No deed goes unpunished
The Loon thinks that Jimmy Wales has diagnosed the decline in search-engine traffic to Wikipedia correctly: search engines have gotten better at using Wikipedia and other sources to do what reference librarians call “ready reference,” such that fewer users need to click over.
This explanation is all the more compelling because it mirrors what reference librarians have found in their work since the advent of the Web: fewer questions as potential questioners satisfice with online information sources, but the questions that remain are more difficult.
Should Wikipedia repudiate search engines, then, since they are punishing its traffic numbers? Only if Wikipedia’s mission is traffic numbers. The Loon was under the impression the real mission had to do with informing people quickly, in which case this traffic decline is a sign of success (and may even be a boon, given that bandwidth is not costless). In other words, this is a non-story. All Wikipedia is doing is leveraging search engines to do its job.
This non-story stuck in the Loon’s head because it exemplifies a pattern she is familiar with: every blip, every tidbit, every morsel that can be twisted to damage an entity seeming to bleed into the water will be so twisted. No deed, as they almost say, goes unpunished.
When the Loon was in library school, she took a full three-credit course in cataloguing (it was required then). The instructor took most of a week to introduce a weird newfangled thing called a “bibliographic model,” still under active development, that was a locus of significant professional conflict despite most Real Catalogers™ not using it and never having heard of it. “I don’t know where this will go,” the instructor said frankly, “but if it does go somewhere, at least you’ll know about it.”
The model in question was FRBR, of course. (The Loon has just dated her library-school education, but so be it.) Now that FRBR is losing its lustre somewhat, Real Catalogers™ act as though they have always loved it; the world is odd that way. Suffice to say, though, that the Loon is sure that instructor got dinged on student evaluations (though emphatically not from the Loon, who was fascinated) for wasting time on unproven nonsense. No deed goes unpunished.
The last time the Loon taught schema.org microdata (outside of the full course she teaches dedicated to such abstruse matters as linked data), a group of annoyed students came to her demanding to know whether anyone (“anyone relevant to their career aspirations,” understood) even used microdata. Well, said the Loon, you might have heard of a little website called the Internet Movie Database, perhaps? But even in the placid waters of library-and-archives-land, microdata is helping with search-engine optimization here and there.
The students went away, stymied but no less inclined to spin conspiracy theories about the Loon teaching useless things because… because… well, the Loon cannot come up with a “because,” but she is sure her students did. No deed goes unpunished.
Never fear, the Loon has no intention of ceasing her restless search for interesting and useful novelties to introduce her classes to. As Jimmy Wales must just now, though, she wishes for a little less rush to invidious judgment sometimes.