9 ms·

Thirteen years later, why are most administrators still from 2005?

96 points by akolbe 3y ago

868ruf0y 3y ago
[flagged]
- hgsgm 3y ago
  This ad hominem rant about editors has nothing to do with admins.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    It's also nonsense expecting articles to be personally written by doctors and scientists who are also not political in any way is just basically not understanding Wikipedia it's not a primary source.
  - 868ruf0y 3y ago
    some of the editors mentioned in the video are also admins e.g. GorillaWarfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare
Simulacra 3y ago
I remember as a child, reading an article about a man who got up every day and logged into Wikipedia and wrote articles about Native American artists. This was in the 90s, and I thought the whole thing sounded wonderful. So I signed up for an account and became an editor. I've maybe contributed 20 or 30 edits over the past 20+ years. That initial influx of people I think has given the impression, or, perhaps the media, that there is a huge army of people maintaining the site.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Wikipedia did not exist in the '90s.
  - Simulacra 3y ago
    Meant to say 00s. Oh wel.
MBCook 3y ago
I wonder if, as the culture has ossified, fewer and fewer people stuck around as editors long enough. Either driven away by other editors/admins, not finding it fulfilling enough as so many topics are already “taken”, or simply didn’t think they did enough to be eligible during their time (correctly or not). Or, I suppose, they don’t WANT to move from editor to admin for some reason.
- jowea 3y ago
  Is admin really the natural progression after editor, as you seem to be assuming? IMHO, the interest in the "project" part of Wikipedia that is required to be an admin isn't intrinsically linked to being a prolific and dedicated editor. Although having a decent number of edits is a de facto requirement for adminship.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    It seems like the natural progression if someone is interested. You can delete or lock people from editing articles with it, which seems useful if you like editing Wikipedia.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      Eh, you're not allowed to use the extra tools without consensus from the rest of the community, so end of day you don't really gain much, and you can do pretty much everything without them. (By way of experiment: one particular admin had their admin bit disabled and it took people a over a year to notice that they'd done so.) Personally I still think 90% of the regular editors should have the tools anyway, but people kept inflating the requirements, or actually rejecting admins on the basis of "we have too many already" As tomodachi94 points out, being a wiki admin ideally should not be a big deal. It just sort of became that way on English Wikipedia, unfortunately.
- tomodachi94 3y ago
  Wikidata editor here. On some of the older Wikimedia projects (and English Wikipedia/enwiki especially), adminship comes with a large amount of extra baggage and is viewed as a somewhat prestigious position (but I have only seen this on enwiki, not Wikidata or other projects. On Wikidata, adminship is mostly a formality for established editors.) Keep in mind that enwiki has the largest amount of history and bureaucracy out of all of the Wikimedia projects, due to being the first in a long line.
Multicomp 3y ago
FTA > The problem 10 years ago was that the electorate was far too picky and rejected candidates who should have been promoted. Today, every potential candidate knows this and self-selects themselves out of standing. There aren't enough outliers who do stand to make much statistical conclusion from there. Yeah. Everybody got wise to the cliques and power struggles of WP and are put off trying to contribute to it as either an editor (changes instantly reverted) and therefore stops them in their tracks in eventually growing to be an admin. Same deal as StackOverflow. Petty tiny power users wield that power like a maniac because that's the way they get their jollies, make the experience a chore for the normies, so no newcomers join, and on the site goes, in a wierd reversal of the eternal september effect. In other cases in real life before the web, i might argue that motorcycles and buicks and HAM radio dealt with this, they got locked into a local culture maxima and have been trapped there ever since, growing stale / ever less appealing to newcomers.
- nyolfen 3y ago
  buicks? would you mind elaborating?
  - Multicomp 3y ago
    Sorry. Just the generation gap that for my generational cohort, Buicks were reputed to be 'rich old people cars' and therefore not even considered when we would go out shopping for cars. Whereas in their heyday of 19x0's American car culture, Buicks were right there in the race with Ford Mustangs and Chevrolet Corvettes and such.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I used to run a torrent site with a very significant user population. I would promote great users to mod positions. On average they would last 6 months before they became Hitlerstalins and I would be forced to fire them. Power corrupts :(
