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> it's extremely difficult to participate, I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? > and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia read

> it's extremely difficult to participate, I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? > and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia reading countless rules trying to figure that out You don't want to spend time contributing, you just want readers to accept your contribution? I hope I'm misreading your intent, as it sounds like you feel you're above the vetting process? I've made some modest contributions to OSS, and I've never expected anyone to accept a patch based on the fact that I feel like I'm a competent programmer.

gergles 15y ago
> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Perhaps because the tagline of Wikipedia is "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit", not "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit after conducting 20 hours of intense self-study into the arbitrary bureaucracy and 'standards' that let us have a page for every Pokemon and Justine Ezarik's 300-page iPhone bill but not a page for a band that's won 15 local music festivals and produced 3 records"?
- zbowling 15y ago
  See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3273124 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3273124
- Dinoguy1000 15y ago
  Your first example is a little dated; Wikipedia hasn't had one article per Pokemon since around 2007, at the latest, when they were all merged into a handful of lists. Since then, a small number have been spun back out into articles on individual species or evolutionary lines, but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability.
  - bane 15y ago
    His point absolutely sill stands. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur can have a page but a local, but very popular band cannot.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      A popular band can, if there are good sources for the information. Regardless of what other policy exists, having written a number of band articles, I've found that to be more or less the one de-facto rule: cite thy sources, preferably to sources that seem relatively legit (musicological books or journal articles good; newspapers and magazines ok; the band's own website ok but not as the only source; "personal communication" not so good). Overall I think that makes sense, because it's the only real way of verifying that it's not just fans writing impossible-to-verify opinion or lore. Plus, Wikipedia is supposed to be a tertiary source that compiles secondary sources, which doesn't make any sense if there aren't secondary sources. Whenever I've written articles about music groups that do have good references, I've never run into problems, even if they're obscure groups. For example, I recently wrote one on a minor 1980s punk band, with citations to the book American Hardcore (a history of 80s hardcore), which I doubt anybody would challenge. I do think there's an awkward gap around subjects that clearly should have secondary sources, but for some reason don't, because music historians and journalists have somehow neglected to write about them, or just haven't done it yet (musicology tends to lag). I can see why people get pissed off in those cases, but I do think it's basically no-win for Wikipedia, because in cases where good sources don't exist, it's not possible to produce an article up to what Wikipedia claims are its standards, a tertiary-literature article solidly referenced to the existing literature; because the problem is with the secondary literature itself being deficient (http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...). Nowadays I mostly do my Wikipedia-editing source-first: I find a good source or two about something, and then decide, hey, this is a good basis for a Wikipedia article. So for example, I'll pick up a book on the history of hip-hop, and use it to write articles about hip-hop musicians. Doing it that way, I have a remarkably laid-back, trouble-free Wikipedia-editing experience. It's still theoretically possible to read some policy pages in a way that could cause me problems: there might be some minor band that I've written a well-referenced article on, but is somehow still "too minor" to deserve a Wikipedia article under the Notability policies. But in practice, those objections almost never come up in the case of well-referenced articles; I think Verifiability basically trumps Notability these days, and that the deletionists who argued for a more strongly curated encyclopedia have lost that battle.
  - shearn89 15y ago
    Am I the only person who find this comment (perhaps inadvertantly) amusing? "A small number have been spun back out... but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability." "Establishing notability"? These are Pokemon we're talking about right?
Animus7 15y ago
> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Because the alternative is massive systemic bias. This issue has been discussed to death and I won't argue anything here, but the point is that having a thick coat of process encourages a _certain kind_ of editor to participate in Wikipedia. Thus, proponents claim, the largest reference work on the internet is biased, in a very nonobvious way. This wouldn't be an issue if Wikipedia was some niche forum where "facts" are taken for granted to be opinions. But for (what I suspect is) the majority of people these days, Wikipedia is the de facto source of truth. Therein the problem lies.
- vacri 15y ago
  The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. Time and time again technical references have played out in personal and professional endeavours. They're clear and concise. You've got to accept that some topics, biographies for example, are inherently subjective and can't be purely objective. Wikipedia is the most rigorous source of 'truth' available to the masses, and the complaints of bias are about bias which may indeed be present, but are markedly subtle. Where is the source of 'truth' that's anywhere near as objective as the offerings of wikipedia?
  - dextorious 15y ago
    """The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. """ You don't really read many quality technical books, do you?
    - vacri 15y ago
      Sorry, I should have said "given the breadth". Even so, the information in wikipedia is regularly (though not always) more concise and palatable than textbooks.
  - john_flintstone 15y ago
    >The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none Academic articles maybe, other articles, not so much. I run a website / forum in a niche area of animal husbandry, and one part of the site links to useful descriptions / information on different breeds. We've had no choice but to ban links to Wikipedia articles on individual breeds because they are simply factually incorrect, to the extent that even pre-teen site members find them funny and point out errors on our forums. Seriously, we have 10 year olds on our forums linking to Wikipedia articles and making fun of them - they really are that full of nonsense.
mikeleeorg 15y ago
> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? I agree with you, though I've also experienced the encouragement to participate as nowarninglabel has: >> When I meet wikipedia people here in SF, they say, "Get involved!" Then, when I have tried to get involved, I get endless bureaucracy and everything eventually deleted. I think this is where the frustration stems. Wikipedia, understandably, wants participation. But it's not just any ole participation. It wants, and needs, _quality_ participation. Unfortunately, quality is a subjective measure; what one assumes is quality is rubbish to another. I sympathize with the huge task Wikipedia has in trying to police an enormous amount of content, though I think it's entirely understandable that there are many people who are unhappy with how that policing is being done, rightly or wrongly.
