People simply don't know how Wikipedia works. Some because they project what they want to see, some because knowing might put them out of a job. But a serious study would help, because then what is good could be encouraged & what is bad discouraged. YMMV. -- llywrch (talk) 21:20, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
People don't know how anything works. I spent 40 years as a telephone worker, and only we insiders know anything about that network. Bicycles, armies, comets, bones, databases, plastics, outsiders know very little about these things. So, here in WP we are the insiders, and marvel at the ignorance of the outsiders who judge us by hunches and irrelevant feelings. Might as well get used to it. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:40, 4 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
An idea that recently occurred to me was of having a "blackout" where, rather than protesting any internet censorship laws like we have in the past, we show people a page "We've found that most of our readers don't really understand what Wikipedia is. Here are a few of the biggest misconceptions." that explains that: anyone can edit; every article should have reliable sources backing up every claim, but we are a work in progress and most of our articles are inadequate in some way; how to follow inline citations; we are not an aggregate of all knowledge but knowledge captured in sources that we view as reliable and significant etc. Let them see the articles again if they create an account. An RfC on such a proposal would be shot down 99 to 1 but I believe it would be immediately very helpful for readers' media literacy, for our editor recruitment problems and much better than the misleading "your donations pay for our servers" rubbish that the WMF smear over our hard work from time to time. — Bilorv (talk) 15:33, 6 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
People mostly don't know how anything works. If what they know is, a thing is run by cranky people who shut down because they don't get enough attention, they will trust less rather than learn more. As it happens, I'll spend this afternoon with a cultish biker gang and hope to steer conversation (when we have enough breath after pedaling) toward my favorite topic. Probably fail to recruit anyone into our cult, but they're a smart and pleasant bunch. Jim.henderson (talk) 11:11, 7 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
What about Google's choice of Wikipedia articles as the first result when almost anything is Googled? My guess is that this is responsible for many of Wikipedia's page views and much of its general notoriety. A mention of this as partly responsible for Wikipedia's longevity would be appropriate. Article count as a measure of "growth" is highly misleading; many articles are permastubs or are merged with other articles as WP contributions on their topic grow. RobDuch (talk·contribs) 02:05, 12 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@RobDuch: Yes, article count is a misleading indicator of "growth" or quality, but I'm guessing that over the last 10 years it is an underestimate of growth. Yes, about half(!) of our articles are stubs, but I think that percentage is going down slightly, as the quality of new articles increases each year, and most old articles increase in quality, if slowly, every year. Anybody interested in increasing the average quality of our articles should feel free to take early stubs that have gone nowhere to AfD, or more easily, merge them into related articles. But average article quality is increasing. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:55, 12 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
