
