15 ms·

I used to contribute heavily to Wikipedia in 2007-08 and intermittently since, however recently it has become an absolute nightmare to contribute. Creating a m

by xref 8y ago

I used to contribute heavily to Wikipedia in 2007-08 and intermittently since, however recently it has become an absolute nightmare to contribute. Creating a missing article almost immediately is met with an admin nominating it for deletion for something like “notability”, the catch-all term for “I personally don’t care about this topic, and if it was important someone would have made it already.” If you survive deletion then your article is often removed from the main Wikipedia site into “draft space” where it is hoped you’ll just go away, with a reason like “need more than the X-number of existing <refs> you have.” If you still haven’t given up trying to contribute it is currently a 6 week wait to have your article reviewed to be moved back into Wikipedia-proper. However! You’ll find any fair-use images you uploaded to support your article (say a movie poster), well those have been deleted since “draft space” articles are banned from containing them. Those are just some of the trials I’ve gone through in the last two months trying to fill in some gaps on Wikipedia. It feels like they’ve added so many layers of bureaucracy over the last decade even longtime contributors are being forced away.

starpilot 8y ago
Wikipedia has finite resources that cost money. So they have to restrict it to hosting articles that will have some level of audience.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  This is wrong. Low view articles cost essentially nothing to host. The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage. Also rejected articles don't get deleted from the system they just get moved to the draft section which is hidden from search results.
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > This is wrong. Low view articles cost essentially nothing to host. The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage. Also rejected articles don't get deleted from the system they just get moved to the draft section which is hidden from search results. That's wrong. Low view articles still cost volunteer time to maintain, otherwise many would become home to malicious edits. That's a kind of hosting cost. Also, deleted articles on Wikipedia are removed such that only admins can see them. I don't think it's common to remove them to the drafts area unless they're under construction and have some hope of meeting standards.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      Malicious edits don't scale with the number of articles, they scale with the number of edits and users. If all of a sudden Wikipedia gained 10 million more articles, there would not be more malicious edits per day than there are now without the amount of malicious users increasing.
      - ardy42 8y ago
        > Malicious edits don't scale with the number of articles, they scale with the number of edits and users. If all of a sudden Wikipedia gained 10 million more articles, there would not be more malicious edits per day than there are now without the amount of malicious users increasing. But some fraction of malicious edits aren't caught as they are made, and those will remain until they're accidentally noticed by someone and fixed. That's also true about honest errors and mistakes. If you add 10 million more articles, they'll either distract "accidental" QA from more popular articles, or (more likely) not receive an adequate amount of accidental QA at all.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    > The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage Where can you store that amount of data for so cheap? Of course I'm assuming that you're including images in the size and not just raw text.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  You should go glance at their budget. Here's the latest annual financial statement: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-18_-_Independent_Auditors%27_Report.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-... They spent about 15x on staff as they did on internet hosting. They spend almost as much on travel as they do on internet hosting.
  - chipperyman573 8y ago
    Honestly that's a lot lower than I would have expected. Internet hosting is very cheap and for a company like Wikimedia would basically come down to their bandwidth costs. But labor, especially skilled labor (like they're hiring) is very expensive. I would have expected it to be a lot higher.
    - smittywerben 8y ago
      If you want low go look at their earlier ('09-10) reports where it's $5 million expenses compared to $81 million today. They had ~2.6 million articles then, and ~5.6 million today. It's nothing abnormal to me and quite small still (esp sitting next to Google, Youtube, Facebook) but I appreciated how efficiently they ran with the help of volunteers.
haberman 8y ago
What did you try to contribute? Last year I added an article about a musical ensemble. I followed the processes and it seemed to be fairly straightforward to get approved. (The ensemble had a bunch of articles written about them in the NYT).
- strainer 8y ago
  I have marvelled at the quality of WPs music theory articles where I think different outlooks are well tolerated and accepted. 8 years ago I tried to fix WP philosophies entry on the concept of "Appeal to Nature" and was even joined by an experienced academic but our efforts[1] where removed by admin/users wishing to describe the topic as a kind of simple fallacious trope[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appeal_to_nature&oldid=526380338 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appeal_to_nature&... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
  - paradoxparalax 8y ago
    that's saddening. I remember when there was no Internet, and you never hear about it will possibly exist (where I was back then) and then when it some day became something I just hear about and had the dream to use someday and see working with my own eyes. And then I though Internet will bring the political (r) evolution that will make humanity human, and that it will have all the Knowledge of All the Scientists from All the World open to anyone, even a poor kid like me, to see and learn and thrive... Wikipedia is still what is closer to that dream I had as a kid who had ever never touched a computer...So it is saddening, but we still have hope.
    - strainer 8y ago
      I still think it is a matter of time before communication and analytical technology overcomes the difficulties which perpetuate human conflict and environmental destruction. Any day now... :)
      - 8y ago
commoner 8y ago
As Wikipedia became more popular, it also started attracting people and companies who try to use it for writing promotional articles on themselves with little to no basis in reality. The notability requirement helps ensure that articles are accurate and can be verified with trustworthy sources. A topic only needs 2 trustworthy sources for an article, and if it doesn't meet that bar, then the topic is probably better suited for a personal blog than a Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
