10 ms·

The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

124 points by mdlincoln 11y ago

thieving_magpie 11y ago
Honestly they could never add another page or edit and I'd still be going there for the next decade.
LoSboccacc 11y ago
Eh, it went from a interesting novelty, to a incredible community, to a petty bureaucracy. My personal experience is that under the crowdsourcing model the well meaning non experts outnumber the real experts and it's hard to police them while treating all as equals. In short, democracy brought content toward mediocrity. Now it's dangerous to use it but for a cursory introduction to any in depth content, while non factual content is polarised toward whatever the bureaucrats decide it's a neutral tone, which may or may not work.
- placeybordeaux 11y ago
  I would say it's still the best singular repository of human knowledge. There is nothing to say that it won't deal with the bureaucratic issues.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    I'd go for a second place after the google index itself
- TheGrassyKnoll 11y ago
  > interesting novelty, to a incredible community, to a petty > bureaucracy. One line summary of the history of the United States ?
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    It may be a property of democracies scaling, the pattern is indeed common.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    It may be a property of democracies scaling, the pattern is indeed common.
- johan_larson 11y ago
  Good, fast, cheap: choose at most two. High quality, large system, lightweight dev process: choose at most two.
  - bashinator 11y ago
    Totally agreed. "Pick two" is a good archetype from which one can direct the decision-making process of those "above" one's self in an organization.
elbigbad 11y ago
Abstract Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.
mangeletti 11y ago
Wikipedia has problems, but I think it's worth noting that Wikipedia has enough content to fill 2,200x volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica[1], or, a small library. I don't think it's necessarily an existential problem that the public image of Wikipedia's relevance is reaching a sort of "trough of disillusionment" due to some of its governance issues. It has simply reached a scale where it faces a new set or hurdles to overcome. Personally, I've learned more from Wikipedia than I did in high school and college combined, and considering that, despite all of Wikipedia's problems, the content therein is more accurate and verifiable than the corrupted corpus whence our primary and secondary educations are derived, I really appreciate its existence. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes
- placeybordeaux 11y ago
  How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.
  - mangeletti 11y ago
    I'm suggesting that there hasn't been as much of a decline in community as there has been a decline in the available encyclopedia-relevant information left in the world that isn't already published on Wikipedia. Also, the public perception is related to the drop of users and vice versa. There has been a lot of negative press lately, specifically related to problems in the community.
    - placeybordeaux 11y ago
      The decline in number of editors seems to have started at 2007 given figure 1. I wouldn't tie the amount of negative press to the decline in editors. The point about there being less new stuff to write about seems apt, what do you think about the counter points that the article had? "First, as noted above, the vast majority of articles in Wikipedia are still below community standards for “good” articles. Second, underrepresented groups still find it challenging to join. For instance, one study found that only 9% of edits are made by female editors, and that articles of particular interest to women are shorter than articles of interest to men (Lam, 2011). Until editors are representative of the population of potential contributors, it is difficult to argue that the socialization practices are sufficiently effective."
_pmf_ 11y ago
I think Wikipedia will become the best case study in how bureaucracy cripples a working society. 80% of the effort of creating new content is following byzantine processes and procedures. While I admit that these processes work for consistency of content, I cannot in the least observe any noticeable quality improvements, and the reason is that valuable contributors with deep domain knowledge will not invest the time to satisfy the OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.
- digler999 11y ago
  > OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger. Is it really necessary to use mental illnesses in a pejorative way to make your point ? How do you think it makes people feel who legitimately suffer from those illnesses ?
  - mahouse 11y ago
    It should make them aware that they should refrain from holding any position where they have to deal with people. I am sure you have never edited Wikipedia; the amount of users and admins that more than obviously suffer from autism spectrum disorders and OCDs is very, very high, and they are crippling the bureaucratic processes of the wiki. I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct" but I think just looking the other way is not helping anybody.
    - Retra 11y ago
      Maybe you should refrain from trying to diagnose mental disorders by pretending to analyze Wikipedia editor culture. That's not even a disorder, it's just plain stupid.
      - Marcomasino 11y ago
        Aw, come on, lighten up, it's just an online forum. Maybe people develop Asperger traits from working in this field. Like one time I asked a college did he know what the time was, he replied YES and walked off :)
rloc 11y ago
I tried once or twice to edit articles but was quickly rejected by editors that usually believe they sort of "own" the content. I've quickly become demotivated as explained in the analysis and never contributed again. Another problem is that when you think you've made an important and useful update you're never sure when someone will roll it back. Some are spending a very big chunk of their time to make sure articles stay as they wish to. Being a former or an active editor on an article is not always related to how much you know about the topic but Wikipedia favorites the biggest editors. There is very little chance to convince if you're new unless you commit to spend a lot of your valuable time contributing which is not possible for everyone and not a good idea for most. A very hard problem to solve. Wikipedia is still great though with no real better alternative.
- runn1ng 11y ago
  I have learned that in order to actually contribute to Wikipedia, you have to treat it less like a collaboration and more like a battle. You can't just contribute and consider it done. You have to be prepare to fight your way through, engage in edit wars, learn about the battlefield (the bureaucracy, the article sourcing) and in the end, if you fight long enough, you usually win. You have to repeatedly, over and over, show that the other person (who 'owns' the article) is wrong, he will revert it, so you do a little dance of reverting and back, then you have to try to dig up some rule from the ruleset, and as I said, you will usually win because the other person gives up. Or he doesn't, but then some higher editor stumps him.
  - ars 11y ago
    You are correct, and you know what happens? The people LEAST qualified to contribute contribute the most. Why? Because they have too much time on their hands, and can battle endlessly. People with real knowledge usually have better things to do.
    - Zitrax 11y ago
      It is indeed a problem to not have enough time. Just throwing in some facts in an article is often not good enough, it must fit with the flow of the article and not repeat things that has already been said and be in order, and with references etc etc. Some people might not have the time for that additional work to make the contribution "good enough". I haven't followed Wikipedia for a while but I assume that some rejected changes are due to that people throw in some changes that might be correct but are not worked on enough to fit in with the rest of the article. And one can't in general assume that someone else will do that work for you. Than the easy way out is often a revert instead of leaving a more unfinished article live. I did most of my contributions to Wikipedia when I had that extra time.
tonocm 11y ago
Can someone give them a standard LaTeX template please
shmerl 11y ago
