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A comment on Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. Parent comment

Re:Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation by dlubarov on Thursday February 04, 2021 @05:57PM (#26030765)
Eh, Wikipedia is 20 years old, and has been a top 20 site for the past 15 years. At this point, they don't have much serious competition. Britannica stopped printing physical encyclopedias in 2012.

The WMF can certainly make their case and answer criticisms, but there are cost-efficient ways of doing that. I don't see much value in funding parties, conferences, etc. for a product that has already dominated in most markets.

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Re:Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation by ckoerner on Friday February 05, 2021 @10:51AM (#26037587)
Most markets? That’s a very privileged view. Research by the WMF in 2019 shows incredibly low rates of awareness in large parts of the world. I doubly you will read it, nor to I seek to argue this with you, but here are the findings: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers/Awareness#Awaren...
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Re:Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation by dlubarov on Friday February 05, 2021 @02:59PM (#26040508)
> That’s a very privileged view

> I doubly you will read it

Why do you feel the need to use ad hominems rather than simply making your point?

> Research by the WMF in 2019 shows incredibly low rates of awareness in large parts of the world

I wasn't claiming that Wikipedia is near peak global usage. My point was that there is no meaningful competition left, so usage should grow organically, as it did for EN-WP back when the WMF had a shoestring budget.

Can you identify some markets where Wikipedia is losing ground to an inferior competitor with more aggressive marketing? I'm not sure there are any.

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Re:Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation by smsm42 on Friday February 05, 2021 @12:09AM (#26033348)
The conferences are not to suppress competition, it's to enable cooperation. Wikis are very distributed projects, and conferences are the only place where people could get together, discuss things, exchange experiences and ideas, and so on. And no, it's not the same via teleconference or mailing lists, those do exist but it's completely different mode of operation.
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Re:Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation by pwinnski on Friday February 05, 2021 @12:01PM (#26038460)
Yes, in the US at least, wikimedia has been very effective. That doesn't seem like "most markets" to me. In fact, not so much the rest of the world at all, and even in the US, now does not seem like the time to stop and let that decline.
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Re:Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation by dlubarov on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:33PM (#26039625)
Maybe my wording was a bit strong, but the US is a pretty small minority of Wikipedia's usage. If we look at article counts, about 12% of articles are in English (5.8M of 49.3M): https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm
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Re:Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation by pwinnski on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:58PM (#26039886)
Right, so more than twice as much as #2 (2.3M), at least in December 18.

And more recently, the US has more than four times as many pageviews as #2 (4B to Japan's 1B)[0].

So no, I don't think the work is done outside the US, and I think maintaining a leading position doesn't happen automatically, so I don't think the work is entirely done inside the US, either.

0. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/page-view...

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