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It's not just about deletes. It's amazing how so many people have the same problems with WP and they are never addressed. Comments here are getting tons of up

It's not just about deletes. It's amazing how so many people have the same problems with WP and they are never addressed. Comments here are getting tons of up votes due to frustration. My questions are: - Does WP leadership really know the extent to which people have stopped editing due to frustration? - Do they not fix it because they don't want to change, don't know a solution, or are bullied by their own editors? - Are they aware that WP tends to attract people with this trait and mitigating these effects would make a massive difference? http://dictionary.com/browse/persnickety http://dictionary.com/browse/persnickety

tptacek 10y ago
I promise I'm not trying to be snarky or dismissive, but I literally have the opposite concern. I am amazed that a group of nerds on message boards can look at the most ambitious knowledge resource in the history of the Internet, and possibly in the history of the last 100 years, and come to the conclusion that it's urgently endangered by the fact that their edits about young startups and science fiction characters are rejected. I feel like the Wikipedia project is one of the better run communities anywhere on the Internet, and that we don't perceive them that way mostly due to the absolutely spectacular scale that they operate at. Note that I'm not saying they're the most pleasant community in the world to work with. They aren't! But that's because they're doing so much, working with so many people at so many different levels of engagement. Hacker News is a trifling community by comparison, and look how much work goes in to trying to maintain norms and civility here. I feel like the Wikipedia community has bent over backwards to understand the concerns that completionist interest groups have about logging every possible startup, every open source developer of any note, every open source project, &c. They spend more time discussing their norms and processes about subject inclusion than any other meta-concern. I do not feel like the tech community meets Wikipedia halfway. Every argument I see in HN threads about "deletionism" seems rooted in the idea that an Internet encyclopedia need not have strict standards for inclusion because the marginal cost of an additional article is zero. But that's simply a false statement; it's based on the false premise that the only cost for Wikipedia for articles is storage space. You can't read the Wikipedia project charter for 5 minutes without realizing that storage is their least important cost.
- nkurz 10y ago
  I literally have the opposite concern. I am amazed that [people think Wikipedia] is urgently endangered by the fact that their edits about young startups and science fiction characters are rejected. I think this mischaracterizes WhitneyLand's fear. The worry is not that the individual edits are crucially important, it's that without a welcoming community Wikipedia will eventually run out of editors willing to do keep the site alive. While the content of Wikipedia won't disappear as a result, one fear is that over time the information will become static and eventually outdated. Perhaps this is acceptable, as older encyclopedias can be a snapshot of their time. A greater worry that some have is that Wikipedia may change from being a relatively unbiased collection of information to cherry-picking and displaying only one side of the facts. I think it's a legitimate fear that some revisions are being refused because they don't match the desired narrative, and that the "rules" are being (selectively) applied as post-hoc justification. While this may not be an overwhelming problem yet, it's possible that a more inclusive community will prevent it from becoming a greater problem in the future.
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    nkurz, yes this is what I meant. tptacek, I appreciate your passion, but actually I don't even feel strongly about the deletiionist/completionist issue. I also don't have any pet subjects that I feel are unjustly excluded. It is about needlessly driving away good contributions in situations where there is no net benefit. I don't want to generalize too much, but there are people who care more about the letter of the wikipedia process and debate than they do about the net affect on content quality. Why not let editors build reputation based on customer service to their peers and to occasional contributors? If such a system was designed and motivated well enough, I believe it could be one way to help the situation. I actually journaled a while writing about ideas to discuss, but lost interest because I didn't know anyone who would care.

tptacek 10y ago

I promise I'm not trying to be snarky or dismissive, but I literally have the opposite concern. I am amazed that a group of nerds on message boards can look at the most ambitious knowledge resource in the history of the Internet, and possibly in the history of the last 100 years, and come to the conclusion that it's urgently endangered by the fact that their edits about young startups and science fiction characters are rejected. I feel like the Wikipedia project is one of the better run communities anywhere on the Internet, and that we don't perceive them that way mostly due to the absolutely spectacular scale that they operate at. Note that I'm not saying they're the most pleasant community in the world to work with. They aren't! But that's because they're doing so much, working with so many people at so many different levels of engagement. Hacker News is a trifling community by comparison, and look how much work goes in to trying to maintain norms and civility here. I feel like the Wikipedia community has bent over backwards to understand the concerns that completionist interest groups have about logging every possible startup, every open source developer of any note, every open source project, &c. They spend more time discussing their norms and processes about subject inclusion than any other meta-concern. I do not feel like the tech community meets Wikipedia halfway. Every argument I see in HN threads about "deletionism" seems rooted in the idea that an Internet encyclopedia need not have strict standards for inclusion because the marginal cost of an additional article is zero. But that's simply a false statement; it's based on the false premise that the only cost for Wikipedia for articles is storage space. You can't read the Wikipedia project charter for 5 minutes without realizing that storage is their least important cost.

nkurz 10y ago
I literally have the opposite concern. I am amazed that [people think Wikipedia] is urgently endangered by the fact that their edits about young startups and science fiction characters are rejected. I think this mischaracterizes WhitneyLand's fear. The worry is not that the individual edits are crucially important, it's that without a welcoming community Wikipedia will eventually run out of editors willing to do keep the site alive. While the content of Wikipedia won't disappear as a result, one fear is that over time the information will become static and eventually outdated. Perhaps this is acceptable, as older encyclopedias can be a snapshot of their time. A greater worry that some have is that Wikipedia may change from being a relatively unbiased collection of information to cherry-picking and displaying only one side of the facts. I think it's a legitimate fear that some revisions are being refused because they don't match the desired narrative, and that the "rules" are being (selectively) applied as post-hoc justification. While this may not be an overwhelming problem yet, it's possible that a more inclusive community will prevent it from becoming a greater problem in the future.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  nkurz, yes this is what I meant. tptacek, I appreciate your passion, but actually I don't even feel strongly about the deletiionist/completionist issue. I also don't have any pet subjects that I feel are unjustly excluded. It is about needlessly driving away good contributions in situations where there is no net benefit. I don't want to generalize too much, but there are people who care more about the letter of the wikipedia process and debate than they do about the net affect on content quality. Why not let editors build reputation based on customer service to their peers and to occasional contributors? If such a system was designed and motivated well enough, I believe it could be one way to help the situation. I actually journaled a while writing about ideas to discuss, but lost interest because I didn't know anyone who would care.