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Right now Wikipedia is run more like an anti-spam organization, the editors (random people) are busy deleting anything added. A Wikipedia 2.0 is needed... one
by gscott 5y ago
Right now Wikipedia is run more like an anti-spam organization, the editors (random people) are busy deleting anything added.
A Wikipedia 2.0 is needed... one where edits are put into a queue rather then having someone come in ten minutes later and delete your edit simply because it is live immediately.
Some years ago there was an NPR story on women in academia and how one decided to get together 50 top female academics in their fields and update Wikipedia in their subject matter that they hold PHD's in and work at Universities teaching about. Waste of time, all deleted.
Wikipedia is great but its emphasis is on deletion. A new Wikipedia needs to be made with an emphasis on addition and depth.
- exporectomy 5y agoThere must be more to the story than that. I've made many edits and I don't recall any being deleted. Maybe they didn't follow the rules.
- solresol 5y agoIt matches my experience. I can update pages about some topics (e.g. backup, tape drives, backup products) and nothing gets deleted or changed. But there are others where everything I update gets reverted with a comment like "reverted good faith edit from ____"
- dataviz1000 5y agoThis might be a case of the Law of triviality[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- yorwba 5y agoI think the expected reaction to having your good faith edits reverted is to reconsider whether it's an improvement to the article, and if it is, reapply it and potentially start a discussion on the talk page. If they keep reverting, they'll eventually get blocked from doing so.
- input_sh 5y agoFrom that short description I'm pretty sure it's related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Relationship_between_the_subject,_the_article,_and_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin... In short, Wikipedia tries to discourage writing about yourself, which also applies to doing so through a representative.
- oxfordmale 5y agoApparently editors identifying as a woman get rolled back far more often then men. This issue also effects some pages more than others. Corporate pages are often maintained by marketing companies that will monitor for changes that they perceive to be negative for their client. On the other hand changes to more technical topic tend to go unchallenged.
- dataviz1000 5y ago> Apparently editors identifying as a woman get rolled back far more often then men. I'm not a scientist, however, this sounds like it could be a legitimate study. If it is, what is the control group? 50 men doing the same?
- oxfordmale 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- belorn 5y agoDon't be lazy. The actually data, as given in the study, is that the first 1 edit has a 2% higher rate of reverting than males, with each further edit a decreased revert rate to the point where female users are less likely to be reverted than male users once they hit their 16th edit. The statement that "Apparently editors identifying as a woman get rolled back far more often then men" and the actually research result is quite far from each other.
- stickyricky 5y agoI don't trust this source. The article is on a website with a well-known gender bias[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia
- mellosouls 5y agoHappens an awful lot with "off message" edits that run counter to the political bias of the general Wiki editor demographic.
- belorn 5y agoThere are three major reasons why those get deleted. 1: Intent matters and advocacy is not permitted on Wikipedia. A lot of people don't like this rule or think it can be ignored if they don't demand payment for it. 2: You can't editing Wikipedia to bring awareness of something while at the same time fulfill the notability requirements. The top 50 academics are important for their fields, and can also be completely unknown for the rest of the world. As an example, people in sport, music and cinema are much more common to have an Wikipedia article about them then academics. This does not mean academics are less important to society, but it does reflect notability. 3: As others has marked, writing a article about yourself or by a representative is heavily discouraged. This runs in the same vein as advocacy.
- enchiridion 5y agoIt's interesting to think that the event of these scientists doing these edits is probably morale enough for its own entry.
- belorn 5y agoYes, and events like that can have enduring notability given enough third-party coverage. In this specific case I tried to search for the article/event, but neither of the search engine gave me any results, to the point where I now would like a source from gscott about that story.
- sitic 5y agoMediaWiki (the software running wikipedia) has this queuing feature already, it's called pending changes (edits from IPs/new users require review before going live): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes It is often used in non-english Wikipedias as default for all articles, on enwiki however only a very limited number of articles are protected in this way. However review guidelines usually don't ask for a check of correctness, but against spam and other obviously inappropriate content.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- macrolime 5y agoThis certainly is annoying. Many years ago when I first found Wikipedia, I would sometimes just type in my notes from some university classes. It was kind of a garbled mess, but every time it just took a couple days and someone had edited it, turning into a decent article. These days even much higher quality content will be deleted. For something to be accepted now it needs to be like something written by a professional writer and follow all kinds of guidelines for style, citations and much more immediately. Nobody fixes issues anymore, if there's any issues or something is not very well written it will be deleted immediately.
- antibuddy 5y ago> For something to be accepted now it needs to be like something written by a professional writer [...] Actually it is mostly selected by person rather than content or style. Mostly evidenced by the fact that accepted edits are mostly done by the same people. This is at least true for the German Wikipedia, but I have no doubt that the English one isn't any different.
- cxr 5y ago> I would sometimes just type in my notes from some university classes The time is ripe for something like Knol to be re-introduced. Even before Knol, we had something like this, and they were called personal websites. People would use them to document their passions (or anything, really) and you could find them on Google. People are probably so addicted to centralization and services, though, and Google's approach to ranking so overwhelmingly works against that style now, that it's probably unworkable to argue for relying on that again.
