4 ms·

Wikipedia is bleeding editors and keeping others away because of the ever more hostile environment. Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very f

Wikipedia is bleeding editors and keeping others away because of the ever more hostile environment. Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.

zozbot234 5y ago
> Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. "Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on github. Yes, I know that a lot of novice-focused content advises people to edit directly. That's fine for fixing typos and bad grammer, not for substantive work.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  QED.
  - xvector 5y ago
    I do not see why it needs to be easier than making a PR. What would you propose?
    - KingOfCoders 5y ago
      Because the easier it is the the more people are involved. That was the original idea of the WikiWay, to make editing simple [1] Second if this is the way to go - and I don't agree [2] - the UI should reflect this workflow and not propose a different one that mostly fails. [Edit] PRs also assume some kind of owner and committer relationship, which might be right for open source projects but is not the case of Wikipedia - even if many editors on Wikipedia consider the content "their own". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb - "Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, [...] . The usefulness of Wiki is in the freedom, simplicity, and power it offers." [2] Wrote a quite successfull wiki 20y ago called SnipSnap, the engine of which started Atlassian Confluence, and did several years of research in using Wikis back then.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        The community is the owner, the individual editor/committer has to reach consensus if the edit is disputed.
        CRConrad 5y ago
        But that doesn't go for reverters, does it?
- mistrial9 5y ago
  naw - I took three paragraphs of an important but obscure 20th century news event, rewrote using 8th grade English principles for clarity and order of facts, specifically and purposefully not changing any statement in the content, and it was immediately reverted with no recourse. The original was demonstrably awful writing -- total gatekeeping.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Rewriting whole paragraphs for clarity is very much the kind of thing that should be discussed on the talk page. That's why the feature exists.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      .. that should be discussed by whom, exactly? That article had not seen but three edits in the last five years. You are implying that the self-appointed gatekeepers need to review it.. you are describing the gatekeeping literally right now.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        People familiar with the article and the topic area, obviously. The way you prevent gatekeeping is by proactively showing good faith and giving people an opportunity to raise any real, actionable concerns they might have.
        mistrial9 5y ago
        Your explanation sounds considered and fair, but, is this what is happening ? not in my experience
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Rewriting whole paragraphs for clarity is very much the kind of thing that should be discussed on the talk page. That's why the feature exists. That's absolutely not how it's been presented for the last couple decades, though.
- h_anna_h 5y ago
  And then an admin removes your post from the talk page because they do not like it or start responding in a toxic way.
- uranusjr 5y ago
  There’s a mental mismatch in here. The pull request workflow works on GitHub because 1. every piece of code has a clear owner that is in charge to gate-keep the changes, and 2. if the gatekeepers fail at their job, contributors have a reasonable recourse (forking). Neither is true for Wikipedia. There are no clear owners for each article so the editors are more or less hidden in the shadows (from the readers and casual contributors, at least), instead of being front-and-center of an article and explicitly taking responsibilities. It is also very unclear why they get to “own” the article like a GitHub repository; are they the initial author? Major contributors that took the baton from the original author? In many cases they are, but Wikipedia does not make that relation clear, so the editors look like self-appointed to an outside eye, which is why people have issues with gate-keeping (not the gate-keeping itself). Making things worse, an “outside” contributor also has no chance but to work with those (seemingly) self-proclaimed maintainers; only one article can be under an entry on Wikipedia, your own modified copy has no chance competing with the original, even if you managed to make other people aware of it and agree it’s objectively better. That’s competitive imbalance, another trait of undesired gate-keeping. I’m not saying what the Wikipedia community is doing is wrong. But if that’s how they want to do things, they need to fix Wikipedia to reflect what they want the process to work. The current system is broken.

zozbot234 5y ago

> Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. "Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on github. Yes, I know that a lot of novice-focused content advises people to edit directly. That's fine for fixing typos and bad grammer, not for substantive work.

KingOfCoders 5y ago
QED.
- xvector 5y ago
  I do not see why it needs to be easier than making a PR. What would you propose?
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    Because the easier it is the the more people are involved. That was the original idea of the WikiWay, to make editing simple [1] Second if this is the way to go - and I don't agree [2] - the UI should reflect this workflow and not propose a different one that mostly fails. [Edit] PRs also assume some kind of owner and committer relationship, which might be right for open source projects but is not the case of Wikipedia - even if many editors on Wikipedia consider the content "their own". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb - "Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, [...] . The usefulness of Wiki is in the freedom, simplicity, and power it offers." [2] Wrote a quite successfull wiki 20y ago called SnipSnap, the engine of which started Atlassian Confluence, and did several years of research in using Wikis back then.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      The community is the owner, the individual editor/committer has to reach consensus if the edit is disputed.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        But that doesn't go for reverters, does it?
mistrial9 5y ago
naw - I took three paragraphs of an important but obscure 20th century news event, rewrote using 8th grade English principles for clarity and order of facts, specifically and purposefully not changing any statement in the content, and it was immediately reverted with no recourse. The original was demonstrably awful writing -- total gatekeeping.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Rewriting whole paragraphs for clarity is very much the kind of thing that should be discussed on the talk page. That's why the feature exists.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    .. that should be discussed by whom, exactly? That article had not seen but three edits in the last five years. You are implying that the self-appointed gatekeepers need to review it.. you are describing the gatekeeping literally right now.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      People familiar with the article and the topic area, obviously. The way you prevent gatekeeping is by proactively showing good faith and giving people an opportunity to raise any real, actionable concerns they might have.
      - mistrial9 5y ago
        Your explanation sounds considered and fair, but, is this what is happening ? not in my experience
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Rewriting whole paragraphs for clarity is very much the kind of thing that should be discussed on the talk page. That's why the feature exists. That's absolutely not how it's been presented for the last couple decades, though.
h_anna_h 5y ago
And then an admin removes your post from the talk page because they do not like it or start responding in a toxic way.
uranusjr 5y ago
There’s a mental mismatch in here. The pull request workflow works on GitHub because 1. every piece of code has a clear owner that is in charge to gate-keep the changes, and 2. if the gatekeepers fail at their job, contributors have a reasonable recourse (forking). Neither is true for Wikipedia. There are no clear owners for each article so the editors are more or less hidden in the shadows (from the readers and casual contributors, at least), instead of being front-and-center of an article and explicitly taking responsibilities. It is also very unclear why they get to “own” the article like a GitHub repository; are they the initial author? Major contributors that took the baton from the original author? In many cases they are, but Wikipedia does not make that relation clear, so the editors look like self-appointed to an outside eye, which is why people have issues with gate-keeping (not the gate-keeping itself). Making things worse, an “outside” contributor also has no chance but to work with those (seemingly) self-proclaimed maintainers; only one article can be under an entry on Wikipedia, your own modified copy has no chance competing with the original, even if you managed to make other people aware of it and agree it’s objectively better. That’s competitive imbalance, another trait of undesired gate-keeping. I’m not saying what the Wikipedia community is doing is wrong. But if that’s how they want to do things, they need to fix Wikipedia to reflect what they want the process to work. The current system is broken.