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    I wouldn't go as far as to say they are 'corrupted', just that they are extracting their payment in a non-monetary form. i.e. There are no 'unpaid mods', at least for any significant period of time. It's just that typically in real life we try to avoid setting up relationships were the only compensation is payment in social status, petty office maneuvers, etc..., since it's very visibly obvious in person. So we don't think about the different dynamics online. But this is the compensation model for a huge fraction of online communities.
jp57 3y ago
One implication of this is that some time in the future (tough to say when exactly) Wikipedia will have a big attrition problem. I could imagine a scenario in which all the current editors retire or pass away and simply are never replaced and Wikipedia dies.
- editional 3y ago
  While a shortage of admins/editors w/could cause the death of rather niche entries, Wikipedia would still have a huge propaganda outlet potential. Whether you believe its being actively used or not, wiki entries that might have political influence (history) will stay active, thus keeping Wikipedia (barely, that is) alive.
  - WereSpielCheqrs 3y ago
    Perhaps I should have made it clearer in the article, but the English Wikipedia is not really short of editors. There was an era of decline from 2007 to 2014, though much of that was a side effect of edit filters that rejected certain edits that were highly likely to be vandalism. But the 2015 rally in editing numbers has turned into a sort of plateau - editing from 2015 to 2023 has consistently been above the 2014 minima. This is looking at "time between edits" How long it takes for each ten million edits.
    - jp57 3y ago
      The numbers in the OP indicated that few new editors are being added, so even if it’s not short of editors now, it will be eventually, unless new editors are added or there’s some breakthrough in longevity research.
      - WereSpielCheqrs 3y ago
        No. The article is about admins. Very few new editors are becoming admins, and my fear is that a Wikigeneration gap is emerging between the admins and the active editors. New editors are starting, old ones leaving or dying, total volume of editing is higher now than it was in the 2014 minima. But the number of admins is falling. Another way to look at the numbers is that if new admins continue to be promoted at the same rate as the last ten years, they would on average, need to be active as admins for fifty years each if you wanted to maintain current admin numbers.
whimsicalism 3y ago
I have found that wikipedia articles have gotten more biased over time. Early on in my usage of wikipedia, it was clear there were substantial issues in article about things like Israel-Palestine (substantial pro-Israeli bias then), but most articles were still pretty balanced. Now, it seems that on many actively contested political issues (ie. not something about climate change), there is a clear editorial stance. I say that as someone who has only voted D their entire life and likely will continue to do so absent some realignment. Efforts to change articles like these are reverted by high-status wikipedeans who have made articles like these their pet projects and build up a community of defenders. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_investigation_origins_counter-narrative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_investigation_origins_c...
- baryphonic 3y ago
  A couple years ago, I tried to edit a page about the economist Deidre McCloskey to add some information about a campaign McCloskey had helped organize in the early aughts to attack & discredit the sex researcher Michael Bailey. McCloskey has tried to cultivate a pro-free speech libertarian image, so I was particularly alarmed when I read a thorough accounting of the Bailey affair in a journal article by Alice Dreger.[0] In fact, I had met McCloskey after the Bailey incident, and knew nothing about it based on the excessively mild portrayal in the Wikipedia article. I tried to edit the page with a more accurate description: namely, that McCloskey attempted to have Bailey fired from Northwestern for violating "research ethics" and tried to have his license to practice psychology revoked in Illinois. Those facts seemed relevant to me, especially about someone who claims to be libertarian or "Classical Liberal." Wikipedia editors did not think so. The change was reverted almost immediately, even despite my citation of a high-quality source - much higher quality than the journalism garbage backing up many of the claims made on Wikipedia, yada yada. I eventually gave up after realizing one of the editors was on a moral crusade to suppress this piece of information, and none of the other editors were going to question her bias. I imagine the same thing happens on thousands of other politically sensitive pages. [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170124/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170124/
