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Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment

• Kumaiti 11y ago
  Just like almost everything else that ends up getting big and successful.
  • logicallee 11y ago
    Not really - Wikipedia still makes you say, "That can't possibly work." Think about it - the first and most definitive, accessible source on any subject you don't know anything about, is something strangers on the Internet can collaboratively edit, troll, or subtlely subvert. This just can't work - except that it does! It goes counter to everything on the Internet. You would expect it to read like the comments section of a news article - instead, it's more definitive and factual than news articles themselves. Amazing!
    • cooper12 11y ago
      In a more general sense this can be applied to any form of crowdsourcing. How can open source software work with a bunch of strangers adding code? How can citizen scientists provide accurate data? How can airbnb provide a good hospitality service? How can uber be safe and on time? It's all just our natural prejudice towards people who aren't "qualified" or experienced. Humans are pretty terrible at judging qualification. Either they'll use some irrational subconscious criteria like the person dressing appropriately or appearing confident, or they'll rely on faulty measurements like scores on some test or having some sort of certification. Sure these are all useful to some extent but we have to start realizing that design has a limit, especially when you enter fields governed by things other than hard science.
    • Nimitz14 11y ago
      > Think about it - the first and most definitive, accessible source on any subject you don't know anything about, is something strangers on the Internet can collaboratively edit, troll, or subtlely subvert. That's not true. Go to this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_celebrities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_celebrities pick a list and add yourself into it. Within an hour your change will have been reverted. This claim that anybody can edit wikipedia is bullshit and rather annoying.
      • DanBC 11y ago
        You've pointed out one page that has good monitoring. There are plenty of pages that don't have anybody watching them where changes can be made.
        • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
          Still the point is valid - the wildcard "anybody can edit" is not at all true, for many of the most 'followed' pages. Which are the one that are most interesting to change. I've had old company listings disappear because they had no links. The company is gone! History! Nothing to link to. So that meant some busybody made it their job to delete that piece.
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I disagree, though we may be living in different Internets :). At least for me, Wikipedia was an obvious continuation of everything I saw on-line when I was growing up. Wikipedia works like every reasonable Internet community - read: just fine as long as someone is not trying to make money on it, and as long as those attempts are actively and ruthlessly punished. For some the default picture of Internet is comments under a news article on some big portal. For me, the default picture of the Internet is Hacker News.
• swang 11y ago
  When the SOPA/PIPA protests happened in 2012, I was really surprised to learn that students were upset since all they used as a resource was Wikipedia. I mean for the most part I agree with the quoted articles in that Wikipedia is hard to "verify" other than what you believe sounds true. And sometimes this happens. 1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat It is a bit scary how much our source of information is just this one site source without decent "fact" checking other than turf war related reasons. Here is one: I am pretty certain that Alicia Keys was born in 1980 and not 1981 as her Wikipedia article says. I have no way to prove this based on Wikipedia standards and if you look on "the Internet" you sometimes see 1980 and sometimes see 1981. The editors who turfed her page at the time sided with the 1981 timeline. And how did they "prove" it was 1981? They showed links to some music related websites with articles about her saying she was born in that year. Completely ignoring alternative sources that said she was born in 1981. I mean there are certain explanations on why this happened: 1) A major publication cited her DOB as 1981, others followed suit. 2) Alicia keys' handlers want her to be a year younger than she is, so she told her PR people to make sure everyone says she was born a year younger. 3) Someone misheard she was born in 1981, wrote that down on Wikipedia, then everyone else just used Wikipedia as a reference. The problem I'm trying to get at is, Wikipedia is so popular its hard to figure out if people are just lazy and using it as a source, which perpetuates this cycle of "Fact F on Article A is true because of source S, Source S it turns out, used article A to look up Fact F and reprinted it without really fact checking F. So yeah, popular, but hard to determine how accurate. /rant.
  • varjag 11y ago
    > 1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat As illustrated in this useful infographic: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
    • cooper12 11y ago
      There's a short list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting
• mike_hearn 11y ago
  Well, Wikipedia is pretty famous for its fairly vicious politics, infighting and general difficulty of getting incorrect articles fixed if someone has decided to camp on them. Whenever I read it I'm constantly amazed that it works as well as it does, given that whenever I peer behind the curtain what's going on there is fairly appalling. I remember some years ago the wiki page for Bitcoin insisted it was a ponzi scheme. Wikipedia has a page that defines the essential elements of a ponzi scheme and Bitcoin didn't meet them, but no matter - edits to remove this statement were immediately reverted and diverted to an endless discussion page in which the camper in question couldn't be persuaded by any means, not logic, not evidence, not weight of people disagreeing. I see that these days the issue has been "resolved" by having an entire section called "ponzi scheme dispute" that consists merely of different pundits contradicting each other. Still, this is better than it used to be.