Wikipedia is a hit and miss. After contributing, some things stick, but others can be removed without good reason, and wasting one's time on bureaucratic fights to restore that content is simply very tiring and after some point it becomes annoying enough, so I stopped trying to restore such things most of the time.
viggity 11y ago
should be titled "The rise and decline in Wikipedia editor counts". Wikipedia may have its political issues, but to say it is "in decline" seems off. There is only so much that can be written and only so many new things can happen to document. Obviously no hard limit exists, but still. If it was to be in general decline as the title conotates, I'd expect to see overall traffic lower over time and while I searched in earnest for 10 minutes, I couldn't find that data (alexa is pay service now, wtf?). But have a hard time seeing actual traffic declining.
tedks 11y ago
I find it hard to believe that Wikipedia is "in decline" when the article I wrote about the niche area of CS I worked in during undergrad has a life of its own now. People continue to add to it and now it has a fair deal of content and information that I was unaware of. If that's what decline looks like, I'm fine with it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Wikipedia used to be a large part of my web experience. Now I might end up on Wikipedia 2 or 3 times a week. That said, DBPedia (RDF data derived from Wikipedia) is useful and I rely on it.
zkhalique 11y ago
Isn't this more describing a typical s-curve with regard to the information being mostly filled out? Wikipedia isn't a news site.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  Actually most of the popular articles for readers and editors are news-based. However, the site, while barely adequate as an encyclopedia, is terrible for news presentation.
Animats 11y ago
So the peak was in 2007. I think I know why. In 2006-2007, there was an organized push on Wikipedia by pro-Israel editors to make Israel-related articles favorable to Israel. This provoked some major controversies, especially because at least one of the pro-Israel editors was a Wikipedia admin and abused their authority. (Eventually, they were "desysopped" for that, but it took years.) For a sense of this, see [1], including all the archived talk pages. Wikipedia dealt with the problem by strictly applying the "reliable sources" rule. It became the practice that every single fact in Israel-related articles must be cited to a reliable source and properly footnoted. Anything that wasn't was deleted as "uncited" or "synthesis" by one side or the other. Until that time, articles often had text which wasn't cited to a specific source. The tough citation requirements anchored the dispute to factual information, and, though the process was painful, worked. The controversies settled down and the edit warring slowed to a crawl. Those strict standards gradually spread to the rest of Wikipedia. Now, everything had to be footnoted like a doctoral thesis. Few people outside of academia write that way. This results in a big hammer coming down on someone new wanting to write an article about their new favorite DJ. Does he have mainstream press coverage that isn't from a press release, and did you cite it? If not, he's out of here. Until you learn to write in that strict style, you can't contribute much to Wikipedia. For people used to blithering on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, this is hard. That's what's discouraging new editors. Writing for Wikipedia is now like contributing to a major open source project like the Linux kernel. There's a big body of code, and your changes have to fit in well and be justified. That's necessary. Wikipedia faces a constant incoming stream of PR, vandalism, and general crap. (Check out the ever-changing list of recent changes.[2]) The petty vandalism is mostly reverted by AIs now; ClueBot, driven by an ANN and trained on known vandalism, is quite good. The other problems take human attention, by volunteers tired of seeing similar annoyances over and over. For the other extreme, of writing about anything with no quality control, see 4chan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israeli_West_Bank_barrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israeli_West_Bank_barrier [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges
- bhouston 11y ago
  More details on that Israel controversy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_on_Wikipedia#Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Middle_East_Reporting_in_America#CAMERA_campaign_in_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Midd...
return0 11y ago
I think that's the best you can do with crowdsourcing. To go beyond you would need a structured community. My bet is, however, on an AI that will build the articles automatically.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  You can do a lot more with crowdsourced models. Crowdsourcing content != wiki. My site (see bio) is a more structured way to build news and biography content that IMHO gives better presentation and less editor stress than the equivalent Wikipedia pages.
mtw 11y ago
I rely on wikipedia like everyone on hacker news but I can't help thinking that changing their status to benefit corporation like Kickstarter would improve the structure and also their finances. Non-profit closes a lot of doors, especially growth opportunities. A renewed status could bring new mobile apps, tie-ins with media companies, perhaps an open API available to third-party developers etc.
js8 11y ago
I think the reason for decline (and bureaucracy) is actually a lack of democracy. For example, there is no way to recall administrators. Also, opinion of majority is sometimes dismissed as not being good consensus, which only helps people in established cliques. Democracy is a rule that ensures fairness, but senior administrators do not always want it. Secondary problem is IMHO the caste nature of administrator privileges. I think if the privileges were more separated and it would be possible to recall them, this would reduce the ossification of the hierarchy. I also think Wikipedia could benefit from having a stable branch into which the changes from unstable branch could be regularly reviewed for addition. It would be nice if unstable branch could return to the idea that someone can add things even if they are not perfect or immediately sourced; IMHO experts can always add sources later for content that is already present, and it would give them some incentive to contribute. That being said, Wikipedia is amazing! I would really like to thank to people who put some work into it.
- rspeer 11y ago
  I'm not so concerned about recalling administrators. Administrators who do blatantly bad things sometimes end up losing their position, and sometimes just end up with enough people angry at them that they leave. What I'm concerned about is that there's no way to get new administrators, which is what it would take to bring in new ideas that break up the unnecessary bureaucracy. The process that used to create them got entirely paralyzed, both by ridiculous inflation of metrics (I saw the edit count requirements -- they call them suggestions but they're requirements -- increase by a factor of 20 while I participated), and by the requirement to convince a supermajority of long-standing editors to vote for you. I became an administrator in '06, and by '08 I would never have been considered. Basically, you have to edit every part of the encyclopedia while upsetting nobody, then inflate your already prolific accomplishments to get your foot in the door, without looking like a liar. This is impossible. Old administrators (like me) lose interest. New ones don't take their place. The work is being increasingly done by the most obsessive people, and by faceless bots.
sparkzilla 11y ago