- bane 15y ago
  "It wants, and needs, _quality_ participation" I think the word/phrase you are likely looking for is "fanatic dedication".
  - jarek 15y ago
    If knowing the fairly simple rules of the site you are participating in counts as fanatic dedication, I weep for the internet. Do you feel one has to be fanatically dedicated to HN to know why "reply" links don't always appear right away?
    - bane 15y ago
      The history of the problem with WP is not that there's a lack of people willing to provide quality participation. Everyone from professional authors to nuclear physicists have been screwed by the bureaucratic psychosis that pervades contributing to WP. Almost by definition, high quality participants are such because they have spent an inordinate amount of time in their area of expertise. They don't have the time to deal with "the WP way", Even contributing an article to WP is a "big deal" for these kinds of people because of the time it takes to do it. But because WP invariably turns almost any submission, no matter the quality, into a situation of content defense, quality participants simply don't have the time to: a) waste defending perfectly good material b) waste learning the ins and outs of WP on how to defend the perfectly good material and manage it through a multi-week AfD process -- possibly several times. Sure there's lots of junk that ends up submitted to WP, and if you read through the comments here, nobody is really up in arms about that, it's when the actual high quality material (which might represent dozens or hundreds of hours of high quality work) is tossed out because some WP editor has trouble functioning in society and decided that they couldn't handle invaders on their patch of electrons that we end up with the problem you see here. So no, the only ones who are able to have any sort of impact on WP are the ones who are able to have fanatical dedication to learning the ins and outs of WP and are able to manage an edit through the tortured, arbitrary and capricious bureaucratic processes that define WP today.
nowarninglabel 15y ago
Your attitude speaks to exactly what is wrong with Wikipedia. You seem to think it should be difficult to participate, such that only the elite who have busted their chops should be able to do so. If you wish to end up with a dead community (which is exactly what is happening, the number contributors is stabilizing not growing), then fine, but if you wish to actually expand the wealth of human knowledge available there, then you're going to have to drop the holier-than-thou attitude. It should be easy to participate because that is what is being asked for, it is after all "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." However, I am being asked to contribute, and asked to encourage others to contribute, such as noted here: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/wikipedia-loses-contributors http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/wikipedia-loses-contr... Or more directly, read the statements from Jimmy Wales here http://www.firstpost.com/tech/wikipedia-in-india-we-needs-more-contributors-in-hindi-says-jimmy-wales-134281.html http://www.firstpost.com/tech/wikipedia-in-india-we-needs-mo... where he says Wikipedia's interface needs to be simplified and asks for more regional language contributors. I've tried to turn on Indian friends/co-workers to editing Wikipedia, but they found it extremely daunting. This is in sharp contrast to open source projects I've contributed to, such as Drupal, which I'll note I have quite a few contributions there, so I'm certainly no stranger to putting in a lot of work to participate in something. The difference with Drupal is that there are very clearly defined rules for how to participate, clear instructions for how to do so, and new contributors are helped along in the process to get their code right, rather than being told their contribution is worthless, which is the attitude I get anytime I try to contribute something on Wikipedia. And that's not to say there isn't attitude in the Drupal community, there still is, but at least there one can still contribute despite it, whereas at Wikipedia, it just becomes a lost cause.
- xyzzyz 15y ago
  The difference with Drupal is that there are very clearly defined rules for how to participate, clear instructions for how to do so, and new contributors are helped along in the process to get their code right, rather than being told their contribution is worthless, which is the attitude I get anytime I try to contribute something on Wikipedia. But there are also clearly defined rules for how to participate in Wikipedia, which you just disregarded as rules made "such that only the elite who have busted their chops should be able to [contribute]". You see, if you write an article without any sources or references, badly formated, without interlinks etc, it's really of no help to us -- getting it into shape (i.e. formatting, finding sources) will take more time than rewriting it from scratch. We can create crappy articles about not notable subjects ourselves, thank you. Do you also think that Linus Torvalds is wrong with rejecting patchs which do not meet guidelines? Do you think it's unfair to make people read and care about Linux guidelines? Do you think it will make Linux a dead community?
bane 15y ago
"I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate?" Because WP advertises itself as being easy to participate in.
DanBC 15y ago
> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Because that's a core fundamental part of wikipedia practice. That's why every page says "the encylopedia anyone can edit" and why you don't need to create an account to contribute.
- jarek 15y ago
  The page says "the encyclopedia anyone can edit," not "the encyclopedia anyone is entitled to edit." I don't think a couple of hours (if that) familiarizing yourself with the practices is much to ask.
deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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ja2ke 15y ago
The "Wikipedia submitter vs script kiddie checkins to an OSS project" analogy is incredibly tired, and the amount of presumption going on here is a huge contributor to why people get so frustrated with Wikipedia's process. That tired ass analogy is too busy focusing blame on hypothetical idiot submitters that it fails to look at the problem it's incorrectly ignoring about the other half -- potential idiot reviewers. Open source submissions are vetted by programmers. Are Wikipedia articles related to Ethiopian cuisine reviewed by Ethiopian chefs, or by food critics or historians or the editor of a culinary publication, or even just by someone who likes food? I imagine on average they are reviewed by a person whose credentials are more or less I'm Some Dude Who Is Involved With Wikipedia. Imagine an open source software project so valuable and interesting that it drew in the most legendary programmers working today, but the person vetting that code was me, a graphic designer with some outdated HTML markup knowledge and enough surviving scraps from my high school Pascal class that I can express an idea to an engineer, but couldn't actually write a 'hello world' to save my grandma. I imagine those brilliant programmers would eventually stop submitting code to my project. It doesn't matter how qualified your submitters are if the gatekeepers aren't. That is especially exacerbated if the gatekeepers are super inside and uppity about it (which is not uncommon in the case of Wikipedia).