  - 3y ago
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
A symptom of the web's own growth in the mainstream and Wikipedia become much more serious as a resource than its early days, that it requires serious attention and effort, not casual hobby moderation. The generation that was really into it in those early days is/was most likely representative of the early Internet generation who believed strongly in the open information movement, and had years of experience in moderated/moderating communities. Now? multiple generations of people who came up more 'digitally native' but only really consume, consume, consume, and take for granted the effort that many services require unseen to appear 'free'. Who's gonna join the small dedicated but exceedingly fussy team of editors with the amount of process and tape involved with keeping up wikipedia pages?
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  > people who [...] take for granted the effort that many services require unseen to appear 'free'. 100%, and I'd argue this also applies to services that are for-profit but don't directly charge end users. The shit social media companies constantly pull isn't surprising when you recognize that these companies exist to make money, but I'm surprised by how many people take this into account (and are therefore perpetually shocked/outraged by the latest stunt).
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
jj999 3y ago
Aren't administrator named for life? If they are, it seems natural that they are getting older, like the Linux kernel leaders.
ern 3y ago
High status admins who bite newcomers with impunity, don't give a damn about systemic bias, ignore their own rules (invoking "Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy"...except when it suits them) - I find the site increasingly infuriating. On the other hand newly minted accounts (a few months old) seem to be getting involved in arcane things by nominating articles for deletion, despite having flimsy edit histories and limited experience on Wikipedia, possibly to build credibility for adminship in future. A worst case scenario is that the long-in-the-tooth admins finally let go, and these dodgy noobs gain adminship. I've kept a clean sheet over a multi-decade editing career, so I can't be dismissed as a crank who doesn't understand the project, but there needs to be some sort of reform.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  Sounds like you'd make a great admin! How much are we willing to bet that you'd be (even more) cynical within 12 months though? This time not at the admins, but at the kinds of weird editors you'd have to deal with. %-) That said, I haven't kept an eye on wikipedia (let alone admins, let alone high status ones) for a while know. I know that sometimes they don't get enough pushback and start making mistakes that way.
- underseacables 3y ago
  This was what I ran in to. Very aggressive editors and trolls who demanded things be written in a certain way. Edits to "their" articles trigged them and they would then edit your edit. It got ridiculous
stonogo 3y ago
They spent years building a toxic moat and now they wonder why nobody wants to swim in it? Zero sympathy.
cowsup 3y ago
This seems to be the case for many long-term websites I was once part of. A site formed in 2002 is heavily moderated by people who were on it prior to 2010; a site formed in 2007 is heavily moderated by people who were on it prior to 2012. Fact is, experience is king. Someone who's been on a site for a year or two is typically knowledgable about it; but when you compare them to someone with a _decade_ or two of knowledge, it's far harder. Not to mention the actual politics of picking someone who signed up only a few years ago. Obviously in some scenarios there is just an obvious pick, but, other times, if there is a candidate who joined in 2010 and a candidate who joined in 2020, and both are otherwise mostly equal, you look like a jerk for picking the 2020 user over the 2010. This, unfortunately, tends to lead to stale ideas; nobody who's been part of a site for over a decade is going to push for things to be better, since they've probably been quite a bit happy with the status quo.
praisewhitey 3y ago
Reading through the responses on that page, many of the editors leaving a comment started editing before 2010. I'm curious how many people considered part of the editor community started in the last few years.
Semaphor 3y ago
My experience with Wikipedia is that toxic, power-hungry trolls like "CityOfSilver" [0] get into positions of power (though luckily only as a reviewer and not an admin). Funnily enough, for the issue I had, it was an admin who agreed with me and simply made the edit that CoS contested and insulted me over (removing unsourced Russian propaganda). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CityOfSilver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CityOfSilver
irrational 3y ago