An interesting paper that basically says that the number of editors is declining due to the difficulty in keeping and retaining new users. Any person who has tried to edit Wikipedia will know that aggressive rule-wielding wikifanatics immediately try to kill newcomer edits using whatever tools they have to hand. But it's important to realize that Wikipedia's ambiguous rules and arbitrary decisions are not a bug, but a feature, giving power to incumbent editors. While most new editors just give up, the ones who do stay on and fight become the same kind of fanatics. Many people say that the toxic community is the problem, but the community issues IMHO are actually a symptom of poor software design. The wiki's open structure and article-based format, which allows the most powerful groups of editors to "own" pages, gives power to people who are interested in keeping and retaining control, rather than those who are interested in sharing knowledge. The power is centralized in these gatekeepers, leading to all the problems we see on the site.[1] This is also the reason the Gender Gap exists.[2] The solution is to redesign the software to devolve power from entrenched groups, but this will never happen because there is no leadership, and the people who have the power are the survivors/fanatics that actually like the current system. Because they write the rules they will not give their power up easily. As for the quality arguments below: without new users and continuous evolution in software development, content presentation, and editorial review processes, the site cannot maintain quality. I believe that it is impossible for any wiki system to maintain a high quality anyway: the amount of time to improve articles to high quality is exponential, while the number of editors and work available is linear. Even in the best circumstances, something has to give. If the number of editors is actually declining then quality problems may also increase exponentially. [1]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ [2]http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedia/ http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedi...
- phicoh 11y ago
  Comparing wikipedia to openstreetmap, it seems to be a community problem, not a software problem. An open structure means that you have to watch what others are doing constantly. But that doesn't explain the huge number of stories where reasonable edits are reverted. That can only happen because the wikipedia (editor) community is ok with that. My conclusion is that wikipedia forgot to redefine itself. Originally, wikipedia was a summary based on existing literature. But pretty soon users took wikipedia way beyond that. Using it to document stuff, instead of summarising stuff documented else where. Most wikis are a tool to collectively create documentation. And somehow wikipedia is stuck in older world, and not what most wikipedia users expect it to be. My conclusion, until the project reforms and allows original content, I won't contribute.
sandworm101 11y ago
There is a finite pattern whenever one relies on volunteers. Most will come and go, but a few hang around and rise to the top. Lacking renumeration, they tend towards self-gratification. Some handle extra responsibility well, but others start building their own little castles from which to berate all below. This process is inevitable once you have multiple ranks of volunteers. I've seen this with charities, open source projects, and it was a constant problem when I worked in film/tv (interns). Things always go south when you have volunteers bossing around other volunteers. Newcomers show up eager but depart quickly, normally after some dressing down by a more senior volunteer. Without pay in dispute, they rarely make complaint. They just stop showing up. And who can blame them? The answer is to keep all volunteers equal. That's probably impossible for a project like wikipedia, but they could certainly do more to ensure new volunteers are not so bullied by the old guard.
- brillenfux 11y ago
  This should get more attention. I'm almost certain you have the source of the problem right. I just wouldn't be so sure and quick about your solution. It would be really nice to have more extensive work on how to mitigate these kinds of dynamics as I'm certain we will see more and more of these projects and I'd like them to be healthy for a change. Humanity: Evolve! ;-)
- DanBC 11y ago
  That's different enough from VestedContributor that you should give it a name and write it up. http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor VestedContributors think the rules can be bent for them because they've been around so long and done so much good work.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    Write up what? Sandworm's syndrome of the progressive dysfunction inherent to hierarchical volunteer communities? Talk to anyone who has worked as a volunteer coordinator. They see this all the time. As for keeping volunteers equal to avoid the problem, that need not mean keeping everyone identical. Leadership roles can rotate, with finite term limits. That way every leader today knows they will be the underling tomorrow. (This also keeps everyone interested and motivated as nobody is every stuck on one task/job).
lovelearning 11y ago
Somehow OpenStreetMaps has managed to remain democratic, welcoming to newcomers and yet remarkably accurate without much (any?) moderation, despite being almost as old as Wikipedia. I've always wondered how it manages that.
- spb 11y ago
  OpenStreetMaps' content is virtually 100% objective (with only political borders and names being potentially contentious).
  - viewer5 11y ago
    What's there to argue about over names? Pardon my ignorance, I'm very poorly-travelled.
    - briandh 11y ago
      For instance, do you refer to a particular group of uninhabited islands as "Senkaku Islands, Japan", "Diaoyu Islands, People's Republic of China", or "Diaoyutai Islands, Republic of China"? Some people are very passionate about the answer. Is the political entity on Formosa "Taiwan", "Taiwan Province, Republic of China", "Taiwan Province, People's Republic of China", or "Taiwan, Province of China"?
  - lovelearning 11y ago
    Political contention isn't as big a problem, as spam and inaccuracy. Those are the problems that make such sites generally unwelcoming towards newcomers. Both Wikipedia and Google Maps demonstrate this. OSM doesn't.
  - frenchy 11y ago
    It's not 100% objective, but for simple things, it mostly is. If you hop on the mailing lists you will find all sorts of people bickering about whether it should be `shop=ice_cream` or `amenity=ice_cream` or `restauraunt=ice_cream` as they fight over their self-made taxonomies. At some point, I think, things will inevitably change. But for the moment, there's so many obvious things to work on that the confusing/subjective things don't really pop up too much.
Paul_S 11y ago
I used to contribute a lot when I was younger and had more free time but I might have kept that up if not for the change that happened in the late 00s when the higher ups decided that wikipedia has too much content and started streamlining by simply deleting whole sections. I am not talking about when citations became a stricter requirement and the quality in general became more of a focus - that came later. I think it's more sane nowadays but I'm too disillusioned now. I hate its approach of "if it's not intelligible to or of interest to a layman then it needs to be streamlined".
- contingencies 11y ago
  Exact same experience here, though I'm still an admin and contribute here and there, the politicking has deeply sapped my enthusiasm.
kevindeasis 11y ago
It would be cool to have a Wikipedia spinoff but articles have to be explained like I'm five. You might get a lot of contributors from that. It's important because some articles have a lot of jargon and feels like it was written by a bureaucrat. SOME people are only willing to invest a few minutes of their time.
- Animats 11y ago
  That's the Simple English Wikipedia.[1] [1] https://simple.wikipedia.org https://simple.wikipedia.org
  - kevindeasis 11y ago
    Good to know, that is pretty cool. I wish they had more stuff.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
IvyMike 11y ago
The article raises an important point that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere in the comments: revert bots can be terrible. For example, I was once reading about a song, and at the bottom there was a link to a youtube video. The link was broken, so I replaced it with a working youtube link. The edit was immediately reverted by a bot that was anti-all-links-to-youtube. Fine, maybe that is a problem. But it's also a problem that the anti-youtube bot replaced my youtube link with a youtube link. When I went to the bot's page, it was filled with comments from dozens of others who had made similar edits that were blindly reverted. The bot author, who took a "it's me against the world" stance, proclaiming that his bot was doing the only sensible thing, and that he was "sick of arguing". As the paper proclaims, this immediate negative reinforcement had long term consequences of turning away many good faith editors.
reagle 11y ago
Note that this is from 2013.
bachmeier 11y ago