  • TuringTest 11y ago
    > these days the issue has been "resolved" by having an entire section called "ponzi scheme dispute" that consists merely of different pundits contradicting each other. IMHO that is a good thing more often that not. It means that someone who has heard the rumour will check Wikipedia and find a couple paragraphs about the subject, with links to the most trusted agreed-upon references about who said what. The alternative is not having the section and requiring those same readers to search their own way through the internet, without having any idea of what sources to trust, and likely getting only one side of the controversy.
    • mike_hearn 11y ago
      It's definitely a better situation than it was, insomuch as at least people can make up their mind about it. That said, call me a pedant, but the term has a clear definition. The statement is either right or wrong. Being able to cite people who merely assert an opinion doesn't make them automatically worth having on an encyclopedia page. As examples, the wiki page for Barack Obama doesn't mention the claim that he's a Muslim or that his birth certificate was faked anywhere .... because it's factually incorrect nonsense that shouldn't be on a wiki page. Ditto for the page on climate change. But this sort of thing seems very hit or miss. Whether pages can be kept factual or not seems to depend just as much on whether someone reverts every change to the page, as the facts themselves.
• vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  My recollections from Wikipedia back in 2005 were quite impressive given the massive scale and open contribution barriers of the project. In fact, the reception is just as split today as it was back then. Especially in light of increased grievances regarding how Wikipedia's bureaucracy operates.
  • moomin 11y ago
    Indeed. There's studies in how to bias an article whilst maintaining the illusion of NPOV (simple example: if you support X, always add an adjective when describing its detractors, but leave supporters unqualified). There's also pretty well documented cases of people with an axe to grind on specific subjects locking an article in their favour.
    • thekodols 11y ago
      Do you by any chance have links to those studies? I'm building a crowdsourced platform, so that info could be super-valuable to me.
      • vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        It seems like a case of the fallacy generally known as "poisoning the well". You can start there.
      • moomin 11y ago
        Sorry, I don't. I recall reading something very intelligent about the edit war between Israeli and Palestinian sympathisers, but google didn't yield it up. (In general terms, it's quite hard to google stuff /about/ wikipedia.)
    • acqq 11y ago
      One special kind of bias I'm aware of is something obviously done by religious fanatics who invest significant amount of energy adding "a religion section" to every famous person's biography and formulating and selecting his/hers statements as the support for the belief even when the statement was obviously made as the opposite. As the most prominent example, the religious people take a deep care not to have this quote of Einstein on his main Wikipedia page: "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends." The goal is obvious: to present "the smartest people" as believers, "one of them."
• austenallred 11y ago
  I wonder how successful Wikipedia would have been if it weren't for being the first result in almost every Google query.
  • cooper12 11y ago
    How do you think it got that way? Honest question, I don't know much about SEO.
    • notahacker 11y ago
      It has a huge advantage of brand recognition, which means it's often the first result people click on and the first page someone links to if they think their readers might want a term defined. You know it's probably not the best description of the topic, but it will tend to give a text-based answer that tend to strike a reasonable balance between length and detail, be easy to navigate, have input from both sides of the debate if there is a prominent debate, and definitely won't try to install malware on your computer or play video in your face. For reasons related to the above, afaik Google has never tried to nerf its prominence in search results, unlike profit-seeking content farms. That's probably an underestimated reason for its SEO success as well.
      • Kurtz79 11y ago
        Well, you are saying (correctly, IMHO) that for users doing a search, without previous knowledge of what are the best sources of information on a particular subject, will choose Wikipedia in a list of possible links for the reasons you mention. On these assumptions I don't see any reason why Google should "nerf" its results, since they effectively present what the user is most likely to be looking for :)
        • notahacker 11y ago
          That was what I meant by "for related reasons". The flip side of that is many of the commercial content farms that Google intentionally nerfed usually gave people exactly what they were looking for too. And on a related note, "what the user is most likely to be looking for" is path dependent. Unlike other content sites, I rarely bother using Wikipedia search, because I can invariably find the page by Googling from my browser. If the relevant Wikipedia result wasn't consistently on the first page of Google, I'd tend to go direct to WP when actively looking for Wikipedia articles like I do with other less search-optimised but often superior websites. And if that was the case, Wikipedia would almost never be the result I wanted when Googling subject matter, much like although I'm often interested in BBC News, finding the Beeb's take on a subject is never the reason for me using Google News.
• ctolsen 11y ago
  "It’s hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment run by utopian radicals." I have absolutely no recollection of this. Wikipedia has had some trouble, just like any other successful project, but has in my view been widely regarded as a pretty successful project that everyone wants to have around (unless you sold encyclopedias).
  • libraryatnight 11y ago
    I also have no recollection of this. 10 years ago I was in college and Wikipedia was ubiquitous enough that every professor had a policy about its use. It never seemed doomed, maybe it seemed to be finding its place, but to me not doomed.
    • clinta 11y ago
      In my experience, 10 years ago the policy was "Don't use it". It was treated as untrustworthy, despite other encylopedias being acceptable. I haven't been in school in a while so I can't say if attitudes have changed. But I'd hope that modern instructors would consider any encyclopedias to be too generic for citing in research, but acceptable for understanding the basics of a topic.