I thought it would be fun to contribute to Wikipedia about topics I’m knowledgeable about. Every single attempt was rejected and reverted almost instantly. The rejections were happening so quickly that I have to assume admins had created bots to auto revert any change that did not come from them. There is no way there was time for a human to be involved. After about 10 attempts on 10 different articles I gave up and haven’t tried again since. There doesn’t seem to be any point.
- notrono 3y ago
  Out of interest which topics were these? I've noticed that for some topics, editors treat these pages as their own personal fiefdom and are very quick to revert.
93po 3y ago
My biggest issue with WP is that it relies largely on corporate news media for many subject areas and you’re only allowed to include the narrative of established corporate news. There is so much bias that is introduced this way and I don’t see any great solution to counter it.
mapmeld 3y ago
I'd encourage people to keep editing. From HN and Reddit I thought that my changes would be thrown out, but nothing happened except bots cleaning up my references. An issue that I noticed is that scientific articles accumulate newsworthy theories. The prion article has a section on weaponization, and prion diseases often have sections on alternate theories, or say that the causes remain unknown. Years later these articles need to be updated or trimmed down.
pm24601 3y ago
I honestly don't remember the last time I used wikipedia. As a member of a minority community. It doesn't have anything that I care about. My information resources are elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of admins was cut in half again in the next 10 years.
ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]
xacky 3y ago
I was an active Wikipedian back in the early days (2002-2006), and I ran for adminship twice, each time I was rejected for petty reasons. If you don't have a "perfect" account, they will pile on opposes. The only reason why so many people became admins at that time was that Wikipedia was still pretty much a "greenfield" site at the time (It had only around 700,000 articles back then, which is ~10% of what it is now), and there were plenty of volunteers signing up. Now it has become more established, and more rules have kept new generations out, similar to how boomers keep younger generations out of housing and high paying careers, despite having more education than them.
memefrog 3y ago
Everything that people say about StackOverflow and its "deletion culture" is doubly true of Wikipedia. Wikipedia today is rigidly controlled by a relatively small group of power users. It's completely unusable for any "culture way" topics and politics in general, including geopolitics, economics, etc. They make the site actively worse on purpose on a regular basis. If you try to make any kind of good faith edit it will be pretty much immediately deleted by someone, and then you go to the history of the page and see that guy has been editing that article (and 1000 others) for a decade. Of course this goes totally against everything Wikipedia originally stood for: neutrality, reliance on reliable sources, "be bold", "anyone can edit", "nobody owns an article", etc. But it doesn't matter, because for every Wikipedia policy there is another policy saying exactly the opposite thing. It's a "rule lawyer"'s paradise: if you know all the policies back-to-front, you can argue your way around any drive-by contributor's attempt to justify their changes. For me, Wikipedia has gone through a bit of a cycle. For a long time, it was unreliable, but the contents were at least largely contributed in good faith. Then it seemed to get better. But these days I try to get information from any other source first, and check the citations pretty carefully. A lot of "information" is sourced from very political media outlets in the US which wear their biases on their sleeves. That's okay, those outlets should exist. But they're not reliable sources for an encyclopedia.
chownie 3y ago
Given others are giving their Wikipedia edit stories I'll do mine. I am not usually a Wiki editor for context, so I was editing from an IP without an account. I was reading the page for a weaponry used by civilians when I noticed someone had linked to a protest page but had labelled the link "x riots" instead of "x protests" -- this seemed a little odd to me. I edited the page to correct the link's text to match the page it pointed to. Within a day it was reverted, I re-reverted and asked the other editor for their rationale. They stated it was important to note that weapons are used by rioters and not protestors and reverted the change once again. I made one last revert to keep my change, cited npov plus some other wiki customs the offending editor had been ignoring and asked them to just edit the wording if they felt so strongly about the nuances. And they did. The other person, a power editor, conceded that this unrelated page was not the appropriate place to argue the semantics of a protest vs a riot and they reworded that section while keeping my edit. Just thought I'd chime in, since positive reviews are naturally rarer than negative ones.