gergles 15y ago

> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Perhaps because the tagline of Wikipedia is "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit", not "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit after conducting 20 hours of intense self-study into the arbitrary bureaucracy and 'standards' that let us have a page for every Pokemon and Justine Ezarik's 300-page iPhone bill but not a page for a band that's won 15 local music festivals and produced 3 records"?

zbowling 15y ago
See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3273124 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3273124
Dinoguy1000 15y ago
Your first example is a little dated; Wikipedia hasn't had one article per Pokemon since around 2007, at the latest, when they were all merged into a handful of lists. Since then, a small number have been spun back out into articles on individual species or evolutionary lines, but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability.
- bane 15y ago
  His point absolutely sill stands. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur can have a page but a local, but very popular band cannot.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    A popular band can, if there are good sources for the information. Regardless of what other policy exists, having written a number of band articles, I've found that to be more or less the one de-facto rule: cite thy sources, preferably to sources that seem relatively legit (musicological books or journal articles good; newspapers and magazines ok; the band's own website ok but not as the only source; "personal communication" not so good). Overall I think that makes sense, because it's the only real way of verifying that it's not just fans writing impossible-to-verify opinion or lore. Plus, Wikipedia is supposed to be a tertiary source that compiles secondary sources, which doesn't make any sense if there aren't secondary sources. Whenever I've written articles about music groups that do have good references, I've never run into problems, even if they're obscure groups. For example, I recently wrote one on a minor 1980s punk band, with citations to the book American Hardcore (a history of 80s hardcore), which I doubt anybody would challenge. I do think there's an awkward gap around subjects that clearly should have secondary sources, but for some reason don't, because music historians and journalists have somehow neglected to write about them, or just haven't done it yet (musicology tends to lag). I can see why people get pissed off in those cases, but I do think it's basically no-win for Wikipedia, because in cases where good sources don't exist, it's not possible to produce an article up to what Wikipedia claims are its standards, a tertiary-literature article solidly referenced to the existing literature; because the problem is with the secondary literature itself being deficient (http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...). Nowadays I mostly do my Wikipedia-editing source-first: I find a good source or two about something, and then decide, hey, this is a good basis for a Wikipedia article. So for example, I'll pick up a book on the history of hip-hop, and use it to write articles about hip-hop musicians. Doing it that way, I have a remarkably laid-back, trouble-free Wikipedia-editing experience. It's still theoretically possible to read some policy pages in a way that could cause me problems: there might be some minor band that I've written a well-referenced article on, but is somehow still "too minor" to deserve a Wikipedia article under the Notability policies. But in practice, those objections almost never come up in the case of well-referenced articles; I think Verifiability basically trumps Notability these days, and that the deletionists who argued for a more strongly curated encyclopedia have lost that battle.
- shearn89 15y ago
  Am I the only person who find this comment (perhaps inadvertantly) amusing? "A small number have been spun back out... but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability." "Establishing notability"? These are Pokemon we're talking about right?

