[Foundation-l] About the low-hanging fruit

Wed Jun 8 10:05:00 UTC 2011

On 06/03/11 3:46 AM, Victor Vasiliev wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter<putevod at mccme.ru>  wrote:
>> this would be 10 years of my work. Note that this is just a narrow topic
>> which does not overlap with my professional interest (I am a theoretical
>> physicist specializing in nanoscience). In this field, I am just an amateur
>> (may be slightly above the average level).
> You are interested in this topic; many users (or most, I am afraid) are not.

It can often be better to write about something where one is NOT a 
professional. It takes special skill to write about professional areas 
in a way that the general public will understand, even in one's native 
language.

>> My conclusions from the two-weeks experience:
>>
>> 1. May be the really low hanging fruit, almost on the ground level, has
>> been picked up, but in the vast majority of articles there is much room for
>> improvement. Note that I did not add any special things - only the basic
>> info which you expect to find in the encyclopaedia. I did not aim at GA or
>> FA. I used may be 10% of the information I had, and what I had I found in
>> the internet.
> You have an expert knowledge in this topic, namely the knowledge of
> Russian language. Most of English Wikipedia editors don't.
>
> There is a plenty of low-hanging fruits in classical music articles
> (especially in Russian Wikipedia). With a use of Grove Dictionary of
> Music and Musicians, one could add more than 1000 paragraphs of text
> into Wikipedia by just retelling its content. Grove has a basic
> coverage of topics, and it has 29 volumes in it; I think that
> describes the breadth of the topic well. Anyone claiming there is
> nothing to write about there must be kidding.
>
> The reason nobody writes them are:
> 1. Nobody cares;
> 2. Nobody understands the terms (most of which are fairly easy to learn).

Most unilingual English editors are surprised by the vast quantity of 
low hanging fruit. Out of curiosity at one time I looked up the fairly 
common Spanish name "Reyes" in the original 70 volume "Enciclopedia 
universal ilustrada". I found 30 individuals there with that simple 
uncompounded surname. Only two of these appeared in the English 
Wikipedia, and only one of the two in the Spanish Wikipedia. Could 
something similar be said of the great Soviet Encyclopedia? I have 
before looked at a couple short encyclopedic works in Russian, one 
relating to hockey and one to movies. Both did address their subject as 
it related to the United States as well as their own country. Comparably 
sized American publications would leave the reader wondering if there 
even was such a thing as a Russian film industry.  The dismissive 
attitude that Russian works were written by Communists becomes quite 
thin in subjects that are inherently apolitical.

> I assume that this is because they are less popular. Articles about US
> towns may have the same problems.
  In the earliest days the starting articles for most US small towns 
were botted in.  Many people complained about this at the time.

Ec