96 points by akolbe 3y ago

868ruf0y 3y ago

[flagged]

hgsgm 3y ago
This ad hominem rant about editors has nothing to do with admins.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  It's also nonsense expecting articles to be personally written by doctors and scientists who are also not political in any way is just basically not understanding Wikipedia it's not a primary source.
- 868ruf0y 3y ago
  some of the editors mentioned in the video are also admins e.g. GorillaWarfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare

Simulacra 3y ago

I remember as a child, reading an article about a man who got up every day and logged into Wikipedia and wrote articles about Native American artists. This was in the 90s, and I thought the whole thing sounded wonderful. So I signed up for an account and became an editor. I've maybe contributed 20 or 30 edits over the past 20+ years. That initial influx of people I think has given the impression, or, perhaps the media, that there is a huge army of people maintaining the site.

TylerE 3y ago
Wikipedia did not exist in the '90s.
- Simulacra 3y ago
  Meant to say 00s. Oh wel.

MBCook 3y ago

I wonder if, as the culture has ossified, fewer and fewer people stuck around as editors long enough. Either driven away by other editors/admins, not finding it fulfilling enough as so many topics are already “taken”, or simply didn’t think they did enough to be eligible during their time (correctly or not). Or, I suppose, they don’t WANT to move from editor to admin for some reason.

jowea 3y ago
Is admin really the natural progression after editor, as you seem to be assuming? IMHO, the interest in the "project" part of Wikipedia that is required to be an admin isn't intrinsically linked to being a prolific and dedicated editor. Although having a decent number of edits is a de facto requirement for adminship.
- MBCook 3y ago
  It seems like the natural progression if someone is interested. You can delete or lock people from editing articles with it, which seems useful if you like editing Wikipedia.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    Eh, you're not allowed to use the extra tools without consensus from the rest of the community, so end of day you don't really gain much, and you can do pretty much everything without them. (By way of experiment: one particular admin had their admin bit disabled and it took people a over a year to notice that they'd done so.) Personally I still think 90% of the regular editors should have the tools anyway, but people kept inflating the requirements, or actually rejecting admins on the basis of "we have too many already" As tomodachi94 points out, being a wiki admin ideally should not be a big deal. It just sort of became that way on English Wikipedia, unfortunately.
tomodachi94 3y ago
Wikidata editor here. On some of the older Wikimedia projects (and English Wikipedia/enwiki especially), adminship comes with a large amount of extra baggage and is viewed as a somewhat prestigious position (but I have only seen this on enwiki, not Wikidata or other projects. On Wikidata, adminship is mostly a formality for established editors.) Keep in mind that enwiki has the largest amount of history and bureaucracy out of all of the Wikimedia projects, due to being the first in a long line.

Multicomp 3y ago

FTA > The problem 10 years ago was that the electorate was far too picky and rejected candidates who should have been promoted. Today, every potential candidate knows this and self-selects themselves out of standing. There aren't enough outliers who do stand to make much statistical conclusion from there. Yeah. Everybody got wise to the cliques and power struggles of WP and are put off trying to contribute to it as either an editor (changes instantly reverted) and therefore stops them in their tracks in eventually growing to be an admin. Same deal as StackOverflow. Petty tiny power users wield that power like a maniac because that's the way they get their jollies, make the experience a chore for the normies, so no newcomers join, and on the site goes, in a wierd reversal of the eternal september effect. In other cases in real life before the web, i might argue that motorcycles and buicks and HAM radio dealt with this, they got locked into a local culture maxima and have been trapped there ever since, growing stale / ever less appealing to newcomers.