Animus7 15y ago

> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Because the alternative is massive systemic bias. This issue has been discussed to death and I won't argue anything here, but the point is that having a thick coat of process encourages a _certain kind_ of editor to participate in Wikipedia. Thus, proponents claim, the largest reference work on the internet is biased, in a very nonobvious way. This wouldn't be an issue if Wikipedia was some niche forum where "facts" are taken for granted to be opinions. But for (what I suspect is) the majority of people these days, Wikipedia is the de facto source of truth. Therein the problem lies.

vacri 15y ago
The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. Time and time again technical references have played out in personal and professional endeavours. They're clear and concise. You've got to accept that some topics, biographies for example, are inherently subjective and can't be purely objective. Wikipedia is the most rigorous source of 'truth' available to the masses, and the complaints of bias are about bias which may indeed be present, but are markedly subtle. Where is the source of 'truth' that's anywhere near as objective as the offerings of wikipedia?
- dextorious 15y ago
  """The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. """ You don't really read many quality technical books, do you?
  - vacri 15y ago
    Sorry, I should have said "given the breadth". Even so, the information in wikipedia is regularly (though not always) more concise and palatable than textbooks.
- john_flintstone 15y ago
  >The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none Academic articles maybe, other articles, not so much. I run a website / forum in a niche area of animal husbandry, and one part of the site links to useful descriptions / information on different breeds. We've had no choice but to ban links to Wikipedia articles on individual breeds because they are simply factually incorrect, to the extent that even pre-teen site members find them funny and point out errors on our forums. Seriously, we have 10 year olds on our forums linking to Wikipedia articles and making fun of them - they really are that full of nonsense.

mikeleeorg 15y ago

> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? I agree with you, though I've also experienced the encouragement to participate as nowarninglabel has: >> When I meet wikipedia people here in SF, they say, "Get involved!" Then, when I have tried to get involved, I get endless bureaucracy and everything eventually deleted. I think this is where the frustration stems. Wikipedia, understandably, wants participation. But it's not just any ole participation. It wants, and needs, _quality_ participation. Unfortunately, quality is a subjective measure; what one assumes is quality is rubbish to another. I sympathize with the huge task Wikipedia has in trying to police an enormous amount of content, though I think it's entirely understandable that there are many people who are unhappy with how that policing is being done, rightly or wrongly.

bane 15y ago
"It wants, and needs, _quality_ participation" I think the word/phrase you are likely looking for is "fanatic dedication".
- jarek 15y ago
  If knowing the fairly simple rules of the site you are participating in counts as fanatic dedication, I weep for the internet. Do you feel one has to be fanatically dedicated to HN to know why "reply" links don't always appear right away?
  - bane 15y ago
    The history of the problem with WP is not that there's a lack of people willing to provide quality participation. Everyone from professional authors to nuclear physicists have been screwed by the bureaucratic psychosis that pervades contributing to WP. Almost by definition, high quality participants are such because they have spent an inordinate amount of time in their area of expertise. They don't have the time to deal with "the WP way", Even contributing an article to WP is a "big deal" for these kinds of people because of the time it takes to do it. But because WP invariably turns almost any submission, no matter the quality, into a situation of content defense, quality participants simply don't have the time to: a) waste defending perfectly good material b) waste learning the ins and outs of WP on how to defend the perfectly good material and manage it through a multi-week AfD process -- possibly several times. Sure there's lots of junk that ends up submitted to WP, and if you read through the comments here, nobody is really up in arms about that, it's when the actual high quality material (which might represent dozens or hundreds of hours of high quality work) is tossed out because some WP editor has trouble functioning in society and decided that they couldn't handle invaders on their patch of electrons that we end up with the problem you see here. So no, the only ones who are able to have any sort of impact on WP are the ones who are able to have fanatical dedication to learning the ins and outs of WP and are able to manage an edit through the tortured, arbitrary and capricious bureaucratic processes that define WP today.

