[Foundation-l] 2M articles

Thu Jun 9 01:49:24 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> 
>>Wikimania should get a dedicated press release when we have finalized
>>the programme. We can mention the "2 million articles" number in that,
>>but it shouldn't be the focus. It seems unlikely that anyone who would
>>not care about Wikimania itself would care about yet another Wikipedia
>>milestone. 

> I think the opposite in this case.  The press will care about 2 million.
>  They will not care about Wikimania.  Using 2 million as the hook to get
> attention to Wikimania makes sense.

Perhaps it makes sense to distinguish different types of media. 
Heise.de, Slashdot.org, Kuro5hin.org, CNET and other media outlets who 
have in the past frequently reported about Wikimedia events are 
different from, say, the New York Times or USA Today.

Kuro5hin and heise.de both reported about the 100K Commons uploads. 
However, in both cases, there were many reader comments of the type "Yet 
Another Wikimedia Number" (YAWN). I think that for a "2 million 
articles" press release, the reaction might be similar, especially 
because Wikimedia Commons is a new project most people haven't heard of, 
while all of these outlets have repeatedly reported about Wikipedia 
itself. On the other hand, I expect that all of them might find 
Wikimania interesting.

More simply put, if you're a geek, you don't need to hear this number, 
so geeky news sources might be less inclined to report it. A traditional 
newspaper like the NYT, however, might see a major milestone like this 
as a good opportunity to report about Wikipedia again (and hence 
Wikimania). The only problem I see with these mega-milestones is that 
the numbers are just getting too large. :-) When you say "The German 
edition of Wikipedia has surpassed Brockhaus" or "The English edition 
has surpassed Britannica", you give people a perspective. When you say 
"All editions together have surpassed 2 million articles", it's not a 
number people can do anything with, or imagine the significance of. In 
fact, for many people who have never used WP, the immediate reaction 
will be an incredulous "But how many of them are any good?"

That is to say, I think that when a Wikipedia language has surpassed all 
existing encyclopedias in quantity, the focus of our media work should 
shift to quality: number of reviewed articles, results of quality 
comparisons, and so on. As for the combined press release at 2M, as 
noted above, I believe that using different media strategies for 
different outlets might be a good idea: focus on the major milestone for 
the traditional ones and on the exciting conference for the techy/geeky 
ones.

Best,

Erik