3 ms·

On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand.... 95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders,

by sethg 15y ago

On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand.... 95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and because so many people do get involved, the actually-useful work is 5% of a very large number. If some change in policy cut the political bullshit in half but drove away two-thirds of the people who, in between PvP battles, improved the quality of the encyclopedia, it would be a net loss.

tptacek 15y ago
That eloquently summarizes of my take on Wikipedia, and the reason I stopped participating several years ago.
philwelch 15y ago
That's the crazy part! I completely agree with you--it's a massively gamified process and ideally, I'd like to believe that just letting people get to work without too much crap in their way would produce good results just as well as the status quo does, but maybe that's too idealistic and this is just how you make the sausage. Still, there are some useful usability critiques to be made. Even an ugly sausage-making process should let you ramp up into it at the very least, and at the most, should have useful methods of collecting and processing input from novice users rather than rejecting it unseen or outright discouraging it in the first place.
- zbowling 15y ago
  sigh It doesn't work like that.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    I spent years in that particular sausage factory. They even let me work some of the levers not everyone gets to work. My time there didn't work out well in the long run. Sorry, but it's pretty ugly and political in there.
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
With your figures, assuming 100k edits being created. Cut the "bullshit" by half leads to 47.5k useful edits (95%/2; or at least ones without bullshit) plus your original 5k leads to 52.5k useful edits. Except we've only a third of the people - assuming equal distribution of edits - so 17.5k of edits are now useful. More than a 3 fold increase in useful edits in the same amount of time. So in fact if you change the system to put off a lot of people in your hypothetical manner you can improve the useful edits. This is akin to pricing out "toxic" customers. Or having complex methods that filter out the more intellectual as those with most power (arguably the problem being ascribed to Wikipedia in the article). Assumptions here make the figures entirely unrealistic but I think the general thrust is nonetheless sound?

by sethg 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

That eloquently summarizes of my take on Wikipedia, and the reason I stopped participating several years ago.

philwelch 15y ago

That's the crazy part! I completely agree with you--it's a massively gamified process and ideally, I'd like to believe that just letting people get to work without too much crap in their way would produce good results just as well as the status quo does, but maybe that's too idealistic and this is just how you make the sausage. Still, there are some useful usability critiques to be made. Even an ugly sausage-making process should let you ramp up into it at the very least, and at the most, should have useful methods of collecting and processing input from novice users rather than rejecting it unseen or outright discouraging it in the first place.

zbowling 15y ago
sigh It doesn't work like that.
- philwelch 15y ago
  I spent years in that particular sausage factory. They even let me work some of the levers not everyone gets to work. My time there didn't work out well in the long run. Sorry, but it's pretty ugly and political in there.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago

With your figures, assuming 100k edits being created. Cut the "bullshit" by half leads to 47.5k useful edits (95%/2; or at least ones without bullshit) plus your original 5k leads to 52.5k useful edits. Except we've only a third of the people - assuming equal distribution of edits - so 17.5k of edits are now useful. More than a 3 fold increase in useful edits in the same amount of time. So in fact if you change the system to put off a lot of people in your hypothetical manner you can improve the useful edits. This is akin to pricing out "toxic" customers. Or having complex methods that filter out the more intellectual as those with most power (arguably the problem being ascribed to Wikipedia in the article). Assumptions here make the figures entirely unrealistic but I think the general thrust is nonetheless sound?