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The problem with Wikipedia -- one that stems from, and compounds, all of the problems mentioned in this piece -- is that the wilderness has been cleared. The fu

The problem with Wikipedia -- one that stems from, and compounds, all of the problems mentioned in this piece -- is that the wilderness has been cleared. The fun, groundbreaking contribution work is done. Much of -- if not most of -- the big, foundational, crystallized knowledge base on the site has been written. All that remains now are small(er) updates to limited subfields, rote listmaking, current events updates (never Wikipedia's strong suit in the first place), and editing. Plenty of editing. None of those things is inherently fun for most people. Your average internet user -- someone who would have loved contributing a fresh article ten years ago -- probably has little desire to devote an appreciable amount of time to curating and categorizing other people's work. But yet, there's a vocal minority of users who do enjoy such things, and those are the "procedural whackjobs" of which you speak. Call this the rise of the Editorial Class. Wikipedia is now dominated by a small percentage of editors, who revert new work by contributors, and whose arcane rules, lists, procedures, politics, and supercillious disdain make contributing fresh material more a labor than a labor of love. And, lest we think this is noble work put forth by self-sacrificing custodians of knowledge, let me say that my encounters with such people have rarely left an impression of maturity, or even competence. No, for a lot of them, it's a petty power trip. (To wit: one of my articles -- thoroughly researched and painstakingly written -- was eventually lobbied for deletion, successfully, by a little clique of editors calling itself the "Counter Vandalism Unit." As far as I could tell, this is a group of grown-ass adults playing "24" dress-up on Wikipedia, complete with their own badge-like logo, who sadly wield a decent amount of editorial control over the site). On the flipside, as you point out, some of this works in Wikipedia's favor. More timely sources of knowledge, like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, search engines, etc., can beat out Wikipedia's relatively antiquated categorization systems and contribution mechanics fairly handily. But, by and large, most people contributing "content" or "information" through such channels are not really cognizant that that's what they're doing (witness the big uproar over Facebook's data collection; people are inherently surprised that they've been contributing data to any sort of repository of such). Rarely does someone tweet, or post an FB status update, thinking he's contributing to the grand collection of all human knowledge. So the sum total of all the knowledge-data generated outside of Wikipedia, more current and possibly even more interesting though it may be, is still a lot more flab than muscle. That will change eventually, as data mining and contextualization technologies improve. For the time being, however, the lack of an organizing principle similar to Wikipedia's, outside of Wikipedia, will keep Wikipedia relevant. Not indefinitely, but for quite a few years to come.

stdbrouw 15y ago
Here's where I think Wikipedia could benefit from a good look at how other social systems handle their editorial and decision making processes — for example, how something as simple as +1/±0/-1 makes resolving tough problems so much easier for open-source project, or just the fact that we bundle problems into issue reports. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has just one endless thread of discussion comments, and like regular comments on news websites that approach is not conducive to civil, intelligent debate in the least.
- tommorris 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_substitute_for_discussion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_subs... And there are many structured discussions on Wikipedia that follow set patterns and rules. Take deletion: at Articles for Deletion (the area of the site where deletion is debated), there are a set of common patterns and anti-patterns of arguments that you should use and avoid using, and there is a time period where you can submit comments and something vaguely like quorate required before a decision can be made. At the end of a week, the discussion is wrapped up: it's obvious, it gets kept or deleted, and if not, the admin has to sum up the arguments and accept them in a sort of quasi-judicial manner. It's rather more civilized than YouTube or newspaper comments pages...
  - stdbrouw 15y ago
    Good points, cheers. It's messy (at the very least just visually) but there are some standards. I'll stick to my assertion, though, that more people need to think about this stuff, because the organically grown processes don't always cut it — otherwise, you wouldn't have frustrated rants like those of Zed Shaw (http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1297662169.html http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1297662169.html) and Jason Scott (http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808).
    - tommorris 15y ago
      And there are people thinking about this and trying to work on software solutions for it. The Wikimedia Foundation are trying to create a variety of tools for new page patrollers (I used to do it) to aid them in better handling the flow of new articles coming in (it's called the "zoom interface"). Another thing that is being tested is making the automatic templates used to notify people that articles are up for deletion or whatever a lot more friendly. For the last month or so, the Foundation and the community have been working together to A-B test better warning templates. As for discussion threads, there's LiquidThreads, which has been in development for a while but would provide a threaded discussion system sort of like what Reddit and HN have but for Wikimedia talk pages, but still keeping the flexibility of being able to refactor discussions and move stuff about without an admin. LiquidThreads is in use on English Wikinews and on mediawiki.org, but English Wikipedia doesn't have it because it isn't quite mature enough yet (or something, I haven't kept track). Finally, there's the big one: the visual editor. That's in development at the moment, hopefully with testing starting by the end of the year. This is going to be an opt-out WYSIWYG-style editor. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor/software_design http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor/software_design for a rough idea how it is being built. There is lots of consensus that things do need to change and Wikipedia does need to have more technical solutions to the problems that are showing with some of the decade-old organically grown social processes.

stdbrouw 15y ago

Here's where I think Wikipedia could benefit from a good look at how other social systems handle their editorial and decision making processes — for example, how something as simple as +1/±0/-1 makes resolving tough problems so much easier for open-source project, or just the fact that we bundle problems into issue reports. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has just one endless thread of discussion comments, and like regular comments on news websites that approach is not conducive to civil, intelligent debate in the least.

tommorris 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_substitute_for_discussion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_subs... And there are many structured discussions on Wikipedia that follow set patterns and rules. Take deletion: at Articles for Deletion (the area of the site where deletion is debated), there are a set of common patterns and anti-patterns of arguments that you should use and avoid using, and there is a time period where you can submit comments and something vaguely like quorate required before a decision can be made. At the end of a week, the discussion is wrapped up: it's obvious, it gets kept or deleted, and if not, the admin has to sum up the arguments and accept them in a sort of quasi-judicial manner. It's rather more civilized than YouTube or newspaper comments pages...
- stdbrouw 15y ago
  Good points, cheers. It's messy (at the very least just visually) but there are some standards. I'll stick to my assertion, though, that more people need to think about this stuff, because the organically grown processes don't always cut it — otherwise, you wouldn't have frustrated rants like those of Zed Shaw (http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1297662169.html http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1297662169.html) and Jason Scott (http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808).
  - tommorris 15y ago
    And there are people thinking about this and trying to work on software solutions for it. The Wikimedia Foundation are trying to create a variety of tools for new page patrollers (I used to do it) to aid them in better handling the flow of new articles coming in (it's called the "zoom interface"). Another thing that is being tested is making the automatic templates used to notify people that articles are up for deletion or whatever a lot more friendly. For the last month or so, the Foundation and the community have been working together to A-B test better warning templates. As for discussion threads, there's LiquidThreads, which has been in development for a while but would provide a threaded discussion system sort of like what Reddit and HN have but for Wikimedia talk pages, but still keeping the flexibility of being able to refactor discussions and move stuff about without an admin. LiquidThreads is in use on English Wikinews and on mediawiki.org, but English Wikipedia doesn't have it because it isn't quite mature enough yet (or something, I haven't kept track). Finally, there's the big one: the visual editor. That's in development at the moment, hopefully with testing starting by the end of the year. This is going to be an opt-out WYSIWYG-style editor. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor/software_design http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor/software_design for a rough idea how it is being built. There is lots of consensus that things do need to change and Wikipedia does need to have more technical solutions to the problems that are showing with some of the decade-old organically grown social processes.