nowarninglabel 15y ago

Your attitude speaks to exactly what is wrong with Wikipedia. You seem to think it should be difficult to participate, such that only the elite who have busted their chops should be able to do so. If you wish to end up with a dead community (which is exactly what is happening, the number contributors is stabilizing not growing), then fine, but if you wish to actually expand the wealth of human knowledge available there, then you're going to have to drop the holier-than-thou attitude. It should be easy to participate because that is what is being asked for, it is after all "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." However, I am being asked to contribute, and asked to encourage others to contribute, such as noted here: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/wikipedia-loses-contributors http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/wikipedia-loses-contr... Or more directly, read the statements from Jimmy Wales here http://www.firstpost.com/tech/wikipedia-in-india-we-needs-more-contributors-in-hindi-says-jimmy-wales-134281.html http://www.firstpost.com/tech/wikipedia-in-india-we-needs-mo... where he says Wikipedia's interface needs to be simplified and asks for more regional language contributors. I've tried to turn on Indian friends/co-workers to editing Wikipedia, but they found it extremely daunting. This is in sharp contrast to open source projects I've contributed to, such as Drupal, which I'll note I have quite a few contributions there, so I'm certainly no stranger to putting in a lot of work to participate in something. The difference with Drupal is that there are very clearly defined rules for how to participate, clear instructions for how to do so, and new contributors are helped along in the process to get their code right, rather than being told their contribution is worthless, which is the attitude I get anytime I try to contribute something on Wikipedia. And that's not to say there isn't attitude in the Drupal community, there still is, but at least there one can still contribute despite it, whereas at Wikipedia, it just becomes a lost cause.

xyzzyz 15y ago
The difference with Drupal is that there are very clearly defined rules for how to participate, clear instructions for how to do so, and new contributors are helped along in the process to get their code right, rather than being told their contribution is worthless, which is the attitude I get anytime I try to contribute something on Wikipedia. But there are also clearly defined rules for how to participate in Wikipedia, which you just disregarded as rules made "such that only the elite who have busted their chops should be able to [contribute]". You see, if you write an article without any sources or references, badly formated, without interlinks etc, it's really of no help to us -- getting it into shape (i.e. formatting, finding sources) will take more time than rewriting it from scratch. We can create crappy articles about not notable subjects ourselves, thank you. Do you also think that Linus Torvalds is wrong with rejecting patchs which do not meet guidelines? Do you think it's unfair to make people read and care about Linux guidelines? Do you think it will make Linux a dead community?

bane 15y ago

"I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate?" Because WP advertises itself as being easy to participate in.

DanBC 15y ago

> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Because that's a core fundamental part of wikipedia practice. That's why every page says "the encylopedia anyone can edit" and why you don't need to create an account to contribute.

jarek 15y ago
The page says "the encyclopedia anyone can edit," not "the encyclopedia anyone is entitled to edit." I don't think a couple of hours (if that) familiarizing yourself with the practices is much to ask.

deleted 15y ago

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deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ja2ke 15y ago

The "Wikipedia submitter vs script kiddie checkins to an OSS project" analogy is incredibly tired, and the amount of presumption going on here is a huge contributor to why people get so frustrated with Wikipedia's process. That tired ass analogy is too busy focusing blame on hypothetical idiot submitters that it fails to look at the problem it's incorrectly ignoring about the other half -- potential idiot reviewers. Open source submissions are vetted by programmers. Are Wikipedia articles related to Ethiopian cuisine reviewed by Ethiopian chefs, or by food critics or historians or the editor of a culinary publication, or even just by someone who likes food? I imagine on average they are reviewed by a person whose credentials are more or less I'm Some Dude Who Is Involved With Wikipedia. Imagine an open source software project so valuable and interesting that it drew in the most legendary programmers working today, but the person vetting that code was me, a graphic designer with some outdated HTML markup knowledge and enough surviving scraps from my high school Pascal class that I can express an idea to an engineer, but couldn't actually write a 'hello world' to save my grandma. I imagine those brilliant programmers would eventually stop submitting code to my project. It doesn't matter how qualified your submitters are if the gatekeepers aren't. That is especially exacerbated if the gatekeepers are super inside and uppity about it (which is not uncommon in the case of Wikipedia).