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I used to contribute a lot to wikipedia in its early days in the 2000' and faced the same frustrating experience. I think this just happens to everybody, from w

I used to contribute a lot to wikipedia in its early days in the 2000' and faced the same frustrating experience. I think this just happens to everybody, from what I heard from other editors. I would expect it to be even worse now that wp is well established and editors do not have to make a common front against academics' denigration. Still, wp is in my view easily the biggest achievement of the web, and I still care for it. I would often fix small issues, like you mention, this does not trigger any hostile response. Something else I found to work quite well to contribute without risking annoying conflicts : to translate articles from en.wp to other languages if their pages don't exist yet on the localized one. And of course, there always need help to revert vandalisms. Also, I would recommend against having an account. Being IP based editor makes you more subject to scrutiny, but this prevents people deciding they don't like you based on your history. That's an advice I would give for any public discussion on the web, though (by always using fresh accounts).

ricardo81 6y ago
While I used Wikipedia a lot and appreciate the generic layout which makes things easier to find, it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. The web lowered the barrier to entry and the Wikipedia editorial system somewhat raises it for anyone interested in creating something for the web.
- LyndsySimon 6y ago
  > it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. I'm not trying to "call you out" on this; I'm genuinely curious - do you have anything to back up this assertion? I've had a couple of instances where I'd written something on a topic that Wikipedia had inadequately covered, and posted on the article's talk page. I included a link to my content, a note that it was my original research, and asked that other editors consider adding it as a source. In most instance - maybe every instance, as it's been a while and I'm not even sure if I could find all the places I'd done that - it was eventually cited and incorporated into the article.
  - ricardo81 6y ago
    Hi, no problem if you wish to call me out :-) I think you may have slightly misunderstood me, as you make examples of times where you've suggested edits to editors and they've been agreeable. I was talking more along the lines of the syndication of content at scale, perhaps a "death by a thousand papercuts (or citations)" scenario where Wikipedia gets the pageviews, the visitors, the links. For example, Wikipedia gets a lot of links as a 'credible' reference, and tends to rank well in search engines for the topic titles due to this. This pushes down all the other pages of course, including the pages that Wikipedia uses as citations. I feel that content has been homogenised and centralised too much, and could go into that more but I'm sure you get my general gist, without any data to back it up. On the flip side, there is additional added value from something like Wikipedia existing, like all the Natural Language Processor tools that get trained up on well-formed and structured text.
    - Jay2wu2u 6y ago
      Note also that the centralization point is not necessarily true. On one hand, yes totally, the process of gathering knowledge is centralized on wikipedia.org . Although, it's not a place where original content is welcome, so it still links to the sources. I guess that if SEO is of concern to you, being linked by wikipedia probably have some value. On the other hand, my usual way of reading wikipedia is by browsing localhost. All data of wikipedia is open (you can actually download its database) and under creative common, so it's perfectly legit to host it on your own computer - quite the opposite of centralized, in that regard. Of course, using the whole database with the whole history is not really practicable nor useful, on a local computer. Personally, I use the dumps generated by Kiwix, which only provide the last revision at the time of generation of the dump. I download them using the torrents provided by Kiwix and keep seeding them, so it can hardly be more decentralized, in that regard :)
      - ricardo81 6y ago
        I wouldn't bother so much about the SEO angle as that's site owner's concern if they wish to help search engines understand them better and/or try game them - I'd say wrt search engines it's about the fact they're still the single largest primary driver in how people find new pages, and generally how sites get seen 'organically' without paying to be seen. Yes, it's cool that the entire dataset is there to be downloaded and used as you please. I have a parser written for it as part of a knowledge graph- don't get me wrong there's good things about Wikipedia I think it just came with collateral damage. Case in point is just searching for any wikipedia title and seeing where it appears in search results, also most of the "knowledge panel" results in major search engines are derived from Wikipedia/Wikidata and deprive the original content creators of their visitors.

ricardo81 6y ago

While I used Wikipedia a lot and appreciate the generic layout which makes things easier to find, it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. The web lowered the barrier to entry and the Wikipedia editorial system somewhat raises it for anyone interested in creating something for the web.

LyndsySimon 6y ago
> it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. I'm not trying to "call you out" on this; I'm genuinely curious - do you have anything to back up this assertion? I've had a couple of instances where I'd written something on a topic that Wikipedia had inadequately covered, and posted on the article's talk page. I included a link to my content, a note that it was my original research, and asked that other editors consider adding it as a source. In most instance - maybe every instance, as it's been a while and I'm not even sure if I could find all the places I'd done that - it was eventually cited and incorporated into the article.
- ricardo81 6y ago
  Hi, no problem if you wish to call me out :-) I think you may have slightly misunderstood me, as you make examples of times where you've suggested edits to editors and they've been agreeable. I was talking more along the lines of the syndication of content at scale, perhaps a "death by a thousand papercuts (or citations)" scenario where Wikipedia gets the pageviews, the visitors, the links. For example, Wikipedia gets a lot of links as a 'credible' reference, and tends to rank well in search engines for the topic titles due to this. This pushes down all the other pages of course, including the pages that Wikipedia uses as citations. I feel that content has been homogenised and centralised too much, and could go into that more but I'm sure you get my general gist, without any data to back it up. On the flip side, there is additional added value from something like Wikipedia existing, like all the Natural Language Processor tools that get trained up on well-formed and structured text.
  - Jay2wu2u 6y ago
    Note also that the centralization point is not necessarily true. On one hand, yes totally, the process of gathering knowledge is centralized on wikipedia.org . Although, it's not a place where original content is welcome, so it still links to the sources. I guess that if SEO is of concern to you, being linked by wikipedia probably have some value. On the other hand, my usual way of reading wikipedia is by browsing localhost. All data of wikipedia is open (you can actually download its database) and under creative common, so it's perfectly legit to host it on your own computer - quite the opposite of centralized, in that regard. Of course, using the whole database with the whole history is not really practicable nor useful, on a local computer. Personally, I use the dumps generated by Kiwix, which only provide the last revision at the time of generation of the dump. I download them using the torrents provided by Kiwix and keep seeding them, so it can hardly be more decentralized, in that regard :)
    - ricardo81 6y ago
      I wouldn't bother so much about the SEO angle as that's site owner's concern if they wish to help search engines understand them better and/or try game them - I'd say wrt search engines it's about the fact they're still the single largest primary driver in how people find new pages, and generally how sites get seen 'organically' without paying to be seen. Yes, it's cool that the entire dataset is there to be downloaded and used as you please. I have a parser written for it as part of a knowledge graph- don't get me wrong there's good things about Wikipedia I think it just came with collateral damage. Case in point is just searching for any wikipedia title and seeing where it appears in search results, also most of the "knowledge panel" results in major search engines are derived from Wikipedia/Wikidata and deprive the original content creators of their visitors.