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Wikipedia developed something many though was impossible by assembling thousands (millions?) of volunteers. Why did the solution here need to be algorithmic? C

Wikipedia developed something many though was impossible by assembling thousands (millions?) of volunteers. Why did the solution here need to be algorithmic? Couldn't they scale useful summaries in the same way they scaled the actual article content?

creatonez 5y ago
You have to actually get those contributors to show up, which is an issue because wikipedia has been slowly bleeding active contributors for years.
- grandpoobah 5y ago
  Perhaps a great way to get them to show up, would be to give them the opportunity to be the first to write a summary and select/upload a picture for an article in their field? :)
grandpoobah 5y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. Every now and then I will naively take on some kind of difficult programming challenge requiring lots of hacks and out of the box thinking. These can be quite fun projects, and very rewarding if you make it to the end. But sometimes, as you work your way through the project, and the number of exceptions and edge cases grows, you have to step back and ask yourself is it really worth it? Sunk cost fallacy usually kicks in and you hate yourself for a couple of days, but ultimately you realise it was the right decision. "They were too occupied thinking about how they could do it, that nobody stopped to ask whether they should." I don't know what drives Wikipedia contributors to do what they do, but I imagine there would be a large number of them who would want to go out and be the first to write a summary and select/upload a picture for as many articles as they possibly could. If the motivation simply isn't there - gamify it somehow.
dokem 5y ago
Yes, use a default basic implementation that just grabs the main image and first paragraph with some basic stripping. Then allow authors to later modify the card content specifically. I'm sure it would take a page editor all of 2 minutes to do something like that. This really seemed like perfect is the enemy of good. I also get the feeling that wikipedia is afraid to stand up to the mob of editors.

creatonez 5y ago

You have to actually get those contributors to show up, which is an issue because wikipedia has been slowly bleeding active contributors for years.

grandpoobah 5y ago
Perhaps a great way to get them to show up, would be to give them the opportunity to be the first to write a summary and select/upload a picture for an article in their field? :)

grandpoobah 5y ago

Wholeheartedly agree. Every now and then I will naively take on some kind of difficult programming challenge requiring lots of hacks and out of the box thinking. These can be quite fun projects, and very rewarding if you make it to the end. But sometimes, as you work your way through the project, and the number of exceptions and edge cases grows, you have to step back and ask yourself is it really worth it? Sunk cost fallacy usually kicks in and you hate yourself for a couple of days, but ultimately you realise it was the right decision. "They were too occupied thinking about how they could do it, that nobody stopped to ask whether they should." I don't know what drives Wikipedia contributors to do what they do, but I imagine there would be a large number of them who would want to go out and be the first to write a summary and select/upload a picture for as many articles as they possibly could. If the motivation simply isn't there - gamify it somehow.

dokem 5y ago

Yes, use a default basic implementation that just grabs the main image and first paragraph with some basic stripping. Then allow authors to later modify the card content specifically. I'm sure it would take a page editor all of 2 minutes to do something like that. This really seemed like perfect is the enemy of good. I also get the feeling that wikipedia is afraid to stand up to the mob of editors.