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Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is Losing Contributors
- gerds 15y agoBecause Wikipedia peaked in 2005.
- pornel 15y agoContributing to Wikipedia is not fun. If you create a new article, it's likely to get deleted for not meeting high "notability" criteria. Your first edits will likely end up being reverted for not having sources good enough. For overzealous admins it's easier to bin them rather than find a better source link or let someone else improve it.
- moultano 15y agoI haven't found that to be true at all, but maybe I'm editing different articles. I've gone through on a bunch of math topics that I know a fair bit about and reworded things to be understandable to someone not steeped in jargon and I've always gotten a positive or at least a neutral response.
- ColinWright 15y agoTweaking what's there isn't so bad. Anything substantial is rapidly punished unless perfect from the start.
- _delirium 15y agoMost of my editing is creating new short articles that are far from complete (often one or two paragraphs), and I haven't had problems. I do tend to cite at least one source per article, though (the place I got my info from). Is that the main reason? Or am I just lucky? Or choosing unproblematic areas? Occasionally someone or a bot slaps on a "this article is a stub" footer, but that doesn't really bug me. The one time I ran into trouble was a pretty edge case: my article on internet-meme rapper "Average Homeboy" was deleted, though it seems to now have been recreated. When I write articles on almost anything that isn't internet culture, there doesn't seem to be an army of evildoers looking to hassle me about them (say, on a CS theorem, castle in Greece, Prussian general, or a city hall in Minnesota).
- mclin 15y agoThanks! Way too often I find a math article jumps straight into the equations without a good overview that can be understood by someone without a math background. Example applications, for example, would greatly reduce the abstract nature of these pages. Here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controllability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controllability
- eru 15y agoDo you see that page as a good or bad example?
- mclin 15y agoWell, I'd seen the term 'Continuous Linear System' somewhere and came to this page, where it starts out as: Consider the continuous linear time-variant system <equations!> so, bad.
- ColinWright 15y agoIt's an encyclopedia, not a tutorial or textbook. It's not supposed to be something you learn from, but something you reference. What you want is something that would be more useful, but harder to produce.
- mclin 15y agoIt's not supposed to be something you learn from, but something you reference. Really? That's the exact opposite of how I think of it. An encyclopedia is something you learn an initial shallow understanding from. A field specific reference text is something you reference. eg. My linear algebra text book. For sure re usefulness, which is why moultano's work is greatly appreciated.
- jerrya 15y agoApart from the usual wikilawyers warring and reverting everything, I've also recently found lots of bots come by just to tag edits, which were correct, as possible vandalism, etc. Plus the problem mentioned in the article that it's no longer "okay" just to drop a url into an article, everything has to match some bizarro world template that no one would ever want to fill out given their lousy pay rates. And for all that, the wiki staff is too stupid/poor/unimaginative to automatically download and archive what the urls in the articles point to, meaning that the whole thing suffers from increasing amounts of link rot. It's also fun to contribute a new article and then see it nominated for swift deletion because it rubs someone the wrong way and has violated one of a trillion different little wiki policies all put up to justify reverting/deleting otherwise fine content.
- _delirium 15y agoThe template isn't as important as the source; if you drop an IEEE/ACM/jstor/Citeseer URL in lieu of a formatted citation, that's fine, and someone should fix it up later into the full journal citation. If it's a URL to a DailyKos diary or something, though, that's less useful.
- jerrya 15y agoI would claim you've got it skewed, especially for someone posting from Hacker News. Let me try and reformulate it: If you drop a URL in that's fine, one of our bots will come by, not to chastise your edit as possible vandalism, but to fill out the journal entry for you and download the url and archive it.
- Enlightenment 15y agoThe biggest problem with wikipedia edits are people NOT following the rules. People act like they can make CRAPPY edits in any way THEY like and then EXPECT those CRAPPY edits to stick. If you add a bunch of text WITHOUT a reference citation, then whine because someone deletes your text, then it is YOUR own fault for NOT adding a reference. Most people need to quit whining like a bunch of little girls and edit articles the correct way.
