[Foundation-l] 80% of our projects are failing

Wed Dec 3 05:47:19 UTC 2008

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Milos - you wrote: "To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful
> Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong. Serbian
> Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles
> than en.wp." Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes
> sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful
> than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm
> curious to know what data changed your mind.

I have to make one correction: Usually, when I say "Serbia", I think
"Belgrade". My "intuition" is connected to Belgrade and I am not so
able to analyze the whole Serbia. Belgrade develops similarly to other
European cities, while parts of Serbia may vary significantly
regionally. But, including Belgrade's "gravitation area", it includes
between 1/4 and 1/3 of population of Serbia (without Kosovo).

I had social bias for a long time. For people around me, which means
fairly educated persons between their 20s and 50s, English Wikipedia
is indeed the most useful project. When some of them is trying to find
informations about [[Earth]], [[Alexander the Great]], [[Amazon]],
[[Arthur C. Clarke]], [[Mikhail Bulgakov]], [[Apache HTTP Server]]
etc., they are going to en.wp. A number of them are not able to
participate actively in English, but they are fully able to understand
what is written in one encyclopedic article.

A couple of years passed from the time when I realized that it was my
social bias. I think that in 2005 I've started to have this kind of
conversations: "Wikipedia is very useful for me!" -- "You mean,
Wikipedia in English?" -- "No, Wikipedia in Serbian."

One more personal bias which I had was a reason why I am using one
encyclopedia. I am using it to find informations which don't below to
something which may be called "a basic set of informations". I am
using Wikipedia to find informations which don't below to my general
knowledge. So, when I am searching for, let's say, some information
from astronomy, I am not going to the articles like [[Moon]] or
[[Jupiter]] are, but about newly discovered planets, [[Timeline of the
Big Bang]] or [[Ultimate fate of the universe]].

BUT, it seems that the most important role of Wikipedia is not to
cover those fields. The most important role is to cover the basic
educational fields, where pupils may find informations for their
classes. So, even I think that [[Ultimate fate of the universe]] is a
very important article, much more important than the article about
lesser known Serbian feudal ruler, like [[sr:Grgur Branković]] is, for
one pupil who learns history from the 5th grade of primary school
(while astronomy is a course just in some of the high schools at, I
think, 4th grade), this Serbian feudal ruler is much more important.

There is no article about the ultimate fate of the universe on sr.wp,
while there is no article about Grgur Branković on en.wp. Conclusion
about usefulness is obvious: for the most of pupils and their parents
the article about Grgur Branković may be used (and it is in Serbian),
while speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are
comparable with watching Battlestar Galactica or Star Track (and it is
in English).