4 ms·
The most enlightening thing in this article is a graph which shows numbers of editors has declined by 25% while articles are more than doubling over past 8 year
by sytelus 11y ago
The most enlightening thing in this article is a graph which shows numbers of editors has declined by 25% while articles are more than doubling over past 8 years. There must obviously be breaking point sooner or later where Wikipedia has more garbage then useful bits. My take away is that Wikipedia's model of small tribes of editors is not working and is demonstrably unscalable.
What could be the replacement? How about Stackoverflow style reputations that one must accumulate overtime and then they translate to privileges. The beauty of Stackoverflow is not its content but this community model they have sharpened to almost perfection. It feels far more scalable than Wikipedia's arcane model of emulating print world editorial team and beautifully takes advantage of gamification combining rewards with career profile.
- kleer001 11y ago> There must obviously be breaking point sooner or later where Wikipedia has more garbage then useful bits. Why do you say that? I doesn't seem obvious to me. I can imagine an endless stream of non-garbage churning out of the complex world we live in.
- sytelus 11y agoAs per the article, the quality of content is moderated by editors who patrol the edits frequently. For example, you can go to a random wikipage and make some insane edit right now and there is a good probability that it would be reverted within few hours. This probability decreases over time when number of articles doubles but editors patrolling them decreases. Eventually you will start seeing lot of low quality edits sipping in and stay there for very long time.
- sparkzilla 11y agoAlso you will begin to see more bias as the few editors who remain will be unchallenged when they remove information they don't like.
- sparkzilla 11y agoI'm not really sure why you've been downvoted, as this seems like a non-controversial statement. I am working on a crowdsourced content site, a large part of which is a replacement for Wikipedia's biography and news-based pages (see profile for link). We do gamification (badges for adding certain types of content) and we pay our writers in revenue share. That said, in my experience, the issue is not one of personal reputation, but one of creating a system where quality data can be added irrespective of the quality of the person adding it. The focus should always be on the quality of the edit, not the quality of the editor. This may seem counter intuitive, but a well-designed crowdsourced site does not actually need experts in the subjects it is compiling.
- sytelus 11y agoI'm surprised at downvotes too. I suspect there are lots of n00b on HN who thinks downvotes is way to express disagreement. I use downvote for not-nice and spammy comments. If I want to express disagreement, I would just put that in reply. But apparently new HN population does things differently.
- rspeer 11y agoIs pg a n00b? Long ago, he said, "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
- sytelus 11y agoI'm surprised at that comment because his writings had given me a different impression. PG's view basically means that people with different opinions and minority views would be punished heavily by the community effectively leading to strip them out of all karma. This guideline would encourage people for groupthink and make them hesistant to offer any perspective that might be remotely perceived as controversial. I truly hope pg's above view was transient and has evolved.
- 11y ago
- escaped_hn 11y agoIf wikipedia took the stackoverflow model, every article will be closed as off topic.