nyolfen 3y ago
buicks? would you mind elaborating?
- Multicomp 3y ago
  Sorry. Just the generation gap that for my generational cohort, Buicks were reputed to be 'rich old people cars' and therefore not even considered when we would go out shopping for cars. Whereas in their heyday of 19x0's American car culture, Buicks were right there in the race with Ford Mustangs and Chevrolet Corvettes and such.
qingcharles 3y ago
I used to run a torrent site with a very significant user population. I would promote great users to mod positions. On average they would last 6 months before they became Hitlerstalins and I would be forced to fire them. Power corrupts :(
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as to say they are 'corrupted', just that they are extracting their payment in a non-monetary form. i.e. There are no 'unpaid mods', at least for any significant period of time. It's just that typically in real life we try to avoid setting up relationships were the only compensation is payment in social status, petty office maneuvers, etc..., since it's very visibly obvious in person. So we don't think about the different dynamics online. But this is the compensation model for a huge fraction of online communities.

jp57 3y ago

One implication of this is that some time in the future (tough to say when exactly) Wikipedia will have a big attrition problem. I could imagine a scenario in which all the current editors retire or pass away and simply are never replaced and Wikipedia dies.

editional 3y ago
While a shortage of admins/editors w/could cause the death of rather niche entries, Wikipedia would still have a huge propaganda outlet potential. Whether you believe its being actively used or not, wiki entries that might have political influence (history) will stay active, thus keeping Wikipedia (barely, that is) alive.
- WereSpielCheqrs 3y ago
  Perhaps I should have made it clearer in the article, but the English Wikipedia is not really short of editors. There was an era of decline from 2007 to 2014, though much of that was a side effect of edit filters that rejected certain edits that were highly likely to be vandalism. But the 2015 rally in editing numbers has turned into a sort of plateau - editing from 2015 to 2023 has consistently been above the 2014 minima. This is looking at "time between edits" How long it takes for each ten million edits.
  - jp57 3y ago
    The numbers in the OP indicated that few new editors are being added, so even if it’s not short of editors now, it will be eventually, unless new editors are added or there’s some breakthrough in longevity research.
    - WereSpielCheqrs 3y ago
      No. The article is about admins. Very few new editors are becoming admins, and my fear is that a Wikigeneration gap is emerging between the admins and the active editors. New editors are starting, old ones leaving or dying, total volume of editing is higher now than it was in the 2014 minima. But the number of admins is falling. Another way to look at the numbers is that if new admins continue to be promoted at the same rate as the last ten years, they would on average, need to be active as admins for fifty years each if you wanted to maintain current admin numbers.

whimsicalism 3y ago

I have found that wikipedia articles have gotten more biased over time. Early on in my usage of wikipedia, it was clear there were substantial issues in article about things like Israel-Palestine (substantial pro-Israeli bias then), but most articles were still pretty balanced. Now, it seems that on many actively contested political issues (ie. not something about climate change), there is a clear editorial stance. I say that as someone who has only voted D their entire life and likely will continue to do so absent some realignment. Efforts to change articles like these are reverted by high-status wikipedeans who have made articles like these their pet projects and build up a community of defenders. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_investigation_origins_counter-narrative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_investigation_origins_c...

baryphonic 3y ago
A couple years ago, I tried to edit a page about the economist Deidre McCloskey to add some information about a campaign McCloskey had helped organize in the early aughts to attack & discredit the sex researcher Michael Bailey. McCloskey has tried to cultivate a pro-free speech libertarian image, so I was particularly alarmed when I read a thorough accounting of the Bailey affair in a journal article by Alice Dreger.[0] In fact, I had met McCloskey after the Bailey incident, and knew nothing about it based on the excessively mild portrayal in the Wikipedia article. I tried to edit the page with a more accurate description: namely, that McCloskey attempted to have Bailey fired from Northwestern for violating "research ethics" and tried to have his license to practice psychology revoked in Illinois. Those facts seemed relevant to me, especially about someone who claims to be libertarian or "Classical Liberal." Wikipedia editors did not think so. The change was reverted almost immediately, even despite my citation of a high-quality source - much higher quality than the journalism garbage backing up many of the claims made on Wikipedia, yada yada. I eventually gave up after realizing one of the editors was on a moral crusade to suppress this piece of information, and none of the other editors were going to question her bias. I imagine the same thing happens on thousands of other politically sensitive pages. [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170124/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170124/
- 3y ago

