On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Thomas Dalton <[email protected]> wrote: > On 18 April 2010 20:47, Gregory Maxwell <[email protected]> wrote: >> I don't agree. It's better you admit you can't measure the thing you >> want to talk about rather than passing off the measurement you can >> make as something it isn't. > > I think how much people use something is a reasonable measure of how > useful it is. Maybe it is only useful for entertaining people or > useful for satisfying idle curiosity, but that is still a use. Perhaps > you mean how useful something is for a particular purpose. If so, you > need to say what purpose you are talking about.
Indeed. "Usefulness" is one of those terms that gets thrown around & debated a lot in the library science literature, and it turns out that usefulness is a deeply contextual concept that is difficult to measure by any metric: a reference work that is useful for settling a bar bet is not generally useful for writing one's thesis, and vice versa, even when it's the same subject in both contexts. This is actually often a helpful point to make to lay people who are concerned about student use, etc. when discussing Wikipedia. What are the useful functions of an encyclopedia? -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com * _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