- save_ferris 8y ago
  And also to scrub existing articles of certain details. A former coworker once told me about a stint he did working for a company that sold wikipedia edits. The founder was Brazilian and apparently their company was super popular with Central and South American politicians trying to scrub their pages of various financial scandals and other things unbecoming of a politician. I was shocked when he first told me about it, but it's pretty easy to see in 2019 that managing one's image online can be incredibly lucrative.
  - commoner 8y ago
    Unfortunately, Wikipedia is not immune to PR firms. In 2013, more than 250 accounts were blocked or banned for being associated with a firm called Wiki-PR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki-PR_editing_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki-PR_editing_of_Wikipedia In a community, one of the best ways to counter bad actors is to recruit more good actors. If you suspect that a Wikipedia article was deleted inappropriately, you can submit it for "deletion review": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - strken 8y ago
baroffoos 8y ago
I tried to contribute something about a month ago and went through the same issues. I could hardly find my way around the complex submission/review system and when I did manage it my article was rejected for not having enough references when . I eventually gave up because I listed every reference that exists on the topic.
simula67 8y ago
Have you tried Everipedia : https://everipedia.org/ https://everipedia.org/ ?
SEJeff 8y ago
And it is super arbitrary. There is a joke I made over 10 years ago making fun of a friend and it is still up (totally not giving it away as then it will be deleted). The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme. Of course, there's no way they could formally audit every article. They're heavily reliant of some rando noticing something fishy in an obscure article and bringing it to their attention.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Wikipedia is still small enough to see every article reviewed. They don’t largely becase they funnel funding into other unrelated projects.
    - circlefavshape 8y ago
      You're wrong on both counts here - nobody gets funded to review articles (it's done by volunteers), and there are nearly 6 million articles in English alone
      - Retric 8y ago
        Saying they don’t do something does not mean they can’t do something. 6 million / 30 minutes per article every 5 years at 15$ per hour ~= 9 million per year. Wikipedia pulled in 55 million in 2017 from North America making this a major but affordable expenditure.
        circlefavshape 8y ago
        The Wikimedia Foundation is not wikipedia. Paying people to edit would be a fundamental change in the ethos of the whole movement
rangibaby 8y ago
Look up the drama relating to Donna Strickland
onlydeadheroes 8y ago
Funny how in spite of all that there are articles like the Gamergate controversy article, in which nearly every sentence is a lie.
tunesmith 8y ago
I find it depressing every time I try to contribute. Most recently, there was an article on a popular TV show that was in its first season, where the very top level cast list gave away a spoiler for very late in the season, that completely changed the lives of some main characters. So if you ever check the WP article for the show during the first 8-10 episodes of the season (like I did), you're completely spoiled. It was unnecessary and also inconsistent with the cast descriptions from the show's marketing, and deleting the spoiler had no real negative informative impact, but when I tried to delete the spoiler (two words), it got rolled back with a scolding with a reference to wikipedia's spoiler policy of not protecting the audience from spoilers... which is normally sane, but completely overkill in that particular case. I ended up asking, what if the WP entry for A New Hope gave away that very famous spoiler about Luke's father in the initial description and cast listing (it currently does not), and then I tried to delete the spoiler? Would the moderation policy roll back my change? He said yes, because of the same reason - WP does not protect audiences against spoilers. So I asked, well then why does the ANH WP article not have this spoiler? And he said, probably just because no one has made the edit yet.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  you could propose a "spoiler" tag, and people who want spoilers to be censored, should log in and set default spoiler setting to censored for themselves. But the default should be spoiling IMHO. Of course once you've seen the media, and go to the WP pages (with your default censor still active) you'd want some kind of red spoiler button close to "talk" and "history" so you 1) know there is a spoiler tag present and 2) can spoil the secret by clicking it...
agurk 8y ago
After reading a lot about helicopters recently, I was reading the wikipedia page about them today, and found the description of how they are controlled if not wrong, then confusing. My first thought was to rewrite the section, but then I have also heard this opinion quite a lot now and it really put me off. Looking at the talk page of one of the related articles [0] there was someone noting that "An expert that didn't cite the literature would be contributing original research, not verifiable information" which is forbidden on Wikipedia. This sounds like a reasonable principle, but if you look at the existing text it's barely cited. It's not clear then if replacing un-cited text would be appropriate, or if this principle would just be a tool used to resist change. And even then, I've had correctly cited changes reverted in the past. So after that I ended up not making any changes, and that section remains - to me at least - confusing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Helicopter_flight_controls https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Helicopter_f...
- commoner 8y ago
  In this situation, consider adding a "citation needed" tag to the incorrect uncited content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed Then, find reliable sources that support the changes you want to make, and propose those changes on the article's talk page. If other editors agree, or if there is silence after a few days, then make your changes to the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources If other editors disagree, and you are unconvinced by their arguments, then escalate this discussion to a request for comment, and debate it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment

by xref 8y ago

starpilot 8y ago

Wikipedia has finite resources that cost money. So they have to restrict it to hosting articles that will have some level of audience.