It's easy to dismiss this as "oh well, it's not perfect". The problem arises when you see something that is factually incorrect but cannot change it, and you know others rely on it. I've noticed a number of wrong, or just not precisely correct, things on Wikipedia, so I seldom click on those links when they appear in a search result. I've never used it all that much, to be honest, but the information hiding aspect is what makes it so dangerous. Allow incorrect information to appear on the site and then explain why it's incorrect. Allow information on the site that might be incorrect, so that others can investigate further. But presenting the material as if it is correct, because there is a quality control mechanism in place, is simply dishonest. If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, it would not bother me at all. No information would be lost. It would reappear elsewhere on the internet.
tokenadult 11y ago
As mentioned in the other recent thread about Wikikpedia, I am a Wikipedian. I joined active editing in 2010, that is after the heyday of welcoming new editors, but long before most articles on important topics were anywhere near to being well sourced. I have tried to clean up the mess on some articles, and am a winner or co-winner of two Million Awards[1] for fixing up high-page-view articles. But how I got the awards basically illustrates the problem. One article I fixed I wrote entirely off-line in a text editor file, while commenting on the talk page of the previous lousy version of the article, and then I dropped in the new article text all at once. Every previous time when I tried piecemeal editing of that article, my best edits would be reverted, while other stuff that was entirely made up and without reliable sources would be inserted into the article. The second article I worked on fixing up was a collaborative effort. Again, I started with discussion on the article talk page. My first few edits were reverted, contrary to reliable sources, by editors who exerted "ownership" on the article but who refused to look up sources. Later I was joined by two other editors, and one of the other two made it his project to rewrite the article from top to bottom for one of the Wikipedia editing contests. He liberally threw out old unsourced crap and then layered in new, well sourced text. I mentioned on the article talk page I'd like to fix a few sections of the article, and proofread all of it, and after he deleted the old crap, I put in new good content in the sections I worked on and checked all of his references throughout the article. The former editors who let the article be bad for years slithered away. It's a slog and a struggle like this every time someone tries to improve Wikipedia--the established editing culture includes snap judgments without looking up reliable sources. AFTER EDIT: I also mentioned in the previous thread about Wikipedia that I hope sometime soon a philanthropist funds a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize to put to the test what could be possible in building an accurate, well edited free, online encyclopedia if some new projects began and tried out some new models of project management and perhaps some new software. (I personally don't have any trouble dealing with Wikipedia's software, but I have been using various kinds of markup languages since the 1980s in earlier editing work.) The only way to know what's possible is to try to challenge the incumbent project with some competition, I think. Even if Wikipedia then just ended up winning a prize with reasonable criteria, it would still become better, and we would all have a better idea about what works and what doesn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Million_Award https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Million_Award
smithkl42 11y ago
I'll toss my own experience out there. I've contributed edits to maybe a dozen or so different Wikipedia articles, and would like to contribute more, but it's hard to get past a couple of hurdles. The main one is the byzantine and archaic editing tools. The markdown language that Wikipedia uses is a PITA to learn, and following a discussion on the talk page is almost impossible. Wikipedia presents a wonderful UX for browsing and reading. It has perhaps the worst UX I've ever seen for a beginner who wants to make a contribution. Beyond that, I spent a significant amount of time editing some articles on a fringe religious group that I had studied extensively. (Apart from the group's own leaders, I arguably knew more about the group than anyone else in the world.) But the group that was the focus of the article kept backing out my edits and replacing them with propaganda. It was simply too much work to fight them (especially with the horrible edit/discussion tools), they were a lot more motivated than I was, and I eventually gave up.
- massysett 11y ago
  This is the worst thing about Wikipedia. Experts with actual knowledge are discouraged and ridiculed while those who have built up longevity through tenacity retain control even if they know nothing.
  - gedy 11y ago
    Sounds like most companies I've worked for :-)
- quadrangle 11y ago
  Talk pages should not themselves be wiki pages. This is the result of all that MVP stuff people go on about. Wikipedia had wikis, they didn't have discussion boards. They needed discussion boards. MVP was to use another wiki page for discussions, and that evolved into the stupidness we see today. Talk and discussion are completely different process than collaborative editing, and they demand different tools. I also agree about the markup (it's markUP. "Markdown" is a specific type of markup language which, despite its flaws, probably is the easiest and now most common one)
quanticle 11y ago
For the record, this paper was published in 2013, in case anyone's looking at it and wondering why its conclusions seem awfully obvious today. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664 http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664
CM30 11y ago
An odd thought, but perhaps the decline in editor numbers also has something to do with an increase in the number of wikis in general, mostly aimed at specific audiences and about specific subjects. Back in the early/mid 00s, Wikipedia was the site you'd contribute to if you wanted to write general encyclopedia entries about something that's now seen as fairly niche (like say, a certain TV show, film series, game franchise, etc), and from there you might become interested in editing other pages on less specialised subjects. But now, thousands of wikis exist, about every subject under the sun. Many of those are very popular, have more welcoming communities, etc. So people don't join the general site any more. If they care for say, Star Wars, they join Wookiepedia. If they care for Pokemon, it'd be Bulbapedia. Or one of the many others listed here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWikiRule http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWikiRule
- Animats 11y ago
  That's helped take some of the load off Wikipedia, and may be responsible for some of the decline in number of editors. Wikipedia used to have a big problem with fancruft - vast amounts of detail about some popular culture icon. There's an article for every Pokemon. There have been attempts to create articles for every episode of popular shows, and every minor One Piece character. There's pushback on that, and general agreement now on how much is too much. The fanatical fans now go to to Wikia or TVTropes, where they can write endlessly on their pet subjects without having to cite reliable third party sources. That's a good thing. You don't need the heavy scrutiny of Wikipedia on those subject.
ignostic 11y ago
Wikipedia feels like a piece of software that's experienced massive scope creep. It's huge. People have pet pieces they're emotionally attached to. It's so massive and trying to do so much that it's hard to even tell how best to improve it or where to start. For every "bug" (bad piece of info) that's fixed, we push 50 new bugs (and tons of new and correct info, of course). I've stopped editing because it just feels like a drop in the pond every time I do. When I fix obvious bias it just reappears by the editors with ulterior motives. And I just don't have the energy to fight them on it. I've stopped reading as much because I've learned that for any topic there are much better and more thorough sources. Economics and medicine in particular have very little... quality control on Wikipedia. With that said it's still a fantastic source for an overview of a topic that I know nothing about, especially for non-controversial topics. Wikipedia will live on as a good starting place for deep research and a quick explanation for quick questions. There just aren't enough editors to make it into the "sum of human knowledge" some people want it to be.
Kinnard 11y ago
As an early wikipedian who doesn't edit much anymore I can corroborate some of the assertions in this paper.