- yichi 15y agoAs an administrator on Wikipedia, I thought the Wikipedia notability criteria is quite leniant about articles which are not that notable, this is evident if you ever look at what kind of articles gets kept on [[WP:AFD]]. The reason notability criteria is there so not everyone can create an article about their band which sold 3 copies of their CD (edit: Which typically have no realiable sources indicating its existance). If the article you are creating was deleted for not meeting the notability criteria, it means you probably did not source it with a reliable source, and the administartor who deleted it could not find a reliable source about the article you were writing. If you think your article's deletion need to be reviewed, try contacting one of the admins, if your article was deleted by me I would be more than happy to tell you why I deleted it, and if I made a mistake I would not hestitate to revert the deletion.
- ramchip 15y ago> The reason notability criteria is there so not everyone can create an article about their band which sold 3 copies of their CD. I could see this being a problem if the band's name is ambiguous with existing, important articles. But if there's no conflict, how is that a bad thing? Perhaps it would encourage people to contribute more if Wikipedia is a little too lenient rather than a little too strict.
- yichi 15y agoBands which sold 3 copies of their CD tend to have no reliable sources indicating its existance even, with no sources, how is anyone able to ensure that it even exists? (Perhaps I should of reworded that). Notability criteria in a nutshell, basically means, the subject of the article needs to be mentioned by some reliable source. If we had no notability criteria, then we simply have no ways to ensure that the subject of the article exists or even real. Note: I'm pretty much summarizing what's on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:N http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:N If you think I'm biased, please read the policy directly on Wikipedia itself.
- cma 15y agoThat's an apologist revisionism take on what Wikipedia notability criteria is.
- GiraffeNecktie 15y agoAnd good luck contributing edits to controversial topics (i.e. anything related to the big topics like the Middle East, religion, Pokemon etc.) where the same battles are fought over and over and over again in a war of attrition. The price of victory is eternal vigilance and an endless supply of fresh troops to reinforce your position.
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoWhy is Pokemon "controversial"? (disclaimer: I barely know what Pokemon is)
- SamReidHughes 15y agoSome people say the site lost its way when each kind of Pokemon didn't have its own Wikipedia page.
- scythe 15y agoIt's controversial because people get into arguments about it. He included it in the list because it's also trivial and silly, as a way of saying that Wikipedians get into arguments about trivial and silly things ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LAME http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LAME ). It's a joke of sorts.
- pyre 15y agoTrivial indeed: Are U2 an "Irish band" or simply a band that happen to be from Ireland, since two of their members were born in the UK
- wisty 15y agoThere's Keldeo, Meloetta, and Genesect - the missing Pokemon. They are only present on a Nintendo game, and only if you hack it. But they are vaporized, 1984-style, from the English Wikipedia; as they don't exist in the real Pokemon world. At least, that's what I can glean from 5 minutes on the discussion page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_(599%E2%80%93646) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_(599%....
- gnosis 15y agoThere are actually many incredibly obscure articles that are created on Wikipedia which rightly deserve to be deleted for not meeting the pretty reasonable notability criteria. There are also way too many articles with either no sources at all or with really crappy or biased sources. If the articles are obscure enough, they often never even get challenged or deleted. Many of those that do get challenged or deleted deserve to be. The real problem comes in when articles which really are notable and information from sources which are credible get deleted for ideological, political, or other biased reasons (though, of course, the people doing the deletion will always claim otherwise). Wikipedia really has no good solution for this than letting the parties involved argue it out, or draw in more editors/admins (who have their own biases) in to the argument. What usually emerges from these arguments is not "neutrality" or "objectivity", but rather a biased point of view of those people who managed to out-Wikilawyer, outnumber, or outlast the other side.
- ColinWright 15y agoYou can't engage gradually - if you don't get everything exactly right first time you just get spat out with little or no feedback or encouragement. Designers of user interfaces have learned over time that you need to engage gradually and give positive feedback for the good bits, while gently removing the bad bits. WikiPedia seems to do exactly the opposite. User Hostile rather than User Friendly. More, in the push to become a "proper" encyclopedia the markup has become remarkably baroque, making it almost impossible to get to know what to do. The macros and other procedures that work behind the scenes are nearly impossible to grok given the lack of tools to help. Overall, it's simply groaning under the mass of twiddles and has no elegance.
