Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Henning Schlottmann wrote:
>
>> Who are our actual users?
>>
> This is a good question, not only with respect to level (youth or
> academic), but also for topics (academic subjects like medicine,
> or popular culture). Retired academics might provide useful input
> on how to treat cancer, but might be out of touch with trends in
> manga or cooking. If we discourage teenagers from writing about
> their favorite artists, they will find Wikipedia less useful.
>
Teenagers know nothing about cooking ... Ask their mothers. ;-)
Teenagers writing about popular culture have never bothered me. They
may seem to carry on ad nauseum on these topics, but so what? These are
great opportunities for them to hone their skills that they will need
when their interests drift to the real world. If they make outrageous
comments in the articles there will be an entire community of other
teens to set them straight.
> It is also a question of what alternatives to Wikipedia our users
> have. Even if we fail to produce a good encyclopedia (in many
> smaller languages, it will take a long time to build something
> useful), we might succeed in killing all competition, especially
> printed reference works. This is a problem for Wikipedia as well,
> as we could be running out of sources to cite.
>
Simply put, we need more forks. If you put a big bet on the longshot in
a horse race he ceases to be the longshot without the horse having
undergone any improvements. Healthy competition is also a guarantee for
NPOV. As much as we advocate for NPOV we can only know that we have
achieved it by comparison with other sites..
> I have written many short articles based on information found in
> reference works like "who's who" from earlier decades. But many
> such titles are no longer produced, because printed reference
> works are no longer profitable, especially in smaller markets
> (smaller languages). The Swedish "Vem är det" was published every
> 2nd year, but had a 6 year gap from 2001 to 2007, and I don't know
> if there will ever be another edition.
>
Swedish is not a major international, but it is still a national
language with a high degree of literacy, and a significant corpus of
extant material For international languages the problem is a bigger one
because the material is so abundant. Some libraries just throw the
stuff out because they need the space. If the material has been there
for more than a century without anyone having asked to use it it is
hardly worth their effort to put essential conservation work on books
printed on acidic paper or with corrosive gall-inks.
> Many printed reference works were financially supported by buyers
> who thought they were necessary to have, but seldom used them.
> Today the same people still use reference works very seldom. The
> difference is they now think (wrongly) that everything is online,
> and they don't need to buy printed reference works anymore.
>
This is a significant observation. For many of these earlier buyers
having long sets of uniformly bound books was a matter of pride; their
heirs did not share this pride. The Google Books venture largely adds
to the confusion. The real value-added comes from knowing how to use
the material, and how to find links between them. This is more than a
matter of search functions. Search functions are no substitute for the
intuitive process of knowing what to look for.
> Another traditional "must have" is the daily newspaper, which many
> young people are now abandoning, resulting in the current crisis.
> Revenue from ads on newspaper websites isn't covering the loss of
> subscription revenue from the printed editions.
>
Traditional newspapers are also losing subscribers because of the high
proportion of advertising. Environmentally conscious members of the
public see no point to receiving stacks of advertising material that
goes immediately into the trash.
> We could be entering a period of scarcity of good reference
> information, as counterintuitive as that might seem. There is a
> huge gap for Wikipedia to fill.
>
>
>
Yes, the gap is huge, perhaps too big for Wikipedia alone to fill. The
attempts by some who possess the information to make it proprietary does
not help.
Ec
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