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

A symptom of the web's own growth in the mainstream and Wikipedia become much more serious as a resource than its early days, that it requires serious attention and effort, not casual hobby moderation. The generation that was really into it in those early days is/was most likely representative of the early Internet generation who believed strongly in the open information movement, and had years of experience in moderated/moderating communities. Now? multiple generations of people who came up more 'digitally native' but only really consume, consume, consume, and take for granted the effort that many services require unseen to appear 'free'. Who's gonna join the small dedicated but exceedingly fussy team of editors with the amount of process and tape involved with keeping up wikipedia pages?

spondylosaurus 3y ago
> people who [...] take for granted the effort that many services require unseen to appear 'free'. 100%, and I'd argue this also applies to services that are for-profit but don't directly charge end users. The shit social media companies constantly pull isn't surprising when you recognize that these companies exist to make money, but I'm surprised by how many people take this into account (and are therefore perpetually shocked/outraged by the latest stunt).
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

jj999 3y ago

Aren't administrator named for life? If they are, it seems natural that they are getting older, like the Linux kernel leaders.

ern 3y ago

High status admins who bite newcomers with impunity, don't give a damn about systemic bias, ignore their own rules (invoking "Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy"...except when it suits them) - I find the site increasingly infuriating. On the other hand newly minted accounts (a few months old) seem to be getting involved in arcane things by nominating articles for deletion, despite having flimsy edit histories and limited experience on Wikipedia, possibly to build credibility for adminship in future. A worst case scenario is that the long-in-the-tooth admins finally let go, and these dodgy noobs gain adminship. I've kept a clean sheet over a multi-decade editing career, so I can't be dismissed as a crank who doesn't understand the project, but there needs to be some sort of reform.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago
Sounds like you'd make a great admin! How much are we willing to bet that you'd be (even more) cynical within 12 months though? This time not at the admins, but at the kinds of weird editors you'd have to deal with. %-) That said, I haven't kept an eye on wikipedia (let alone admins, let alone high status ones) for a while know. I know that sometimes they don't get enough pushback and start making mistakes that way.
underseacables 3y ago
This was what I ran in to. Very aggressive editors and trolls who demanded things be written in a certain way. Edits to "their" articles trigged them and they would then edit your edit. It got ridiculous

stonogo 3y ago

They spent years building a toxic moat and now they wonder why nobody wants to swim in it? Zero sympathy.

cowsup 3y ago

This seems to be the case for many long-term websites I was once part of. A site formed in 2002 is heavily moderated by people who were on it prior to 2010; a site formed in 2007 is heavily moderated by people who were on it prior to 2012. Fact is, experience is king. Someone who's been on a site for a year or two is typically knowledgable about it; but when you compare them to someone with a _decade_ or two of knowledge, it's far harder. Not to mention the actual politics of picking someone who signed up only a few years ago. Obviously in some scenarios there is just an obvious pick, but, other times, if there is a candidate who joined in 2010 and a candidate who joined in 2020, and both are otherwise mostly equal, you look like a jerk for picking the 2020 user over the 2010. This, unfortunately, tends to lead to stale ideas; nobody who's been part of a site for over a decade is going to push for things to be better, since they've probably been quite a bit happy with the status quo.

praisewhitey 3y ago

Reading through the responses on that page, many of the editors leaving a comment started editing before 2010. I'm curious how many people considered part of the editor community started in the last few years.

Semaphor 3y ago

My experience with Wikipedia is that toxic, power-hungry trolls like "CityOfSilver" [0] get into positions of power (though luckily only as a reviewer and not an admin). Funnily enough, for the issue I had, it was an admin who agreed with me and simply made the edit that CoS contested and insulted me over (removing unsourced Russian propaganda). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CityOfSilver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CityOfSilver

irrational 3y ago

I thought it would be fun to contribute to Wikipedia about topics I’m knowledgeable about. Every single attempt was rejected and reverted almost instantly. The rejections were happening so quickly that I have to assume admins had created bots to auto revert any change that did not come from them. There is no way there was time for a human to be involved. After about 10 attempts on 10 different articles I gave up and haven’t tried again since. There doesn’t seem to be any point.

notrono 3y ago
Out of interest which topics were these? I've noticed that for some topics, editors treat these pages as their own personal fiefdom and are very quick to revert.