- Hyena 15y agoPresumably a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the English-speaking world has been picked. So Wikipedia really needs to draw contributors from outside Anglosphere to flesh out history and culture articles.
- hugh3 15y agoMore importantly, it needs to draw contributors from outside the Anglosphere to work on languages other than English. English wikipedia has 3.7 million articles. Spanish has only 810,000, Chinese just 300,000-ish, and Hindi less than one hundred thousand. That's the top four most spoken languages in the world right there.
- _delirium 15y agoFor Hindi in particular, there's a big competition-with-English issue. There was a study at some point that Wikimedia commissioned that found that most educated Hindi-speakers preferred to read and contribute to the English Wikipedia. IIRC, one of the reasons was that they felt it promoted Indian culture to a more international audience if they wrote an article about an Indian location, or novel, or historical figure, in English. Another reason is that a lot of higher education in India is in English already. (Also, anecdotally, the South Indians I know would rather use English than Hindi; their own native-language Wikipedias, like Kannada, are too small for them to consider them viable, and they see English as more "neutral" than Hindi in domestic political terms.)
- eru 15y agoYou can go and translate articles from the other languages' Wikipedias.
- Hyena 15y agoI do it on a regular basis, actually. What's surprising to me is that others don't seem to: I often come across articles in other languages which are dwarfed by their English companion. I'd think that someone would have bothered using Google Translate to guide a conversion of the page from English, but I guess I'd think wrong.
- bugsbunnyak 15y agoI think MediaWiki is showing its age. Some improvements could include: - reputation system and better meta-edit controls a la StackOverflow. This could help remove some of the politics associated with Administrative rights in the current system. - edit thresholds that increase with size/age of articles, to avoid stupid troll-based edit wars. To still allow quick reaction to news events, have a vote-based modification system to allow upvotes to overcome the threshold. - A robust table editor to replace the monstrosity of MW tables would go a long way to improve readability. - ... and in general, less arcane markup.
- emp_ 15y agoAgree with the aging, but I don't think it is so simple. Voting has issues too, you are not seeing everyone's points in HN for a reason.
- starwed 15y agoMW tables aren't really a monstrosity -- I doubt a better text editable table format that maintained the flexibility could be produced. But yeah, there are some problematic holes in MW, especially when you consider how wikipedia is used today. Example: How many times have you clicked on a link, to be redirected to a page that seems to have no relevance? After a few seconds, you realise it was supposed to redirect to a specific subsection, but that subsection has been removed or renamed. That is a problem that could be solved with better technology.
- bh42222 15y agoWikipedia puzzles me. Why so many deletions? The significance of a topic is very important for paper encyclopedias because shelf space is finite. A regular encyclopedia collection can have only so many books before no one can afford to buy one. But when most of the Wikipedia contents are text - why all the deletions?
- jerrya 15y agoMy experience is that almost every deletion war I have witnessed is in reality a war about differing "political" beliefs and is an exercise mostly in censorship, speech policing, and gate keeping. Instead of deleting articles, it might be better to "age" articles and let interested parties know when an article hasn't been viewed or edited or linked to 90 days, six months, 1 year, 2 years, etc. Those articles could then either be freshened, merged, or potentially deleted (after say a decade of never being edited or looked at or linked to.)
- dpark 15y ago> or potentially deleted (after say a decade of never being edited or looked at or linked to.) You've got to be kidding. I no longer edit Wikipedia in part to the deletionism, but a decade of zero interest before deletion? Wikipedia itself is only a decade old. They'd just now be deleting the first vanity pages.
- jerrya 15y agoYes. Exactly. Sounds good to me. I am glad we can agree on this.