baroffoos 8y ago
This is wrong. Low view articles cost essentially nothing to host. The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage. Also rejected articles don't get deleted from the system they just get moved to the draft section which is hidden from search results.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > This is wrong. Low view articles cost essentially nothing to host. The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage. Also rejected articles don't get deleted from the system they just get moved to the draft section which is hidden from search results. That's wrong. Low view articles still cost volunteer time to maintain, otherwise many would become home to malicious edits. That's a kind of hosting cost. Also, deleted articles on Wikipedia are removed such that only admins can see them. I don't think it's common to remove them to the drafts area unless they're under construction and have some hope of meeting standards.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    Malicious edits don't scale with the number of articles, they scale with the number of edits and users. If all of a sudden Wikipedia gained 10 million more articles, there would not be more malicious edits per day than there are now without the amount of malicious users increasing.
    - ardy42 8y ago
      > Malicious edits don't scale with the number of articles, they scale with the number of edits and users. If all of a sudden Wikipedia gained 10 million more articles, there would not be more malicious edits per day than there are now without the amount of malicious users increasing. But some fraction of malicious edits aren't caught as they are made, and those will remain until they're accidentally noticed by someone and fixed. That's also true about honest errors and mistakes. If you add 10 million more articles, they'll either distract "accidental" QA from more popular articles, or (more likely) not receive an adequate amount of accidental QA at all.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  > The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage Where can you store that amount of data for so cheap? Of course I'm assuming that you're including images in the size and not just raw text.
maxerickson 8y ago
You should go glance at their budget. Here's the latest annual financial statement: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-18_-_Independent_Auditors%27_Report.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-... They spent about 15x on staff as they did on internet hosting. They spend almost as much on travel as they do on internet hosting.
- chipperyman573 8y ago
  Honestly that's a lot lower than I would have expected. Internet hosting is very cheap and for a company like Wikimedia would basically come down to their bandwidth costs. But labor, especially skilled labor (like they're hiring) is very expensive. I would have expected it to be a lot higher.
  - smittywerben 8y ago
    If you want low go look at their earlier ('09-10) reports where it's $5 million expenses compared to $81 million today. They had ~2.6 million articles then, and ~5.6 million today. It's nothing abnormal to me and quite small still (esp sitting next to Google, Youtube, Facebook) but I appreciated how efficiently they ran with the help of volunteers.

haberman 8y ago

What did you try to contribute? Last year I added an article about a musical ensemble. I followed the processes and it seemed to be fairly straightforward to get approved. (The ensemble had a bunch of articles written about them in the NYT).

strainer 8y ago
I have marvelled at the quality of WPs music theory articles where I think different outlooks are well tolerated and accepted. 8 years ago I tried to fix WP philosophies entry on the concept of "Appeal to Nature" and was even joined by an experienced academic but our efforts[1] where removed by admin/users wishing to describe the topic as a kind of simple fallacious trope[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appeal_to_nature&oldid=526380338 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appeal_to_nature&... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
- paradoxparalax 8y ago
  that's saddening. I remember when there was no Internet, and you never hear about it will possibly exist (where I was back then) and then when it some day became something I just hear about and had the dream to use someday and see working with my own eyes. And then I though Internet will bring the political (r) evolution that will make humanity human, and that it will have all the Knowledge of All the Scientists from All the World open to anyone, even a poor kid like me, to see and learn and thrive... Wikipedia is still what is closer to that dream I had as a kid who had ever never touched a computer...So it is saddening, but we still have hope.
  - strainer 8y ago
    I still think it is a matter of time before communication and analytical technology overcomes the difficulties which perpetuate human conflict and environmental destruction. Any day now... :)
    - 8y ago

commoner 8y ago

As Wikipedia became more popular, it also started attracting people and companies who try to use it for writing promotional articles on themselves with little to no basis in reality. The notability requirement helps ensure that articles are accurate and can be verified with trustworthy sources. A topic only needs 2 trustworthy sources for an article, and if it doesn't meet that bar, then the topic is probably better suited for a personal blog than a Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