93po 3y ago

My biggest issue with WP is that it relies largely on corporate news media for many subject areas and you’re only allowed to include the narrative of established corporate news. There is so much bias that is introduced this way and I don’t see any great solution to counter it.

mapmeld 3y ago

I'd encourage people to keep editing. From HN and Reddit I thought that my changes would be thrown out, but nothing happened except bots cleaning up my references. An issue that I noticed is that scientific articles accumulate newsworthy theories. The prion article has a section on weaponization, and prion diseases often have sections on alternate theories, or say that the causes remain unknown. Years later these articles need to be updated or trimmed down.

pm24601 3y ago

I honestly don't remember the last time I used wikipedia. As a member of a minority community. It doesn't have anything that I care about. My information resources are elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of admins was cut in half again in the next 10 years.

ldehaan 3y ago

[dead]

xacky 3y ago

I was an active Wikipedian back in the early days (2002-2006), and I ran for adminship twice, each time I was rejected for petty reasons. If you don't have a "perfect" account, they will pile on opposes. The only reason why so many people became admins at that time was that Wikipedia was still pretty much a "greenfield" site at the time (It had only around 700,000 articles back then, which is ~10% of what it is now), and there were plenty of volunteers signing up. Now it has become more established, and more rules have kept new generations out, similar to how boomers keep younger generations out of housing and high paying careers, despite having more education than them.

memefrog 3y ago

Everything that people say about StackOverflow and its "deletion culture" is doubly true of Wikipedia. Wikipedia today is rigidly controlled by a relatively small group of power users. It's completely unusable for any "culture way" topics and politics in general, including geopolitics, economics, etc. They make the site actively worse on purpose on a regular basis. If you try to make any kind of good faith edit it will be pretty much immediately deleted by someone, and then you go to the history of the page and see that guy has been editing that article (and 1000 others) for a decade. Of course this goes totally against everything Wikipedia originally stood for: neutrality, reliance on reliable sources, "be bold", "anyone can edit", "nobody owns an article", etc. But it doesn't matter, because for every Wikipedia policy there is another policy saying exactly the opposite thing. It's a "rule lawyer"'s paradise: if you know all the policies back-to-front, you can argue your way around any drive-by contributor's attempt to justify their changes. For me, Wikipedia has gone through a bit of a cycle. For a long time, it was unreliable, but the contents were at least largely contributed in good faith. Then it seemed to get better. But these days I try to get information from any other source first, and check the citations pretty carefully. A lot of "information" is sourced from very political media outlets in the US which wear their biases on their sleeves. That's okay, those outlets should exist. But they're not reliable sources for an encyclopedia.

chownie 3y ago

Given others are giving their Wikipedia edit stories I'll do mine. I am not usually a Wiki editor for context, so I was editing from an IP without an account. I was reading the page for a weaponry used by civilians when I noticed someone had linked to a protest page but had labelled the link "x riots" instead of "x protests" -- this seemed a little odd to me. I edited the page to correct the link's text to match the page it pointed to. Within a day it was reverted, I re-reverted and asked the other editor for their rationale. They stated it was important to note that weapons are used by rioters and not protestors and reverted the change once again. I made one last revert to keep my change, cited npov plus some other wiki customs the offending editor had been ignoring and asked them to just edit the wording if they felt so strongly about the nuances. And they did. The other person, a power editor, conceded that this unrelated page was not the appropriate place to argue the semantics of a protest vs a riot and they reworded that section while keeping my edit. Just thought I'd chime in, since positive reviews are naturally rarer than negative ones.