124 points by mdlincoln 11y ago

Honestly they could never add another page or edit and I'd still be going there for the next decade.

Eh, it went from a interesting novelty, to a incredible community, to a petty bureaucracy. My personal experience is that under the crowdsourcing model the well meaning non experts outnumber the real experts and it's hard to police them while treating all as equals. In short, democracy brought content toward mediocrity. Now it's dangerous to use it but for a cursory introduction to any in depth content, while non factual content is polarised toward whatever the bureaucrats decide it's a neutral tone, which may or may not work.

placeybordeaux 11y ago
I would say it's still the best singular repository of human knowledge. There is nothing to say that it won't deal with the bureaucratic issues.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  I'd go for a second place after the google index itself
TheGrassyKnoll 11y ago
> interesting novelty, to a incredible community, to a petty > bureaucracy. One line summary of the history of the United States ?
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  It may be a property of democracies scaling, the pattern is indeed common.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  It may be a property of democracies scaling, the pattern is indeed common.
johan_larson 11y ago
Good, fast, cheap: choose at most two. High quality, large system, lightweight dev process: choose at most two.
- bashinator 11y ago
  Totally agreed. "Pick two" is a good archetype from which one can direct the decision-making process of those "above" one's self in an organization.

elbigbad 11y ago

Abstract Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.

mangeletti 11y ago

Wikipedia has problems, but I think it's worth noting that Wikipedia has enough content to fill 2,200x volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica[1], or, a small library. I don't think it's necessarily an existential problem that the public image of Wikipedia's relevance is reaching a sort of "trough of disillusionment" due to some of its governance issues. It has simply reached a scale where it faces a new set or hurdles to overcome. Personally, I've learned more from Wikipedia than I did in high school and college combined, and considering that, despite all of Wikipedia's problems, the content therein is more accurate and verifiable than the corrupted corpus whence our primary and secondary educations are derived, I really appreciate its existence. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes

placeybordeaux 11y ago
How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.
- mangeletti 11y ago
  I'm suggesting that there hasn't been as much of a decline in community as there has been a decline in the available encyclopedia-relevant information left in the world that isn't already published on Wikipedia. Also, the public perception is related to the drop of users and vice versa. There has been a lot of negative press lately, specifically related to problems in the community.
  - placeybordeaux 11y ago
    The decline in number of editors seems to have started at 2007 given figure 1. I wouldn't tie the amount of negative press to the decline in editors. The point about there being less new stuff to write about seems apt, what do you think about the counter points that the article had? "First, as noted above, the vast majority of articles in Wikipedia are still below community standards for “good” articles. Second, underrepresented groups still find it challenging to join. For instance, one study found that only 9% of edits are made by female editors, and that articles of particular interest to women are shorter than articles of interest to men (Lam, 2011). Until editors are representative of the population of potential contributors, it is difficult to argue that the socialization practices are sufficiently effective."

_pmf_ 11y ago

I think Wikipedia will become the best case study in how bureaucracy cripples a working society. 80% of the effort of creating new content is following byzantine processes and procedures. While I admit that these processes work for consistency of content, I cannot in the least observe any noticeable quality improvements, and the reason is that valuable contributors with deep domain knowledge will not invest the time to satisfy the OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.

digler999 11y ago
> OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger. Is it really necessary to use mental illnesses in a pejorative way to make your point ? How do you think it makes people feel who legitimately suffer from those illnesses ?
- mahouse 11y ago
  It should make them aware that they should refrain from holding any position where they have to deal with people. I am sure you have never edited Wikipedia; the amount of users and admins that more than obviously suffer from autism spectrum disorders and OCDs is very, very high, and they are crippling the bureaucratic processes of the wiki. I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct" but I think just looking the other way is not helping anybody.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Maybe you should refrain from trying to diagnose mental disorders by pretending to analyze Wikipedia editor culture. That's not even a disorder, it's just plain stupid.
    - Marcomasino 11y ago
      Aw, come on, lighten up, it's just an online forum. Maybe people develop Asperger traits from working in this field. Like one time I asked a college did he know what the time was, he replied YES and walked off :)

rloc 11y ago

I tried once or twice to edit articles but was quickly rejected by editors that usually believe they sort of "own" the content. I've quickly become demotivated as explained in the analysis and never contributed again. Another problem is that when you think you've made an important and useful update you're never sure when someone will roll it back. Some are spending a very big chunk of their time to make sure articles stay as they wish to. Being a former or an active editor on an article is not always related to how much you know about the topic but Wikipedia favorites the biggest editors. There is very little chance to convince if you're new unless you commit to spend a lot of your valuable time contributing which is not possible for everyone and not a good idea for most. A very hard problem to solve. Wikipedia is still great though with no real better alternative.

runn1ng 11y ago
I have learned that in order to actually contribute to Wikipedia, you have to treat it less like a collaboration and more like a battle. You can't just contribute and consider it done. You have to be prepare to fight your way through, engage in edit wars, learn about the battlefield (the bureaucracy, the article sourcing) and in the end, if you fight long enough, you usually win. You have to repeatedly, over and over, show that the other person (who 'owns' the article) is wrong, he will revert it, so you do a little dance of reverting and back, then you have to try to dig up some rule from the ruleset, and as I said, you will usually win because the other person gives up. Or he doesn't, but then some higher editor stumps him.
- ars 11y ago
  You are correct, and you know what happens? The people LEAST qualified to contribute contribute the most. Why? Because they have too much time on their hands, and can battle endlessly. People with real knowledge usually have better things to do.
  - Zitrax 11y ago
    It is indeed a problem to not have enough time. Just throwing in some facts in an article is often not good enough, it must fit with the flow of the article and not repeat things that has already been said and be in order, and with references etc etc. Some people might not have the time for that additional work to make the contribution "good enough". I haven't followed Wikipedia for a while but I assume that some rejected changes are due to that people throw in some changes that might be correct but are not worked on enough to fit in with the rest of the article. And one can't in general assume that someone else will do that work for you. Than the easy way out is often a revert instead of leaving a more unfinished article live. I did most of my contributions to Wikipedia when I had that extra time.

tonocm 11y ago

Can someone give them a standard LaTeX template please

shmerl 11y ago

Wikipedia is a hit and miss. After contributing, some things stick, but others can be removed without good reason, and wasting one's time on bureaucratic fights to restore that content is simply very tiring and after some point it becomes annoying enough, so I stopped trying to restore such things most of the time.