- teddyh 5y agoWould you mind giving links to these pages? Especially links to the specific edits which were reverted? This would set you apart from all the other people who complain about Wikipedia; as a rule, no links or specifics are given.
- chki 5y agoOP (and others in this thread) might not want to reveal their IP address or their Wikipedia username.
- teddyh 5y agoOr they might secretly be a dog. If someone complains about edits in Wikipedia, a site where all edits are publicly recorded for all time, I want to see links, or some very good reason for not providing any.
- drran 5y agoMaybe we need to create a "factopedia", with strict process for verification of facts, to avoid bias at Wikipedia.
- teddyh 5y agoIt’s been tried, more or less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium However, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- drran 5y agoI'm thinking about something different: a site, where everyone can publish a fact or a statement, arguments that supports or contradicts the fact, and a process with goal to make fact proven or falsified. (Sorry for my English). Fact: Earth is flat. Pros: Earth is flat, it's obvious. [direct evidence] Cons: Fact: [Picture of the Earth from the space] shows that Earth is round. Fact: Picture of the Earth from the space And so on.
- topranks 5y agoNot saying that’s not got its place, but most people want to look something up and get the facts. Personally I prefer if Wikipedia just says “earth is a sphere” and links citations, than makes me wade through a bunch of bullshit and evaluate it all for myself.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chki 5y ago> A Wikipedia 2.0 is needed... one where edits are put into a queue rather then having someone come in ten minutes later and delete your edit simply because it is live immediately. This is how some language versions of Wikipedia work, for example the German Wikipedia. Edits by new editors or IP-addresses are not live immediately but are put into a special review state for a more experienced editor to confirm the change. The English language version only uses this for a subset of pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes
- nature 5y ago> Some years ago there was an NPR story on women in academia and how one decided to get together 50 top female academics in their fields and update Wikipedia in their subject matter that they hold PHD's in and work at Universities teaching about. Waste of time, all deleted. [citation needed] Can't find the NPR article based on your description.
- Kim_Bruning 5y agoI'm me 3 on that citation. I'd love to read more on this and see what happened.
- hliyan 5y agoAnother idea for Wikipedia 2.0 is make the basic unit a "statement" rather than an "article". When Google Knol came out and called a Knol a unit of knowledge, I was excited that this was what they were going for, but sadly it was not to be. Now that we have GPT-3 like technology, it wouldn't be hard to generate generally readable prose from a database of statements. Each statement can be verified independently from each other, and can appear in multiple articles. E.g. [Christopher Columbus] is a person is italian is an explorer, navigator birth 1451/08/25 - 1451/10/31 death 1506/05/20 is known for the exploration of the Americas
- smitop 5y agoThat is the exact idea behind Abstract Wikipedia (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia), the idea of which is to automatically generate prose from structured data in Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org https://www.wikidata.org). You can already do a lot of cool stuff with Wikidata today
- hliyan 5y agoThat's great! The wikidata UI could be more compact though.
- cxr 5y agoSee also the World Wide Graph <https://graph.global https://graph.global> by Mek from OpenLibrary/archive.org. It's more informal than Wikidata and has looser requirements. (Pretty sure Mek wants it to embody something closer to the original "sum of all human knowledge" spirit that was bandied about in relation to Wikipedia in its early days. Heed the privacy implications of this, however! <https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline/?id=660 https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline/?id=660>) I ran into the bugs in the default web-based client available from the graph.global homepage, though, and I'm not especially fond of the opinionated choices it makes about overriding browser-native behavior for dealing with navigation. I made an attempt back in November at beginning to implement an alternative frontend for it. I have an "instance" (if you can call it that) running at <https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline/ https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline/>, but right now you can only use it for read-only access to w2g. I will eventually fix this to allow graph changes, too, because my original motivation also included how cumbersome I noticed it was when entering new triples and linking together existing entities. I haven't worked out the right interaction for that yet. See this recent note <https://hypothes.is/a/RdwnFLRlEeu1mD-tdfIKCQ https://hypothes.is/a/RdwnFLRlEeu1mD-tdfIKCQ> about adding a command-line interface to w2g. Granted, it has similar whitespace problems as your criticism of Wikidata. An even more streamlined version that is tailored to be accessed from the terminal is, I think, more in line with what you'd probably like to see.
- vkk8 5y ago> Some years ago there was an NPR story on women in academia and how one decided to get together 50 top female academics in their fields and update Wikipedia in their subject matter that they hold PHD's in and work at Universities teaching about. Waste of time, all deleted. This sounds strange. Few years ago, when I was still in academia, I used to make small contributions to Wikipedia articles in my field (theoretical physics) and even smaller contributions to all sorts or articles (like fixing grammatical errors or adding "source needed" -tags). I checked my Wikipedia history now and none of my edits were ever reverted. What I sometimes see on Wikipedia is details of some new and obscure, sometimes even controversial research in a general overview article. It's probably the researchers themselves advertising their own research and trying to make it look more important. Sometimes this is probably even done in good faith. I wonder if this is what happened to the women in your story
- collyw 5y agoIt has gone downhill badly in the last few years. Anything with a political angle has a hard left bias. Many articles just look like smear pieces.