- ejames 15y agoBecause there are storage costs other than the literal cost of maintaining data on a server. Is the data accurate and up-to-date? Are the links still viable? Do the citations check out? etc. It's just like having a project with a huge number of lines of code. It's an important maintenance task to delete outdated or obsolete code - not because you will run out of disk space to store your .c files, but because unused, unmaintained code is very likely to be confusing or wrong. Remember also the power rule for user contribution: 90% of all users do not contribute anything ever. 9% of users contribute at least once. 1% of users contribute everything else. If an article is not very notable, it's extremely likely that the person who originally contributes it will be the only person who ever contributes anything to the article, and contributing the original is very likely to be the only contribution to the subject they make. This will hold true even if there are some number of "long tail" readers interested in the article, because readers are drastically more common than writers, and infrequent writers drastically more common than writers who consistently attempt to improve the articles they read. So: Articles with low notability are probably poorly maintained, out of date, and/or consisting entirely of the statements of a single person. Making them better imposes a cost which relatively few people in Wikipedia's community actually pay - the cost of taking time to edit something. All of Wikipedia's pains and stretch marks will become much clearer if you restate the purpose and function of the site. If you approach Wikipedia as a server farm that takes in user contributions and produces a compilation of same, then it's strange to have any limits on contributions, since the cost of storing text data is extremely small. If you approach Wikipedia as a group of people that takes in the members' time and energy and produces agreement between the members, then you see where their problems come from. Remember, a Wikipedia article gets to stay in a particular state only when everyone who potentially could change it agrees that no changes are necessary. Wikipedia produces consensus, not data. Its limiting factor is the time and patience of the people who work on edits. If you need consensus - the kind that will not be repeatedly challenged by latecomers - and you are limited in the number of people who will voluntarily "meet" in the editing area to discuss a particular subject, then low-popularity articles are a cost with no benefit. The opinions of a single person - possibly an oddball, since they're the only one who submitted the article - will produce no agreement, and it will consume more time and energy to find people who could hammer out a lasting consensus.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoNot surprising in the least. We already know that the people who add content to wikipedia are not the same as the people in power. But worse than that there's a pervasive failure to understand that within the wikipedia moderator and management community. The mods and admins have put a lot of their effort into pissing off the greater community with edit wars and rampant deletionism. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this would eventually take its toll on discouraging commenters.
- doctoboggan 15y agoIt has always been my opinion that the high barrier to editing has prevented vandalism. It seems we are now getting to the point that it is preventing legitimate commits as well.
- int3rnaut 15y agoI've been on both sides of the spectrum of this--I've "vandalized" (I was young, it wasn't malicious but I can see now it was disruptive--and for those wondering...it had to do with wild cats slowly taking over my city... haha) and I've legitimately tried to post useful and factual information and I will say this, the thing I universally found to be my biggest obstacle was this elitist structure of the "higher ups"--the big editors held way to much power (I can't speak to the present as I no longer even try) but I can't tell you how frustrating it was to try and be helpful and good, and then being told I am an idiot/noob and to cease from attempting to write wiki articles. It always seemed like some of them were just on power trips, and didn't care for your "help".
- kevinpet 15y agoMy beef with Wikipedia is the squeaky wheel gets the grease problem: a vocal minority easily drowns out the more rational but less rabid. For example: why does the article on pregnancy need a naked woman on it? The talk page dismisses all arguments of "why is this necessary, what's wrong with this other photo of a clothed pregnant woman" with "we don't censor". The article for video games is a good example of this. There's clearly someone on wikipedia who has made it his life's work to ensure that there cannot exist an article which doesn't explicitly state that "video game" can only refer to something that has a raster display.
- scythe 15y ago>My beef with Wikipedia is the squeaky wheel gets the grease problem: a vocal minority easily drowns out the more rational but less rabid. For example: why does the article on pregnancy need a naked woman on it? The talk page dismisses all arguments of "why is this necessary, what's wrong with this other photo of a clothed pregnant woman" with "we don't censor". The irony is palpable. Upon reading this, I went to the Wikipedia article on Pregnancy and looked at the talk page. I found a lot of surprisingly decent and rational discussion about the choice of the image, including some gems: "There is no profanity in any of the later 3 images. These images depict the natural condition of pregnancy (external manifestation, physical changes, etc), to which image 1 alone would not be able to do justice." "Someone recently used the phrase "adolescent glee" to describe the attitudes of some editors who argue for the most prominent possible placement of nudity, and that resonates with me. Just because we can (and IMO should) include this image somewhere in the article does not mean that we should make it be the first and largest image—or that we should have zero images of pregnant women who aren't in a state of undress. If you want to present pregnancy as a part of normal life, then showing exclusively images of women who are undressed isn't the way to go about it." Regardless of whom you agree with, both sides are putting forth legitimate arguments. Your intentional misrepresentation of the discussion raises questions about your motives.
