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Wikipedia being a non-profit, and Jimmy Wales being a respected leader, is key to Wikipedia's success. Why should I contribute to the curation of a for-profit
by dragontamer 3y ago
Wikipedia being a non-profit, and Jimmy Wales being a respected leader, is key to Wikipedia's success.
Why should I contribute to the curation of a for-profit company? Especially if Twitter will simply be sold off to the highest-bidder, such as a rich narcissist with a chip on his shoulder?
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This past year, we've seen the collapse of trust in three community driven websites:
1. Twitter
2. Reddit
3. StackOverflow
It turns out that for-profit companies seem to have good morals when there's plenty of money floating around. But the moment venture capitalism dries up, we get this year. All three making user-hostile and anti-moderator choices.
Curation of communities takes _work_. Work that people have been demotivated to do in various forms. Wikipedia has kept its moderators / editor base motivated... and I think the non-profit status is part of the key here.
Or at very least, the advertising approach that Twitter, Reddit, and kinda-sorta StackOverflow, has is probably unable to make a long-lasting trustful community.
Twitter and Reddit will continue existing of course. But I don't think we're going to have the communities of yesteryear anymore.
- flerchin 3y agoWhat did StackOverflow do?
- agubelu 3y agoLately it's been overran with ChatGPT-generated answers.
- randomdata 3y agoWhat says that Wikipedia is successful and not just existing like Twitter and Reddit are likely to continue to?
- dragontamer 3y agoFor better or for worse, Wikipedia is devoid of advertising revenue, and therefore seemingly immune to these ups and downs to the ad-tech market like Twitter/Reddit have been this past year.
- randomdata 3y agoMeaning that the marker of success is stable revenue? In other words, someone who keeps a minimum wage job their entire life could be the most successful person around?
- dragontamer 3y agoI'd say being in a position where you aren't forced to piss off the moderators to make more advertisement revenue is a major advantage this year. It's not about revenue. I'm talking about trust, so that the crowd is willing to curate data for you.
- randomdata 3y agoIf access to moderators is the metric of success, Wikipedia claims to have ~900 moderator accounts currently. Reddit, in 2017, claimed to have ~75,000 moderators. Unfortunately the later figure is severely dated, but has Reddit really lost over 74,000 moderator accounts since? That seems unlikely. Perhaps Wikipedia has never been successful, just something that has managed to continue to exist?
- dragontamer 3y agoIf Reddit says X but Wikipedia says Y, do you trust X to be true or do you trust Y to be true? I'm talking about curation and quality of the editor force. Wikipedia's editors are highly respected by everyone. Reddit... not so much.
- randomdata 3y ago> If Reddit says X but Wikipedia says Y, do you trust X to be true or do you trust Y to be true? Neither. One – or both – of them might be true, but who cares? It is not advantageous to give it much concern. We have evolved to not rely on truths. "Is that a lion rustling those bushes or just the wind? Let me be absolutely certain it is a lion before I run." said no one who successfully passed on their genes ever. Truths don't matter much, and the reality is that we're not capable of processing full truths anyway, having to rely on simplifications that lose a lot of the important nuance. > Wikipedia's editors are highly respected by everyone. Reddit... not so much. That's like saying librarians garner more respect than comedians. That might be the case when observed through some particular lens, but they're really not comparable. What would that even mean? And if this is the measure of success we want to use, I am struggling to understand why Wikipedia and Reddit were brought together for comparison.