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On the modern web, where far-flung strangers collaborate on things like authoring an encyclopedia and overthrowing abusive governments, it's still too hard for

On the modern web, where far-flung strangers collaborate on things like authoring an encyclopedia and overthrowing abusive governments, it's still too hard for most people to contribute to open source projects. First, its actually not that easy to contribute to Wikipedia. Unless you've got a lot of patience to fight with the people who don't like your changes and are more willing to revert them rather than improve them, getting your contribution into Wikipedia is far more difficult than it first appears. Even if you are willing to undertake that battle, you have to navigate a slew of semi-official organizations and obscure three-letter-abbreviations in order to make your case. For example, I've seen the following on the Wikipedia IRC channel: "The submitter didn't like their article being AfD'd, so he took it to AN/I and argued that it wasn't a violation of WP:N." I wish OSS commentary would stop holding Wikipedia up as some paragon of openness, when in fact it is just as closed and insular as every other online community. Second, the impact of a bad submission into Wikipedia is much less than the impact of a bad submission to a software project. A buggy patch causes the program to fail. A single bad fact on a Wikipedia article doesn't cause Wikipedia as a whole to be a failure. For that reason, free software projects are justified in being more selective than Wikipedia in accepting patches.

sethg 16y ago
I always got the impression that getting stuff on Wikipedia was a political minefield because you can never make a clear-cut argument like “after this patch was submitted, the code didn’t compile; therefore, the patch should be backed out”.
_delirium 16y ago
Unless you've got a lot of patience to fight with the people who don't like your changes and are more willing to revert them rather than improve them, getting your contribution into Wikipedia is far more difficult than it first appears. This is often asserted, but it has never been my experience. Have you attempted to contribute to Wikipedia and had that experience? In which areas? My observations have been, on the contrary, that there are very few areas where reverts are common, mostly areas with political controversy or recent events. And deletion is only an issue in a small minority of article classes as well, mostly things like software projects, music groups, and professors, where there's a grey area between "obvious keep" and "obviously this guy just wrote an article about himself". Some more solid data would be nice to tell either way, but I'm confident that if you ran the numbers, the percentage of edits that get reverted or deleted is tiny; probably under 0.1%. Most articles I create have the opposite problem: they languish unimproved for years, with no edits besides the occasional maintenance bot modifying a category.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  >Have you attempted to contribute to Wikipedia and had that experience, or is this based on your guess as to what would happen? I have. I was a very active WP editor (mostly on religion articles) in the 2005-2007 timeframe. From what I can tell, it's only gotten worse. There are some articles that you can change without having to bicker for three weeks before your changes finally stick, but at least in the fields I'm interested in, that's definitely not true. These days when I make a change (only a handful per year now), I get accused of violating WP "canvassing policies", which didn't even exist back in my day, assuming bad faith, and whatever other stupid acronym the adversarial side can come up with. Wikipedians who don't like your edits will drag them through so much bureaucracy only the most determined editors care enough to push through it. Even then there's no guarantee the bureaucracy will make the correct decision; you almost have to get something to the Arbitration Committee to know you're dealing with someone that at least sort of understands what they're talking about.
  - whatusername 16y ago
    You were editing religious articles. And you're complaining about bickering. What exactly did you expect? Around 07 I made the first few edits to the wiki page for the small town I grew up (added the first 2 sentances of custom text) and updated the census statistics. It's now at 1600 words -- and I don't think has ever had any acronyms thrown at it (the only discussion page text is my question about census data from 2007) For most articles -- for people who act as contributors -- the bureaucracy just isn't there.
    - cookiecaper 16y ago
      It wasn't only religion articles, I experience the same on almost any topic of general interest. Niche articles that are primarily regurgitation of statistics like articles about small towns (which consist primarily of weather and census data) obviously don't get much attention or controversy because there's not much interesting going on there. "Hard science" articles are harder to bicker about, but it still happens there occasionally. And everywhere outside of that this useless bureaucracy, reversion, and bickering cycle is the predominant activity on Wikipedia.

sethg 16y ago

I always got the impression that getting stuff on Wikipedia was a political minefield because you can never make a clear-cut argument like “after this patch was submitted, the code didn’t compile; therefore, the patch should be backed out”.

_delirium 16y ago

Unless you've got a lot of patience to fight with the people who don't like your changes and are more willing to revert them rather than improve them, getting your contribution into Wikipedia is far more difficult than it first appears. This is often asserted, but it has never been my experience. Have you attempted to contribute to Wikipedia and had that experience? In which areas? My observations have been, on the contrary, that there are very few areas where reverts are common, mostly areas with political controversy or recent events. And deletion is only an issue in a small minority of article classes as well, mostly things like software projects, music groups, and professors, where there's a grey area between "obvious keep" and "obviously this guy just wrote an article about himself". Some more solid data would be nice to tell either way, but I'm confident that if you ran the numbers, the percentage of edits that get reverted or deleted is tiny; probably under 0.1%. Most articles I create have the opposite problem: they languish unimproved for years, with no edits besides the occasional maintenance bot modifying a category.

cookiecaper 16y ago
>Have you attempted to contribute to Wikipedia and had that experience, or is this based on your guess as to what would happen? I have. I was a very active WP editor (mostly on religion articles) in the 2005-2007 timeframe. From what I can tell, it's only gotten worse. There are some articles that you can change without having to bicker for three weeks before your changes finally stick, but at least in the fields I'm interested in, that's definitely not true. These days when I make a change (only a handful per year now), I get accused of violating WP "canvassing policies", which didn't even exist back in my day, assuming bad faith, and whatever other stupid acronym the adversarial side can come up with. Wikipedians who don't like your edits will drag them through so much bureaucracy only the most determined editors care enough to push through it. Even then there's no guarantee the bureaucracy will make the correct decision; you almost have to get something to the Arbitration Committee to know you're dealing with someone that at least sort of understands what they're talking about.
- whatusername 16y ago
  You were editing religious articles. And you're complaining about bickering. What exactly did you expect? Around 07 I made the first few edits to the wiki page for the small town I grew up (added the first 2 sentances of custom text) and updated the census statistics. It's now at 1600 words -- and I don't think has ever had any acronyms thrown at it (the only discussion page text is my question about census data from 2007) For most articles -- for people who act as contributors -- the bureaucracy just isn't there.
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    It wasn't only religion articles, I experience the same on almost any topic of general interest. Niche articles that are primarily regurgitation of statistics like articles about small towns (which consist primarily of weather and census data) obviously don't get much attention or controversy because there's not much interesting going on there. "Hard science" articles are harder to bicker about, but it still happens there occasionally. And everywhere outside of that this useless bureaucracy, reversion, and bickering cycle is the predominant activity on Wikipedia.