- lukifer 15y ago> Your intentional misrepresentation of the discussion raises questions about your motives. Your intentional assumptions regarding intent and motives raises questions about your motives. :P
- duopixel 15y agoSay you draw a venn diagram with three intersecting circles: 1. People with technical web expertise 2. People with deep domain knowledge 3. People willing to deal with bureaucracy You will get a very tiny population. Wikipedia wasn't always like this, the problem is that well established editors have built a fort to keep the noobs out—not because they are power thirsty—but because they don't want to deal with noob mistakes. As with anyone new to a job, your first week will likely be a net loss to the company: they have to show you the ropes, set up your computer, take you out for lunch, make you feel welcome, etc. The wikipedia editors don't want to deal with this, so they just build technical and policy barriers to keep new people out. Around three years ago I decided on "donating" one day of my life to Wikipedia in Spanish. I went around areas of intest, fixed some stuff, created two new articles of well recognized designers. The next day both articles were "nominated for deletion", one because it wasn't properly formatted or referenced, and the other for copyright infringement. An overzealous editor made a search on google and found a similar article in a blog, my own blog! which I release under public domain and which shares my wikipedia handle. I ended up collaborating one day and fighting bureaucracy three days. No wonder they're having trouble finding new editors.
- Steko 15y agoIt's pretty clear that Wikipedia's eventually death/massive reorganization will come about over four easily recognizable flaws: (1) rejecting articles for notability. (2) no advertising (3) reliance on a tiny population of unpaid editors. (4) allowing anonymous edits. Google tried with Knol but they focused on (2), (3) and (4) when in actuality the biggest weakness is (1) due to Kryder's Law. What Google (or Microsoft or some startup) should do is create a third party wikipedia extension, call it notapedia (or whatever) and have it spider wikipedia and keep a fork of any page deleted for notability reasons. Of course that's just the tip of the iceberg. People will be able to make their own (notable or not notapedia) info pages. Notapedia will hit a critical mass and the killing blow will come all at once as wikipedia is forked and most of their editors enticed with revenue deals. Having swallowed it's father (patriphagicide?) notapedia grows even faster. Info pages are created for nearly every person on the planet, becoming the anti-facebook that Zuckerburg envisioned but replacing the real facebook and twitter and flickr and linked in and everything else as well. Businesses and government agencies will check your id against the datestamped photos of you on notapedia. An enormous network of private and government databases will be setup to work as extensions of notapedia.
- gojomo 15y agoMy current project aims to address many of these concerns with a new kind of reference website. The goal is to be complementary in license to Wikipedia, but with a different organizational model that is better able to accept any topic and casual contributors. (That is, it's definitely not Just-Another-MediaWiki-Install or content fork.) I'm still pre-launch but I discuss the themes and motivations in a blog at: http://infinithree.org http://infinithree.org
- carussell 15y agoI remember this being brought up before, and I remember some sound advice to change the name. It appears that advice was not heeded.
- gojomo 15y agoI cannot find any criticism of the name here via HNSearch, nor in the previous submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597881 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597881 So it appears that advice was not, in fact, given. If anyone had delivered that advice, I would have pointed out: 'Infinithree' is just a pre-launch code name. Any other feedback?
- DannoHung 15y agoMaybe wikipedia should start to move to a git-style of collaboration? Anonymous or semi-committed members can make or arrange small contributions that may or may not fit all the requirements. More senior members collate and merge contributions together. There would be multiple branches of a page to support re-organizations or new page sections.... I dunno, just a thought.
- scorpion032 15y agoWasn't that exactly what Knol set out to do? Associating ownership of an article to an individual.
