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
<wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> 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 <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com> 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 <dgge...@gmail.com>
> 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 <vituzzu.w...@gmail.com> 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 <le...@wikimedia.org> 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,
>>>>> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> 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,
>>>> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> 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,
>>> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Goodman
>>
>> DGG at the enWP
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>> _______________________________________________
>> 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,
>> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> _______________________________________________
> 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,
> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
> _______________________________________________
> 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,
> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
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,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