viggity 11y ago

should be titled "The rise and decline in Wikipedia editor counts". Wikipedia may have its political issues, but to say it is "in decline" seems off. There is only so much that can be written and only so many new things can happen to document. Obviously no hard limit exists, but still. If it was to be in general decline as the title conotates, I'd expect to see overall traffic lower over time and while I searched in earnest for 10 minutes, I couldn't find that data (alexa is pay service now, wtf?). But have a hard time seeing actual traffic declining.

tedks 11y ago

I find it hard to believe that Wikipedia is "in decline" when the article I wrote about the niche area of CS I worked in during undergrad has a life of its own now. People continue to add to it and now it has a fair deal of content and information that I was unaware of. If that's what decline looks like, I'm fine with it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Wikipedia used to be a large part of my web experience. Now I might end up on Wikipedia 2 or 3 times a week. That said, DBPedia (RDF data derived from Wikipedia) is useful and I rely on it.

zkhalique 11y ago

Isn't this more describing a typical s-curve with regard to the information being mostly filled out? Wikipedia isn't a news site.

sparkzilla 11y ago
Actually most of the popular articles for readers and editors are news-based. However, the site, while barely adequate as an encyclopedia, is terrible for news presentation.

Animats 11y ago

So the peak was in 2007. I think I know why. In 2006-2007, there was an organized push on Wikipedia by pro-Israel editors to make Israel-related articles favorable to Israel. This provoked some major controversies, especially because at least one of the pro-Israel editors was a Wikipedia admin and abused their authority. (Eventually, they were "desysopped" for that, but it took years.) For a sense of this, see [1], including all the archived talk pages. Wikipedia dealt with the problem by strictly applying the "reliable sources" rule. It became the practice that every single fact in Israel-related articles must be cited to a reliable source and properly footnoted. Anything that wasn't was deleted as "uncited" or "synthesis" by one side or the other. Until that time, articles often had text which wasn't cited to a specific source. The tough citation requirements anchored the dispute to factual information, and, though the process was painful, worked. The controversies settled down and the edit warring slowed to a crawl. Those strict standards gradually spread to the rest of Wikipedia. Now, everything had to be footnoted like a doctoral thesis. Few people outside of academia write that way. This results in a big hammer coming down on someone new wanting to write an article about their new favorite DJ. Does he have mainstream press coverage that isn't from a press release, and did you cite it? If not, he's out of here. Until you learn to write in that strict style, you can't contribute much to Wikipedia. For people used to blithering on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, this is hard. That's what's discouraging new editors. Writing for Wikipedia is now like contributing to a major open source project like the Linux kernel. There's a big body of code, and your changes have to fit in well and be justified. That's necessary. Wikipedia faces a constant incoming stream of PR, vandalism, and general crap. (Check out the ever-changing list of recent changes.[2]) The petty vandalism is mostly reverted by AIs now; ClueBot, driven by an ANN and trained on known vandalism, is quite good. The other problems take human attention, by volunteers tired of seeing similar annoyances over and over. For the other extreme, of writing about anything with no quality control, see 4chan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israeli_West_Bank_barrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israeli_West_Bank_barrier [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

bhouston 11y ago
More details on that Israel controversy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_on_Wikipedia#Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Middle_East_Reporting_in_America#CAMERA_campaign_in_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Midd...

return0 11y ago

I think that's the best you can do with crowdsourcing. To go beyond you would need a structured community. My bet is, however, on an AI that will build the articles automatically.

sparkzilla 11y ago
You can do a lot more with crowdsourced models. Crowdsourcing content != wiki. My site (see bio) is a more structured way to build news and biography content that IMHO gives better presentation and less editor stress than the equivalent Wikipedia pages.

mtw 11y ago

I rely on wikipedia like everyone on hacker news but I can't help thinking that changing their status to benefit corporation like Kickstarter would improve the structure and also their finances. Non-profit closes a lot of doors, especially growth opportunities. A renewed status could bring new mobile apps, tie-ins with media companies, perhaps an open API available to third-party developers etc.

js8 11y ago

I think the reason for decline (and bureaucracy) is actually a lack of democracy. For example, there is no way to recall administrators. Also, opinion of majority is sometimes dismissed as not being good consensus, which only helps people in established cliques. Democracy is a rule that ensures fairness, but senior administrators do not always want it. Secondary problem is IMHO the caste nature of administrator privileges. I think if the privileges were more separated and it would be possible to recall them, this would reduce the ossification of the hierarchy. I also think Wikipedia could benefit from having a stable branch into which the changes from unstable branch could be regularly reviewed for addition. It would be nice if unstable branch could return to the idea that someone can add things even if they are not perfect or immediately sourced; IMHO experts can always add sources later for content that is already present, and it would give them some incentive to contribute. That being said, Wikipedia is amazing! I would really like to thank to people who put some work into it.

rspeer 11y ago
I'm not so concerned about recalling administrators. Administrators who do blatantly bad things sometimes end up losing their position, and sometimes just end up with enough people angry at them that they leave. What I'm concerned about is that there's no way to get new administrators, which is what it would take to bring in new ideas that break up the unnecessary bureaucracy. The process that used to create them got entirely paralyzed, both by ridiculous inflation of metrics (I saw the edit count requirements -- they call them suggestions but they're requirements -- increase by a factor of 20 while I participated), and by the requirement to convince a supermajority of long-standing editors to vote for you. I became an administrator in '06, and by '08 I would never have been considered. Basically, you have to edit every part of the encyclopedia while upsetting nobody, then inflate your already prolific accomplishments to get your foot in the door, without looking like a liar. This is impossible. Old administrators (like me) lose interest. New ones don't take their place. The work is being increasingly done by the most obsessive people, and by faceless bots.

sparkzilla 11y ago

An interesting paper that basically says that the number of editors is declining due to the difficulty in keeping and retaining new users. Any person who has tried to edit Wikipedia will know that aggressive rule-wielding wikifanatics immediately try to kill newcomer edits using whatever tools they have to hand. But it's important to realize that Wikipedia's ambiguous rules and arbitrary decisions are not a bug, but a feature, giving power to incumbent editors. While most new editors just give up, the ones who do stay on and fight become the same kind of fanatics. Many people say that the toxic community is the problem, but the community issues IMHO are actually a symptom of poor software design. The wiki's open structure and article-based format, which allows the most powerful groups of editors to "own" pages, gives power to people who are interested in keeping and retaining control, rather than those who are interested in sharing knowledge. The power is centralized in these gatekeepers, leading to all the problems we see on the site.[1] This is also the reason the Gender Gap exists.[2] The solution is to redesign the software to devolve power from entrenched groups, but this will never happen because there is no leadership, and the people who have the power are the survivors/fanatics that actually like the current system. Because they write the rules they will not give their power up easily. As for the quality arguments below: without new users and continuous evolution in software development, content presentation, and editorial review processes, the site cannot maintain quality. I believe that it is impossible for any wiki system to maintain a high quality anyway: the amount of time to improve articles to high quality is exponential, while the number of editors and work available is linear. Even in the best circumstances, something has to give. If the number of editors is actually declining then quality problems may also increase exponentially. [1]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ [2]http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedia/ http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedi...