- bane 15y agoOr perhaps support different "levels" of "encyclopedianess"? At the top are only articles that are of encyclopedia level contribution, then as you go down the rules slacken up a bit. All new contributions start at the bottom, say...level 5, and have to be accepted by editors at each higher level. That way if a reader doesn't care for the hyper-strict top level, they can view more inclusive information down the lower levels. If the site grows too big/strict and more levels are needed, it should be relatively trivial to add another level down.
- gnosis 15y agoI've freely given many, many hours of my life to improving Wikipedia, and here's why I left: Except for technical, completely uncontroversial articles, Wikipedia is dominated by people with apparently unlimited time on their hands to devote to pushing their point of view. I got really tired of the endless arguments I needed to engage in to contribute new information or improve the wording of existing articles. Some person or group of people with apparently unlimited time on their hands and who feel they "own" the article would inevitably come by and start reverting and endlessly arguing every little change. I just don't have the infinite time on my hands (or interest, frankly) that it would require to out-argue these people. They can keep their articles. I've got better things to do with my time than argue with no-life Wikilawyers all day, every day.
- shinratdr 15y agoHardly surprising. The last 50 edits to a Wiki I've made were to private Wikias. Why? Because I actually contributed something, and the paragraph I wrote about bugs in a Fallout: New Vegas location is still there in it's entirety, but with additions and conformations from users of other platforms. That's how Wikipedia was supposed to work. Now every time I try to do something, I know it will be deleted over non-notability. It's not even a question anymore, it's just a matter of time. Since we can break up articles into sub-topics very easily, there is absolutely no reason for this behaviour other than a love of power-tripping and some vague Wikipeida guidelines to fall back on. The editors are already in this thread, defending themselves. Nothing new, just the same "We don't want pages about your unknown indie band". Talk about baby & the bathwater.
- VioletEvil 15y agoDon't whine like a little girl because your edits don't meet the wikipedia guidelines.
- shinratdr 15y agoDon't comment on Hacker News if you can't compose yourself and respond like an adult.
- TorKlingberg 15y agoThe problem with Wikipedia is the reaction to people trying to add crap that doesn't belong. It has been to put up barriers to adding content, making anyone who starts a new article go though more and more bureaucracy, paperwork and proving your innocence. It is the same with uploading pictures or just adding text to an article. This has led to much fewer people joining the community, and without enough editors to look after the articles, the arguments to lock down and protect only becomes stronger. Basically Wikipedia has suffered the same fate as many mature online communities. In the beginning everyone is helping each other out and you are creating something great together. After a few years the older members of the community start getting really tired of the clueless newcomers and start complaining and setting up rules. New users no longer feel welcome and never stay long. Soon 90% are experienced members, and the newcomer perspective is lost completely. It is often not intentional, making it easier for moderators is just higher priority than letting more people participate. I wonder if Stack Overflow will survive growing up.
- bane 15y agoAfter a few years the older members of the community start getting really tired of the clueless newcomers and start complaining and setting up rules. Maybe a "forced retirement" rule should go in effect for long time editors?
- VioletEvil 15y agoTweaking articles is the very best way to get involved with editing Wikipedia. There are lots of minor typos and grammar mistakes in Wikipedia, and fixing every little bit refines an article.
- bane 15y agoNo really? Wikipedia has fostered a culture where the only remaining people who participate think it's perfectly reasonable to destroy knowledge because it hasn't achieved a level of fame such that everybody already knows it.
- raldi 15y ago"It's the deletionists, stupid."
- a3_nm 15y agoI find it quite worrying that people will rely on Wikipedia but stop editing it because it's hard and because not everyone is friendly there. Yes, part of the time that you spend editing Wikipedia is lost because you have to look up obscure conventions and templates and policies, and argue with people every now and then, including some rare cases where it's hard to assume good faith. You should be fair though -- Wikipedia is a huge endeavor, and administrative friction is unavoidable to some extent. If people stop contributing, though, the bureaucrats will take over, and we cannot afford to let Wikipedia stagnate and die in this way. It's tempting to leave the administrative burden to someone else, but it will get heavier and heavier for those who stay.
- sambeau 15y agoI too have found editing wikipedia painful. On one memorable occasion my historically accurate change to a page was reverted by the 'page owner' on the grounds that "ask any man in the street and he will tell you different".