5 ms·

It used to be even worse -- when I started using Wikipedia (dinosaurs walked the earth) they had substantially more written about several comic book characters

by patio11 14y ago

It used to be even worse -- when I started using Wikipedia (dinosaurs walked the earth) they had substantially more written about several comic book characters than on obscure religious cults like e.g. Catholicism. That said, long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians (who are so screamingly not representative of the population that it almost pains me to have to mention that) than on any objectively awesome target for Wikipedia. Happily, Wikipedian's consensus target for Wikipedia is, even if far from perfect, pretty close to one of the most useful tools on the Internet.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. As long as the site doesn't make editing/adding articles a more user friendly/advertised feature, things aren't going to change. Case in point: I went just yesterday to add some new content to an article, along with which I had a citation to add. Imagine my surprise when I found out that citations are still added in MediaWiki syntax! I can say without a doubt that every single acquaintance of mine who doesn't have an interest in computers (and quite a few who do) would have been utterly discouraged at this point from editing the article. How difficult can it be to add a GUI editor? It would be a small, purely technical, step that could have a significant impact on the userbase, if advertised properly.
- jacobolus 14y ago
  Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base. Most GUI text editors around the web are horrible buggy piles of crap (to take one example I was recently frustrated by, the editor at Adobe’s forums – and Adobe is a gigantic company with thousands of highly paid, experienced developers). The result of any such effort could easily end up making the software more complex and harder to use rather than easier.
  - MikeCapone 14y ago
    > Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base. As one of the most popular websites on the net, it's not like they don't have the resources to do it. I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism against newbies. This probably does some good, but it also definitely does a lot of bad (keeping out worthy contributors just because they don't feel like learning the markup language). I'm sure they could achieve their goal some other way without pushing away talented contributors.
    - jacobolus 14y ago
      > it's not like they don't have the resources to do it. Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. Just finding developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge. The Wikimedia Foundation has a lot less resources than you might imagine, considering the reach of its projects, and there are an awful lot of other funding priorities (not to mention other code priorities). They’re doing the best they can, but making sweeping changes to the code base is a lot harder than it looks. > I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism. Do you have any evidence for that? As conspiracy theories go, this one seems pretty weak to me. I can’t think of another organization of comparable size which is as welcoming and open to involvement and contribution from ordinary community members, at all levels of decision making. Almost the entire management and operation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation is carried out in public, nearly all of the parties involved are volunteers (with a quite small number of full time staff keeping infrastructure running, handling legal issues, and so on), and many many decisions are made collectively, by consensus. It’s easy to hate on anything, as a disinterested outsider, without making any real attempt to understand the internal processes involved, but organizing millions of people is a highly non-trivial job, and I think the Wikimedia community has done pretty admirably, all things considered.
- cocoflunchy 14y ago
  The GUI editor is under (active?) development. You can try it here in a sandbox : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox More info here : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor
- mjn 14y ago
  > The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. It's actually not clear that's true when it comes to primary writers. There are a group of active editors (about 3000 at any given time) who do much of the maintenance work, e.g. putting articles into categories, formatting references, editing for style, moving stuff around, adding infoboxes, etc. But at least one study (I'll see if I can dig it up) found that a surprising percentage of the total content on Wikipedia is written by random anonymous IP addresses that show up to write a few paragraphs on a subject and are then never seen again.
  - petitmiam 14y ago
    I'd love to see that study. For some reason the idea of anonymous people writing bits and pieces, makes me like Wikipedia more.
robryan 14y ago
And why shouldn't it, people contributing to something for free are likely doing so in some part to shape it to something they themselves would find useful. Seems very similar to open source software. If there are major parts missing that people deem important maybe they need to step up and provide some funding to get them done.
- TomAnthony 14y ago
  I think the problem isn't that the "Wikipedians" aren't creating this content but are advocating its deletion when "outsiders" do add it.
blahedo 14y ago
I agree with your underlying point, but due to a weird quirk of Wikipedia history, Catholicism in particular was for quite some time way over-represented; in the initial land-rush to populate Wikipedia with content, they grabbed a number of out-of-copyright encyclopaedias whose text were already in digital form, and one of these was an old edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia from 1913. With the strange result that the very most obscure topics in Catholicism were actually pretty well-covered, though often with information that was a century out of date! Even now you can find articles that have been barely tweaked from their 1913 form.