phicoh 11y ago
Comparing wikipedia to openstreetmap, it seems to be a community problem, not a software problem. An open structure means that you have to watch what others are doing constantly. But that doesn't explain the huge number of stories where reasonable edits are reverted. That can only happen because the wikipedia (editor) community is ok with that. My conclusion is that wikipedia forgot to redefine itself. Originally, wikipedia was a summary based on existing literature. But pretty soon users took wikipedia way beyond that. Using it to document stuff, instead of summarising stuff documented else where. Most wikis are a tool to collectively create documentation. And somehow wikipedia is stuck in older world, and not what most wikipedia users expect it to be. My conclusion, until the project reforms and allows original content, I won't contribute.

sandworm101 11y ago

There is a finite pattern whenever one relies on volunteers. Most will come and go, but a few hang around and rise to the top. Lacking renumeration, they tend towards self-gratification. Some handle extra responsibility well, but others start building their own little castles from which to berate all below. This process is inevitable once you have multiple ranks of volunteers. I've seen this with charities, open source projects, and it was a constant problem when I worked in film/tv (interns). Things always go south when you have volunteers bossing around other volunteers. Newcomers show up eager but depart quickly, normally after some dressing down by a more senior volunteer. Without pay in dispute, they rarely make complaint. They just stop showing up. And who can blame them? The answer is to keep all volunteers equal. That's probably impossible for a project like wikipedia, but they could certainly do more to ensure new volunteers are not so bullied by the old guard.

brillenfux 11y ago
This should get more attention. I'm almost certain you have the source of the problem right. I just wouldn't be so sure and quick about your solution. It would be really nice to have more extensive work on how to mitigate these kinds of dynamics as I'm certain we will see more and more of these projects and I'd like them to be healthy for a change. Humanity: Evolve! ;-)
DanBC 11y ago
That's different enough from VestedContributor that you should give it a name and write it up. http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor VestedContributors think the rules can be bent for them because they've been around so long and done so much good work.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  Write up what? Sandworm's syndrome of the progressive dysfunction inherent to hierarchical volunteer communities? Talk to anyone who has worked as a volunteer coordinator. They see this all the time. As for keeping volunteers equal to avoid the problem, that need not mean keeping everyone identical. Leadership roles can rotate, with finite term limits. That way every leader today knows they will be the underling tomorrow. (This also keeps everyone interested and motivated as nobody is every stuck on one task/job).

lovelearning 11y ago

Somehow OpenStreetMaps has managed to remain democratic, welcoming to newcomers and yet remarkably accurate without much (any?) moderation, despite being almost as old as Wikipedia. I've always wondered how it manages that.

spb 11y ago
OpenStreetMaps' content is virtually 100% objective (with only political borders and names being potentially contentious).
- viewer5 11y ago
  What's there to argue about over names? Pardon my ignorance, I'm very poorly-travelled.
  - briandh 11y ago
    For instance, do you refer to a particular group of uninhabited islands as "Senkaku Islands, Japan", "Diaoyu Islands, People's Republic of China", or "Diaoyutai Islands, Republic of China"? Some people are very passionate about the answer. Is the political entity on Formosa "Taiwan", "Taiwan Province, Republic of China", "Taiwan Province, People's Republic of China", or "Taiwan, Province of China"?
- lovelearning 11y ago
  Political contention isn't as big a problem, as spam and inaccuracy. Those are the problems that make such sites generally unwelcoming towards newcomers. Both Wikipedia and Google Maps demonstrate this. OSM doesn't.
- frenchy 11y ago
  It's not 100% objective, but for simple things, it mostly is. If you hop on the mailing lists you will find all sorts of people bickering about whether it should be `shop=ice_cream` or `amenity=ice_cream` or `restauraunt=ice_cream` as they fight over their self-made taxonomies. At some point, I think, things will inevitably change. But for the moment, there's so many obvious things to work on that the confusing/subjective things don't really pop up too much.

Paul_S 11y ago

I used to contribute a lot when I was younger and had more free time but I might have kept that up if not for the change that happened in the late 00s when the higher ups decided that wikipedia has too much content and started streamlining by simply deleting whole sections. I am not talking about when citations became a stricter requirement and the quality in general became more of a focus - that came later. I think it's more sane nowadays but I'm too disillusioned now. I hate its approach of "if it's not intelligible to or of interest to a layman then it needs to be streamlined".

contingencies 11y ago
Exact same experience here, though I'm still an admin and contribute here and there, the politicking has deeply sapped my enthusiasm.

kevindeasis 11y ago

It would be cool to have a Wikipedia spinoff but articles have to be explained like I'm five. You might get a lot of contributors from that. It's important because some articles have a lot of jargon and feels like it was written by a bureaucrat. SOME people are only willing to invest a few minutes of their time.

Animats 11y ago
That's the Simple English Wikipedia.[1] [1] https://simple.wikipedia.org https://simple.wikipedia.org
- kevindeasis 11y ago
  Good to know, that is pretty cool. I wish they had more stuff.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

IvyMike 11y ago

The article raises an important point that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere in the comments: revert bots can be terrible. For example, I was once reading about a song, and at the bottom there was a link to a youtube video. The link was broken, so I replaced it with a working youtube link. The edit was immediately reverted by a bot that was anti-all-links-to-youtube. Fine, maybe that is a problem. But it's also a problem that the anti-youtube bot replaced my youtube link with a youtube link. When I went to the bot's page, it was filled with comments from dozens of others who had made similar edits that were blindly reverted. The bot author, who took a "it's me against the world" stance, proclaiming that his bot was doing the only sensible thing, and that he was "sick of arguing". As the paper proclaims, this immediate negative reinforcement had long term consequences of turning away many good faith editors.

reagle 11y ago

Note that this is from 2013.