      • josephmx 11y ago
        2 years ago it was banned in my sixth form still, but the sources at the bottom were allowed. The principle was "anyone can edit it, therefore only trust things with multiple sources". A reasonable policy really.
        • zeveb 11y ago
          > 2 years ago it was banned in my sixth form still, but the sources at the bottom were allowed. That's a really good lesson about sources in general. One can't even trust a primary source, except as an indicator about what someone at close hand thought to write down; it and everything which references it will have biases, slant and perspective. There is such a thing as truth, but it can only be approximated.
• reitanqild 11y ago
  10 years ago I was optimistic about Wikipedia. For me Wikipedia and Stackoverflow are now only reference material; - I rarely even consider contributing. I still pay a bit once in a while for the fundraisers but my feeling is that will decrease as well.
• hvs 11y ago
  Wikipedia is what convinced everyone that you could "crowd-source" everything. That inevitably spawned all sorts of doomed experiments. But the only ones who considered Wikipedia a "doomed experiment" were those who had a vested interest in that being true.
  • drakenot 11y ago
    What are some of the other success stories of the crowd-source movement besides Wikipedia? StackOverflow / StackExchange comes mind perhaps.
    • smokeyj 11y ago
      Linux and open source in general
    • astazangasta 11y ago
      Open Street Maps, IMDb. Heck, Reddit and HN. This is how the net works: we build it together.
    • lcswi 11y ago
      Openstreetmap, freedb, musicbrainz, random totally illegal torrent site with a focus.
• cwyers 11y ago
  > There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it provides accurate, comprehensive information to billions of people every day. Comprehensive? What?
  • codingdave 11y ago
    Billions? What?
    • cwyers 11y ago
      That's... a very good point.
      • TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Some random Internet stat says there are about 3 billion users on the Internet. It's reasonable to assume that Wikipedia gets used by at 1-2 billion at minimum.
        • cwyers 11y ago
          Daily?
          • TeMPOraL 11y ago
            Right. Reading comprehension failure on my part, sorry :<.
        • felipeerias 11y ago
          No need to assume: they report having about 400 million unique users per month. https://reportcard.wmflabs.org https://reportcard.wmflabs.org
    • a3_nm 11y ago
      https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ indicates 453M unique visitors in the month of April 2015, so most certainly the claim of "billions of people every day" is wrong by at least one order of magnitude.
• pbreit 11y ago
  The current example of similar style "claim chowder" is probably Bob Lutz' commentary on Tesla. And I would do the same thing I did back then re: Wikipedia: acknowledge but discount.
• EA 11y ago
  Upper management sent out an email my workforce telling us "to beware the Wikis". Their stance was that since anyone can edit it, it can not be trusted and that it could potentially host malicious content.
• antonmaju 11y ago
  Long-long time ago, there was Microsoft Encarta
• skrowl 11y ago
  Today it's just widely considered a very popular but doomed experiment. Wikipedia is corrupt as hell and the power of editing important pages lies in the hands of a few elites.
  • bnegreve 11y ago
    > corrupt as hell and the power of editing important pages lies in the hands of a few elites. Are other medias better in that respect?
• arafa 11y ago
  It would seem there's a conflict of interest between Wikipedia and those that report on it, since there's some overlap there. Reminds me of the old Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
• yarrel 11y ago
  Clickbait title is clickbait. And wrong.
• davidgerard 11y ago
  The talk was that it was doomed, but from inside it was blindingly obvious that, "if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia." I said so at the time: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/277688.html http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/277688.html
• oldmanjay 11y ago
  This article is essentially an approximation of a Jay-Z song, celebrating the triumph over adversity and haters. If Wikipedia started out selling crack the similarities would be overwhelming. Good on ya, Wikipedia! You've come a long way up.
• kingmanaz 11y ago
  Wikipedia has succeeded in allowing the victors to write history. Nothing damaging to the status quo escapes the paid Hasbara editors.
• panglott 11y ago
  To be fair, pretty much everything on the Internet in 2005 was a doomed experiment. Plenty of them have beat the odds.
• beagle3 11y ago
  Personal anecdote: I was in a location where Jimmy Wales introduced himself in 2007 with a simple, "My name is Jimmy Wales, I started Wikipedia". Some 50 very senior people from many industries and professions all said "thank you!" enthusiastically in response. It wasn't considered a failure or doomed in any circle I frequented 10 years ago, and I did a lot (academia, business, entrepreneurship, makers, more) -- and it wasn't so with anyone of the "general population" that I associated with. The only less-than-positive remarks I've heard about Wikipedia where from people who snarked "but anyone anywhere can change a value any time, how can you ever trust that?" Which is, of course, true -- but a variation of which applies to e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica just as well.
• MrPatan 11y ago
  I never had the impression this was true 10 years ago. Source: I was there