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Interesting points. Most popular alternatives to Wikipedia, commercial and non-commercial, work with ownership of articles, or a stricter editorial policy. [1]
by sshine 9y ago
Interesting points.
Most popular alternatives to Wikipedia, commercial and non-commercial, work with ownership of articles, or a stricter editorial policy. [1] This includes Scholarpedia, Citizendium, Conservapedia. It comes at the cost of volume and recency. In a sense, Wikipedia deals with all the advantages and disadvantages of modern, free democracy.
An aspect that the article seems to miss is the different demographics of Wikipedia and GitHub. (There are a lot fewer high-schoolers vandalizing GitHub repositories out of boredom.) The drawback of GitHub is not just that pull-requests must be accepted by authorized users, but also the bureaucracy of learning version control. Compared to Wikipedia, anyone with domain knowledge can hit "Edit" and add their bit.
I would rather like to see a synthesis of StackOverflow's point system, so the quality of your contributions grants you privileges for certain sections of the site, applied to wiki articles.
Another difference for comparison between GitHub/StackOverflow and Wikipedia is that you have ownership of your contributions. I occasionally go back and revise the most popular StackOverflow answers I've made for posterity. It's been years since I last made a change to one of my Wikipedia contributions. The last I remember was that someone had restructured a part of an article I'd written from scratch and added wrong information.
[1]: http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/top-7-alternatives-to-wikipedia/ http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/top-7-alternatives-to-wikipedia/
- gonzo41 9y agoWhy don't you just open an empty repo, and start accepting pull requests. See what happens.
- fredley 9y agoIs editing Wikipedia easy? Although I'll agree it's a lot easier than pushing to GitHub, it's still way beyond the skills of the average Wikipedia reader. Click Edit on any article. It's a mess of opaque syntax, presented in a textbox. Above the textbox are two different warning paragraphs, one because I'm not logged in and another warning against copyright. Any casual user who clicked Edit out of a genuine desire to improve the article would probably just click away. I would say the ease of editing needs to be much better than GitHub or current Wikipedia. A decent, WYSIWYG editor (with a Markdown mode, don't panic) with tools to make adding citations etc. possible for mortal users.
- DanBC 9y ago> Click Edit on any article. It's a mess of opaque syntax, presented in a textbox. They've had visual editing for years: https://imgur.com/a/mnePe https://imgur.com/a/mnePe
- fredley 9y agoBut that's not what's presented by default. I just tried again and got a popup asking me to switch (not sure why that didn't show up first time around), but the default button for the popup ('Start Editing') takes you to the old interface.
- sshine 9y agoAlso, getting the visual editor back once you say no thanks doesn't seem trivial. I had to look up how. My guess is that regular contributors hardly use it, and its purpose is mostly symbolic rather than practical.
- fredley 9y agoHow I would love to see the data on how many edits submitted from the WYSIWYG tool are/aren't reverted.
- tgr_ 9y agoSlightly less than with the text editor: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_effect_on_newly_registered_editors/November_2015_follow-up https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_ef...
- DanBC 9y agoI just tried in a private window, and got this: https://imgur.com/a/isTAw https://imgur.com/a/isTAw I guess this just proves OP's point: Wikipedia has been struggling to introduce visual editing because the current editing userbase rejected it.
- 9y ago
- Aissen 9y agoGithub has an Edit button, too. It will automatically fork the repo, make a commit, and then create a pull-request. Very handy.
- reificator 9y ago> The drawback of GitHub is not just that pull-requests must be accepted by authorized users, but also the bureaucracy of learning version control. Compared to Wikipedia, anyone with domain knowledge can hit "Edit" and add their bit. Editing from the site is incredibly simple. Browse to a file, click `edit` and make your changes. Then at the bottom of the page, give a commit message and click "Propose file change".
- Singletoned 9y agoIndeed. I've had non-technical content writers feeling comfortable adding files directly to GitHub and writing Markdown in the them. Basically using it as a CMS. Pull Requests and Branching remained confusing issues for them though.
- cabalamat 9y ago> Most popular alternatives to Wikipedia, commercial and non-commercial, work with ownership of articles, or a stricter editorial policy. I'm currently doing an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia -- http://www.wikifork.org/mw/index.php/Main_Page http://www.wikifork.org/mw/index.php/Main_Page . Wikifork (when I get it up and running) will have much looser policies on notability than Wikipedia has.