by patio11 14y ago

w1ntermute 14y ago

> long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. As long as the site doesn't make editing/adding articles a more user friendly/advertised feature, things aren't going to change. Case in point: I went just yesterday to add some new content to an article, along with which I had a citation to add. Imagine my surprise when I found out that citations are still added in MediaWiki syntax! I can say without a doubt that every single acquaintance of mine who doesn't have an interest in computers (and quite a few who do) would have been utterly discouraged at this point from editing the article. How difficult can it be to add a GUI editor? It would be a small, purely technical, step that could have a significant impact on the userbase, if advertised properly.

jacobolus 14y ago
Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base. Most GUI text editors around the web are horrible buggy piles of crap (to take one example I was recently frustrated by, the editor at Adobe’s forums – and Adobe is a gigantic company with thousands of highly paid, experienced developers). The result of any such effort could easily end up making the software more complex and harder to use rather than easier.
- MikeCapone 14y ago
  > Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base. As one of the most popular websites on the net, it's not like they don't have the resources to do it. I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism against newbies. This probably does some good, but it also definitely does a lot of bad (keeping out worthy contributors just because they don't feel like learning the markup language). I'm sure they could achieve their goal some other way without pushing away talented contributors.
  - jacobolus 14y ago
    > it's not like they don't have the resources to do it. Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. Just finding developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge. The Wikimedia Foundation has a lot less resources than you might imagine, considering the reach of its projects, and there are an awful lot of other funding priorities (not to mention other code priorities). They’re doing the best they can, but making sweeping changes to the code base is a lot harder than it looks. > I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism. Do you have any evidence for that? As conspiracy theories go, this one seems pretty weak to me. I can’t think of another organization of comparable size which is as welcoming and open to involvement and contribution from ordinary community members, at all levels of decision making. Almost the entire management and operation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation is carried out in public, nearly all of the parties involved are volunteers (with a quite small number of full time staff keeping infrastructure running, handling legal issues, and so on), and many many decisions are made collectively, by consensus. It’s easy to hate on anything, as a disinterested outsider, without making any real attempt to understand the internal processes involved, but organizing millions of people is a highly non-trivial job, and I think the Wikimedia community has done pretty admirably, all things considered.
cocoflunchy 14y ago
The GUI editor is under (active?) development. You can try it here in a sandbox : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox More info here : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor
mjn 14y ago
> The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. It's actually not clear that's true when it comes to primary writers. There are a group of active editors (about 3000 at any given time) who do much of the maintenance work, e.g. putting articles into categories, formatting references, editing for style, moving stuff around, adding infoboxes, etc. But at least one study (I'll see if I can dig it up) found that a surprising percentage of the total content on Wikipedia is written by random anonymous IP addresses that show up to write a few paragraphs on a subject and are then never seen again.
- petitmiam 14y ago
  I'd love to see that study. For some reason the idea of anonymous people writing bits and pieces, makes me like Wikipedia more.

robryan 14y ago

And why shouldn't it, people contributing to something for free are likely doing so in some part to shape it to something they themselves would find useful. Seems very similar to open source software. If there are major parts missing that people deem important maybe they need to step up and provide some funding to get them done.

TomAnthony 14y ago
I think the problem isn't that the "Wikipedians" aren't creating this content but are advocating its deletion when "outsiders" do add it.

blahedo 14y ago

I agree with your underlying point, but due to a weird quirk of Wikipedia history, Catholicism in particular was for quite some time way over-represented; in the initial land-rush to populate Wikipedia with content, they grabbed a number of out-of-copyright encyclopaedias whose text were already in digital form, and one of these was an old edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia from 1913. With the strange result that the very most obscure topics in Catholicism were actually pretty well-covered, though often with information that was a century out of date! Even now you can find articles that have been barely tweaked from their 1913 form.