bachmeier 11y ago

It's easy to dismiss this as "oh well, it's not perfect". The problem arises when you see something that is factually incorrect but cannot change it, and you know others rely on it. I've noticed a number of wrong, or just not precisely correct, things on Wikipedia, so I seldom click on those links when they appear in a search result. I've never used it all that much, to be honest, but the information hiding aspect is what makes it so dangerous. Allow incorrect information to appear on the site and then explain why it's incorrect. Allow information on the site that might be incorrect, so that others can investigate further. But presenting the material as if it is correct, because there is a quality control mechanism in place, is simply dishonest. If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, it would not bother me at all. No information would be lost. It would reappear elsewhere on the internet.

tokenadult 11y ago

As mentioned in the other recent thread about Wikikpedia, I am a Wikipedian. I joined active editing in 2010, that is after the heyday of welcoming new editors, but long before most articles on important topics were anywhere near to being well sourced. I have tried to clean up the mess on some articles, and am a winner or co-winner of two Million Awards[1] for fixing up high-page-view articles. But how I got the awards basically illustrates the problem. One article I fixed I wrote entirely off-line in a text editor file, while commenting on the talk page of the previous lousy version of the article, and then I dropped in the new article text all at once. Every previous time when I tried piecemeal editing of that article, my best edits would be reverted, while other stuff that was entirely made up and without reliable sources would be inserted into the article. The second article I worked on fixing up was a collaborative effort. Again, I started with discussion on the article talk page. My first few edits were reverted, contrary to reliable sources, by editors who exerted "ownership" on the article but who refused to look up sources. Later I was joined by two other editors, and one of the other two made it his project to rewrite the article from top to bottom for one of the Wikipedia editing contests. He liberally threw out old unsourced crap and then layered in new, well sourced text. I mentioned on the article talk page I'd like to fix a few sections of the article, and proofread all of it, and after he deleted the old crap, I put in new good content in the sections I worked on and checked all of his references throughout the article. The former editors who let the article be bad for years slithered away. It's a slog and a struggle like this every time someone tries to improve Wikipedia--the established editing culture includes snap judgments without looking up reliable sources. AFTER EDIT: I also mentioned in the previous thread about Wikipedia that I hope sometime soon a philanthropist funds a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize to put to the test what could be possible in building an accurate, well edited free, online encyclopedia if some new projects began and tried out some new models of project management and perhaps some new software. (I personally don't have any trouble dealing with Wikipedia's software, but I have been using various kinds of markup languages since the 1980s in earlier editing work.) The only way to know what's possible is to try to challenge the incumbent project with some competition, I think. Even if Wikipedia then just ended up winning a prize with reasonable criteria, it would still become better, and we would all have a better idea about what works and what doesn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Million_Award https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Million_Award

smithkl42 11y ago

I'll toss my own experience out there. I've contributed edits to maybe a dozen or so different Wikipedia articles, and would like to contribute more, but it's hard to get past a couple of hurdles. The main one is the byzantine and archaic editing tools. The markdown language that Wikipedia uses is a PITA to learn, and following a discussion on the talk page is almost impossible. Wikipedia presents a wonderful UX for browsing and reading. It has perhaps the worst UX I've ever seen for a beginner who wants to make a contribution. Beyond that, I spent a significant amount of time editing some articles on a fringe religious group that I had studied extensively. (Apart from the group's own leaders, I arguably knew more about the group than anyone else in the world.) But the group that was the focus of the article kept backing out my edits and replacing them with propaganda. It was simply too much work to fight them (especially with the horrible edit/discussion tools), they were a lot more motivated than I was, and I eventually gave up.

massysett 11y ago
This is the worst thing about Wikipedia. Experts with actual knowledge are discouraged and ridiculed while those who have built up longevity through tenacity retain control even if they know nothing.
- gedy 11y ago
  Sounds like most companies I've worked for :-)
quadrangle 11y ago
Talk pages should not themselves be wiki pages. This is the result of all that MVP stuff people go on about. Wikipedia had wikis, they didn't have discussion boards. They needed discussion boards. MVP was to use another wiki page for discussions, and that evolved into the stupidness we see today. Talk and discussion are completely different process than collaborative editing, and they demand different tools. I also agree about the markup (it's markUP. "Markdown" is a specific type of markup language which, despite its flaws, probably is the easiest and now most common one)

quanticle 11y ago

For the record, this paper was published in 2013, in case anyone's looking at it and wondering why its conclusions seem awfully obvious today. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664 http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664

CM30 11y ago

An odd thought, but perhaps the decline in editor numbers also has something to do with an increase in the number of wikis in general, mostly aimed at specific audiences and about specific subjects. Back in the early/mid 00s, Wikipedia was the site you'd contribute to if you wanted to write general encyclopedia entries about something that's now seen as fairly niche (like say, a certain TV show, film series, game franchise, etc), and from there you might become interested in editing other pages on less specialised subjects. But now, thousands of wikis exist, about every subject under the sun. Many of those are very popular, have more welcoming communities, etc. So people don't join the general site any more. If they care for say, Star Wars, they join Wookiepedia. If they care for Pokemon, it'd be Bulbapedia. Or one of the many others listed here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWikiRule http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWikiRule

Animats 11y ago
That's helped take some of the load off Wikipedia, and may be responsible for some of the decline in number of editors. Wikipedia used to have a big problem with fancruft - vast amounts of detail about some popular culture icon. There's an article for every Pokemon. There have been attempts to create articles for every episode of popular shows, and every minor One Piece character. There's pushback on that, and general agreement now on how much is too much. The fanatical fans now go to to Wikia or TVTropes, where they can write endlessly on their pet subjects without having to cite reliable third party sources. That's a good thing. You don't need the heavy scrutiny of Wikipedia on those subject.

ignostic 11y ago

Wikipedia feels like a piece of software that's experienced massive scope creep. It's huge. People have pet pieces they're emotionally attached to. It's so massive and trying to do so much that it's hard to even tell how best to improve it or where to start. For every "bug" (bad piece of info) that's fixed, we push 50 new bugs (and tons of new and correct info, of course). I've stopped editing because it just feels like a drop in the pond every time I do. When I fix obvious bias it just reappears by the editors with ulterior motives. And I just don't have the energy to fight them on it. I've stopped reading as much because I've learned that for any topic there are much better and more thorough sources. Economics and medicine in particular have very little... quality control on Wikipedia. With that said it's still a fantastic source for an overview of a topic that I know nothing about, especially for non-controversial topics. Wikipedia will live on as a good starting place for deep research and a quick explanation for quick questions. There just aren't enough editors to make it into the "sum of human knowledge" some people want it to be.

Kinnard 11y ago

As an early wikipedian who doesn't edit much anymore I can corroborate some of the assertions in this paper.