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Administrator since 2003 here. I have contributed to Wikipedia in various languages, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. Three core point

Administrator since 2003 here. I have contributed to Wikipedia in various languages, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. Three core points, particularly on Wikipedia: (1) Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. This is due to factors such as too much bureaucracy, too many subjective guidelines, too much content being deleted (exclusionism), and an overwhelming mess of projects and policies. (2) Not enough focus. By starting many projects the foundation has muddied its mission and public identity. In addition, it has broad and potentially mutually conflicting goals such as educating the public about various issues, educating the public about how to work with others to contribute to projects, asking the public for money, agitating governments and corporations for policy change and support, monitoring public behavior looking for evidence of wrongdoing, and engaging with education. Why not leave education to the educationalists, politics to the politicians, spying to the government and motivated contributors and fundraising to donors? (3) Non-free academic media is hurting the project. Given that only a small number of editors have true access to major academic databases, it is often hard for contributors to equally and fairly balance an article. Having said that, I still have tremendous respect for the project and comparing its costs to those of the prior systems necessarily incorporating manual preparation, editing, production and distribution of printed matter by 'experts', the opportunity costs for access alone justify the full expenditure. It's not a lot of money in global terms.

cooper12 10y ago
> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue. > Not enough focus. This is a valid point but I think you're being too scorched earth with it like saying that Wikipedia shouldn't do any political outreach at all. If its millions of viewers hadn't seen the SOPA blackout, would it have been as successful? If it didn't fight for freedom of panorama and other copyright issues, would it be able to exist in the same form as now? Your suggestion is like telling Japan to go back to isolationism. Sure it might work if you're self-sustaining, but it's no way to run a global project. > Non-free academic media is hurting the project. If you are part of a university, you likely have access to such media. Many public libraries also have such access. Lastly, there's the Wikipedia Library. [0] I'm not sure what you want Wikipedia to do here past what it's already doing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...
- nullc 10y ago
  > This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue. I don't agree. Choices in how the foundation spends it's money can amplify or diminish these concerns. E.g. WMF has spent extensively to try to bring in a wider space of borderline editors rather than investing as much in infrastructure to soften the learning curve to retain and boost the participation of middle-tier editors, which exacerbates us vs them seige mentality... and the overuse of blunt tools to stem a rising tide of low quality edits at the cost of a poor experience for new contributors. E.g. An example I'd cite for this is the extreme investment in "visual editing"-- which only barely manages to not mangle pages when its used-- over things like syntax highlighting. Not all the blame in these areas falls on the WMF for sure. As an example, enwiki community factionlization around deletion blocked the deployment of revision flagging (basically supporting having 'release' versions of articles so that non-contributors are not constantly subjected to the very latest unreviewed revision of an article) which would have allowed radically less aggressive edit patrolling.
- rsync 10y ago
  >> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. > This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue. I do not contribute financially to wikipedia, despite being very interested in doing so, because of this issue. I am sick and tired of seeing large amounts of properly formatted, well formed articles, written in good faith, deleted by the little hitlers protecting their precious wikipedia turf. This "community issue" costs wikipedia several thousand of my dollars per year. I wonder how many other people decline to support them financially due to these "community issues" ?
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    I don't normally post "me too" on HN, but I feel I should here. I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore, because the editorial policies don't agree with my views on how an internet encyclopedia should be run.
  - cooper12 10y ago

cooper12 10y ago

> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue. > Not enough focus. This is a valid point but I think you're being too scorched earth with it like saying that Wikipedia shouldn't do any political outreach at all. If its millions of viewers hadn't seen the SOPA blackout, would it have been as successful? If it didn't fight for freedom of panorama and other copyright issues, would it be able to exist in the same form as now? Your suggestion is like telling Japan to go back to isolationism. Sure it might work if you're self-sustaining, but it's no way to run a global project. > Non-free academic media is hurting the project. If you are part of a university, you likely have access to such media. Many public libraries also have such access. Lastly, there's the Wikipedia Library. [0] I'm not sure what you want Wikipedia to do here past what it's already doing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...

nullc 10y ago
> This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue. I don't agree. Choices in how the foundation spends it's money can amplify or diminish these concerns. E.g. WMF has spent extensively to try to bring in a wider space of borderline editors rather than investing as much in infrastructure to soften the learning curve to retain and boost the participation of middle-tier editors, which exacerbates us vs them seige mentality... and the overuse of blunt tools to stem a rising tide of low quality edits at the cost of a poor experience for new contributors. E.g. An example I'd cite for this is the extreme investment in "visual editing"-- which only barely manages to not mangle pages when its used-- over things like syntax highlighting. Not all the blame in these areas falls on the WMF for sure. As an example, enwiki community factionlization around deletion blocked the deployment of revision flagging (basically supporting having 'release' versions of articles so that non-contributors are not constantly subjected to the very latest unreviewed revision of an article) which would have allowed radically less aggressive edit patrolling.
rsync 10y ago
>> Bad experiences for new and established contributors mean less motivated contributors. > This has nothing to do with the financials of the foundation and is completely a community issue. I do not contribute financially to wikipedia, despite being very interested in doing so, because of this issue. I am sick and tired of seeing large amounts of properly formatted, well formed articles, written in good faith, deleted by the little hitlers protecting their precious wikipedia turf. This "community issue" costs wikipedia several thousand of my dollars per year. I wonder how many other people decline to support them financially due to these "community issues" ?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I don't normally post "me too" on HN, but I feel I should here. I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore, because the editorial policies don't agree with my views on how an internet encyclopedia should be run.
- cooper12 10y ago