save_ferris 8y ago
And also to scrub existing articles of certain details. A former coworker once told me about a stint he did working for a company that sold wikipedia edits. The founder was Brazilian and apparently their company was super popular with Central and South American politicians trying to scrub their pages of various financial scandals and other things unbecoming of a politician. I was shocked when he first told me about it, but it's pretty easy to see in 2019 that managing one's image online can be incredibly lucrative.
- commoner 8y ago
  Unfortunately, Wikipedia is not immune to PR firms. In 2013, more than 250 accounts were blocked or banned for being associated with a firm called Wiki-PR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki-PR_editing_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki-PR_editing_of_Wikipedia In a community, one of the best ways to counter bad actors is to recruit more good actors. If you suspect that a Wikipedia article was deleted inappropriately, you can submit it for "deletion review": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- strken 8y ago

baroffoos 8y ago

I tried to contribute something about a month ago and went through the same issues. I could hardly find my way around the complex submission/review system and when I did manage it my article was rejected for not having enough references when . I eventually gave up because I listed every reference that exists on the topic.

simula67 8y ago

Have you tried Everipedia : https://everipedia.org/ https://everipedia.org/ ?

SEJeff 8y ago

And it is super arbitrary. There is a joke I made over 10 years ago making fun of a friend and it is still up (totally not giving it away as then it will be deleted). The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme.

ardy42 8y ago
> The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme. Of course, there's no way they could formally audit every article. They're heavily reliant of some rando noticing something fishy in an obscure article and bringing it to their attention.
- Retric 8y ago
  Wikipedia is still small enough to see every article reviewed. They don’t largely becase they funnel funding into other unrelated projects.
  - circlefavshape 8y ago
    You're wrong on both counts here - nobody gets funded to review articles (it's done by volunteers), and there are nearly 6 million articles in English alone
    - Retric 8y ago
      Saying they don’t do something does not mean they can’t do something. 6 million / 30 minutes per article every 5 years at 15$ per hour ~= 9 million per year. Wikipedia pulled in 55 million in 2017 from North America making this a major but affordable expenditure.
      - circlefavshape 8y ago
        The Wikimedia Foundation is not wikipedia. Paying people to edit would be a fundamental change in the ethos of the whole movement

rangibaby 8y ago

Look up the drama relating to Donna Strickland

onlydeadheroes 8y ago

Funny how in spite of all that there are articles like the Gamergate controversy article, in which nearly every sentence is a lie.

tunesmith 8y ago

I find it depressing every time I try to contribute. Most recently, there was an article on a popular TV show that was in its first season, where the very top level cast list gave away a spoiler for very late in the season, that completely changed the lives of some main characters. So if you ever check the WP article for the show during the first 8-10 episodes of the season (like I did), you're completely spoiled. It was unnecessary and also inconsistent with the cast descriptions from the show's marketing, and deleting the spoiler had no real negative informative impact, but when I tried to delete the spoiler (two words), it got rolled back with a scolding with a reference to wikipedia's spoiler policy of not protecting the audience from spoilers... which is normally sane, but completely overkill in that particular case. I ended up asking, what if the WP entry for A New Hope gave away that very famous spoiler about Luke's father in the initial description and cast listing (it currently does not), and then I tried to delete the spoiler? Would the moderation policy roll back my change? He said yes, because of the same reason - WP does not protect audiences against spoilers. So I asked, well then why does the ANH WP article not have this spoiler? And he said, probably just because no one has made the edit yet.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
you could propose a "spoiler" tag, and people who want spoilers to be censored, should log in and set default spoiler setting to censored for themselves. But the default should be spoiling IMHO. Of course once you've seen the media, and go to the WP pages (with your default censor still active) you'd want some kind of red spoiler button close to "talk" and "history" so you 1) know there is a spoiler tag present and 2) can spoil the secret by clicking it...

agurk 8y ago

After reading a lot about helicopters recently, I was reading the wikipedia page about them today, and found the description of how they are controlled if not wrong, then confusing. My first thought was to rewrite the section, but then I have also heard this opinion quite a lot now and it really put me off. Looking at the talk page of one of the related articles [0] there was someone noting that "An expert that didn't cite the literature would be contributing original research, not verifiable information" which is forbidden on Wikipedia. This sounds like a reasonable principle, but if you look at the existing text it's barely cited. It's not clear then if replacing un-cited text would be appropriate, or if this principle would just be a tool used to resist change. And even then, I've had correctly cited changes reverted in the past. So after that I ended up not making any changes, and that section remains - to me at least - confusing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Helicopter_flight_controls https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Helicopter_f...

commoner 8y ago
In this situation, consider adding a "citation needed" tag to the incorrect uncited content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_needed Then, find reliable sources that support the changes you want to make, and propose those changes on the article's talk page. If other editors agree, or if there is silence after a few days, then make your changes to the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources If other editors disagree, and you are unconvinced by their arguments, then escalate this discussion to a request for comment, and debate it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment