16 ms·

Wikipedia Is Nearing Completion, in a Sense

110 points by kevbin 14y ago

pebb 14y ago
Yup, from now on all edits done by outsiders shall be reverted with extreme prejudice.
jevinskie 14y ago
"Jensen believes that there is a way out of this: "Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. The problem is that it is not mature in a scholarly sense." Wikipedia should devote more resources toward getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences, and maybe even training in the field of historiography, so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard." I think that this is the most interesting part of the article. What if Wikipedia was funded well enough to act as both a traditional encyclopedia with full-time editors/writers and as a place where everyone can add/edit content? We need a modern Andrew Carnegie to step up.
- gojomo 14y ago
  They're not hurting for funding. The Wikimedia Foundation had a $28 million budget for its current year and is projecting $46 million in revenues for 2012-2013: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Q... Also, hiring editors/writers might crowd out the volunteer motivations, costing the project far more in the loss of donated effort. I believe Wikipedia's challenges are more strategic -- deciding the right things to do and in what proportions -- than financial.
  - jessriedel 14y ago
    What makes you think $40 million is a lot? That seems like a very tiny amount to me, especially considering that most (nearly all?) is spent on technical requirements rather than editing.
    - gojomo 14y ago
      I believe $40 million per year is a lot because it could, just based on crude rules-of-thumb, support a strong technical staff of well over 100 people indefinitely. Indeed, according the 2012-2013 Plan document, current Wikimedia Foundation headcount was about 119 at the time of writing and expected to grow to 174 next year. I'm not sure what you mean by 'technical requirements', but if you specifically mean hosting costs (other than staffing) and capital expenditures on equipment, per the plan's page 69 that is forecast to be about $5.3MM of the total $42MM budget -- around 13%. Staff is the major cost -- I believe it is chiefly technical, administrative, legal, and community/chapter outreach roles. I also believe there's a not single person with explicit 'editing' duties on their payroll, as a matter of strategy and doctrine: Wikipedia is edited by unpaid volunteers, the Foundation supports those volunteers. Adding any 'official' and compensated editors would tamper with the formula/culture that's worked so far. In one respect, crossing that threshold by adding just a single paid editor would be 'cheap', but if that steps makes the volunteers feel less appreciated, or start thinking of things in terms of a salary (aka: 'motivation crowding'), the loss in productive contributions could be much larger. Why do you think $40MM-per-year is a "very tiny amount", and how big of an editorial staff do you think they'd need under some new model including professionalized editors?
      - jessriedel 14y ago
        There are 4 million articles on Wikipedia and 50k active editors. 100 people, even working full time, would hardly make a dent. This is true even ignoring the serious impact of tampering with the all-volunteer philosophy. I'd wager you'd need at least 10 times the number of people/money to seriously improve the content of wikipedia by hiring editors.
        gojomo 14y ago
        The definition of 'active editor' that gives totals in the tens of thousands is anything more than 5 edits a month. That could just be minutes of time, so I doubt you can draw any sensible conclusions about sizing a paid full-time staff from '5+ edit' volunteer counts. FWIW, the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia Britannica suggests that in 2007, Britannica had a credited staff of about 60, with another dozen editorial advisors. (While thousands of other advisors contributed over the decades, they're not required as continuing full-time staff.) So your suggestion that the Foundation would need a "at least 10 times the number of people/money" -- 1000+ full-time paid editors, a $400 million/year+ budget?!? -- for serious improvements seems wildly extravagant. Is it extrapolated from the known size/cost of any real-world professional/academic editorial efforts?
- saurik 14y ago
  While I agree that that would be interesting, that seems incredibly far-fetched as every one of those categories of scholarship--even including reading JSTOR to a real extent--is what Wikipedia would call "original research". Instead, Wikipedia believes strongly that it should only base itself on secondary sources, and thereby would much prefer to cite a New York Times article over a peer-reviewed journal article (which you are technically allowed to do, but the rules severely discourage it). The problem, therefore, isn't about helping editors get access to these more professional sources, it is making Wikipedia believe that they are even valuable sources in the first place. Until then, it simply will not happen. (To demonstrate the issue, I have pasted below a section of the rules on the usage of primary sources on Wikipedia. The idea of sending someone to a "military-history conference" with this rule still in place, obviously would do no help.) > A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge.
  - ErrantX 14y ago
    A journal article would certainly count as a secondary source (unless of course you were talking about the source itself)! And is always preferred over a media report. Now if your argument was that Wikipedia suffers from "recentism", whereby lots of topics are based on media reports and lack more in depth literature to establish historical interest, then we would be in agreement. But the Wikipedia community is well aware of the importance of peer reviewed literature. The Medicine wiki-project, for example, has specific sourcing policies[1] for medical articles that specifies literature reviews as good sources. In fact, Wikipedians are working to get access to professional literature. There is a resource exchange page where we help each other get access to specific journal articles. And one particular editor has been working hard to get free accounts for things like Credo reference etc. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS
    - saurik 14y ago
      I found your response highly surprising, and I see my confusion now: Wikipedia is making (I will even admit correctly) a distinction between actual research (which it very clearly calls a "primary source") and a "review paper" (which it calls a "secondary source"). [references below] You really thereby can't say "a journal article would certainly count as a secondary source", as most journal articles are research, not reviews of research: the page you link to even very directly states "many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources". Of course, I will totally admit that at least some of the articles in JSTOR are going to be review papers, and thereby must retract part of my previous statement as written. In the specific case of JSTOR from those examples, and thereby my entire first aside, there would be at least some marginal benefit, even under Wikipedia's rules. However, I will point out that the underlying argument I was making quite stands: sending people to conferences, teaching them more about historiography, and getting them access to more sources of research, are all ways to make people better at performing what Wikipedia continues to call "original research" (and clearly wants no part in). Put differently, the goal of these activities is to make people better at interpreting primary information, not copy/pasting secondary information. Indeed, Wikipedia makes it quite clear that primary sources may only be used in cases where people with no specialized knowledge can plainly understand the information (which, honestly, to me seems unlikely to be plausible: journal articles are not written for the layperson), and even goes so far as to be quite explicit that secondary sources must be used to make the primary sources trustworthy. <edit> It does, however, at least seem like the medical parts of Wikipedia do not believe that a newspaper article is even a valid secondary source, so good on them. ;P I tried to find a similar document for the field of History, and they do seem to be working on a similar document (still marked "essay") and it also looks like it could be pretty good (as in, "no journalism"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(history) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_... (I imagine an interesting benefit with Wikipedia/History is that you don't run experiments, so of course much of the material you find is technically a secondary source; you thereby don't actually find the usual discussion of "primary" vs. "secondary" in this essay: "primary" gets defined as the actual source documents, as arguably history is all opinion ;P.) Even reading the history-specific documentation, however, does not seem to indicate that you could both follow the rules and get much value out of having a strong background in history and history research: I maintain that attending conferences and taking courses in the field is seemingly not something that Wikipedia would look favorably on. This quote, however, was quite uplifting: "Historical articles on wikipedia should be the result of scholarly works.". </edit> (additional quotes from Wikipedia backing up my statements:) "...similarly, a scientific paper documenting a new experiment is a primary source on the outcome of that experiment." "A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge." "For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research "A primary source in medicine is one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. ... Many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources for facts about the research and discoveries made." "A secondary source is... Examples include literature reviews or systematic reviews found in medical journals, specialist academic or professional books, and medical guidelines or position statements published by major health organizations." "All Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse." (emphasis copied from original) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS
kiba 14y ago
Wikipedia may be getting more mature, but I think barrier to entry is also cause for lack of outsider edits. Also, being a wikipedian isn't like being a professor. You don't get much outsider respect. Due to their policies, you also see "forks" or more specialist wiki such as comixpedia, or libregamewiki(A wiki that I actually found) for subjects like webcomics or open source video games that keeps getting deleted. Gwern, who is a veteran editor, got so tired of the wikipolitics(Even though he's really good at wikilawyering to protect his contribution when needed), so he started http://gwern.net http://gwern.net He benefit from the reputation and traffic that would otherwise goes to wikipedia.
DanBC 14y ago
There is less for people to do, but there is still plenty of "wiki gnoming" to do. This is exactly the kind of thing that could attract some new editors. The minor fixing of small details should be an excellent use of crowdsourcing. I seem to have lousy experiences at Wikipedia whenever I try to edit anything, even if it's a minor edit. Last time I tried: My IP had already been blocked because it had been used by a vandal. I thought that was a bit odd (blocking a dynamic IP range), so I made an unblock request. The template is confusing, and doesn't tell users to include the reason for being blocked as well as the reason for being unblocked, so I got an error message. While I was fixing the mistake I made my unblock request was declined. (This happened within a few minutes of me posting it.) Thus, I fixed the mistake I made, saved the page, (working past the edit conflict) and find that my request has been declined. I read why it's declined. I make another unblock request. I get a friendly, polite, sympathetic reply. But it's not actually much use - it doesn't help new users to understand WP. And the block remains. I try to reply. Because the talk page includes links to templates WP thinks I'm entering external links and asks me to enter capchas. I enter the capchas and reply. I say that blocking a troll by blocking some dynamic IPs is odd - they just log off the Internet and log back on to get a new IP address, which may be outside the blocked range. Determined trolls (the kind who attract IP range blocks) will find this trivial to do. Newbies, the kind of people who are being targeted for this retention programme, may not find this quite so easy. What kind of person will willingly jump through these hoops? People who are great at grammar and copy editing? Or cranks who want to put homeopathy in every article, or who want to mention Armenian genocide in many articles?
- ErrantX 14y ago
  Putting my admin hat on for a moment... rangeblocks are fairly rare for the reason you cite. But when used they are deployed in situations where a vandal has been noted to be using IP addresses from the same range. Although you seem skeptical it often works! As these are not the smartest cookies in the crumble. Unfortunately, the only way to fix your problem is to create an account on another IP address and log in (or alternately ask someone to create it for you, a service Wikipedia can provide). Because the talk page includes links to templates WP thinks I'm entering external links and asks me to enter capchas. That's rather odd, I've never come across that before! I thought internal Wikipedia links were excluded from that filter. I will raise that when I find someone who is responsible for such things :)
binxbolling 14y ago
I think this article makes a great point, but there might be other, more unpopular reasons fewer people are editing. For example, in my opinion, the barrier to entry has gotten much higher. Fanatical editors revert aggressively, red tape holds up even great changes, and the rites & mores of the Wikipedia community become ever more convoluted & impenetrable to outsiders. It's a myth, albeit popular, that one can just read an article and quickly edit a mistake (whether major or minor). Perhaps this facade is crumbling a bit, and more people are realizing that "contributing" is not actually all that easy. I actually love Wikipedia, so don't take this as petty sniping, it's just what I've experienced.
- jarek 14y ago
  I'm actually rather curious as I see this argument repeatedly and it doesn't match my personal experience (I've corrected plenty of mistakes both with a user account and as an IP and I don't think I've been reverted once). Do you mind sharing what kind of articles or mistakes have you had this experience with?
  - JustSomeAnon 14y ago
    Unfortunately I have to comment as anonymous. My experience totally matches binxbolling. As a new contributor my entries were either blanked by trolls (and left for dead for weeks without end) or have been deleted by over-zealous editors whose only reference seems to be their own opinion and the spouting of endless WP this and WP that rules. I was appalled by the bullying and mob mentality I found in there.
    - jarek 14y ago
      Can you comment on the articles or fields you were editing in, or would that jeopardize your anonymity?
      - JustSomeAnon 14y ago
        The field is, broadly speaking, Computer Science.
Jabbles 14y ago
I suspect many articles are approaching a local maximum, and it will be very difficult to do a significant reorganisation of an article in order to reach "the global maximum". It is possible to have two very dissimilar, balanced and detailed articles on the same subject. Wikipedia makes an arbitrary choice and this is difficult to undo. I can't think of any articles that I can point to and say "this was the wrong choice", but it's certainly something to think about.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
This is the other end of extrapolation. There is a lot of stuff in the world, but its finite stuff. And information, like lots of things, has its own inverse power law. When building a search engine folks say "Gee you don't have nearly the hardware that Google does, how can you ever hope to compete?" and the answer is the inverse power law. Looking at queries that are served out of the index vs being served off the long tail it drops off dramatically. How many companies are there in the world? 100M? Give them each a a megabyte for a pictures and their information, that is 100 TB of data, 50 disk drives, 150 if they are triply replicated. And what are the net new businesses in a given year? 2% annual growth rate for the worlds economies over the long scale, that's maybe 2M new businesses a year, or 2TB of data, or 1 (or 3) new disks a year? A billion people on Facebook? 1/7th of the world population? What a megabyte for each of them is PB of data? The Backblaze guys can put a petabyte of storage in a single cabinet. For a long time the Internet was playing 'catch-up' now it is asymptotically approaching 'caught up.' Different problems and different opportunities for folks now who are basing their endeavors on the net.
- tisme 14y ago
  Storing data and using data are two completely different things. You can store all of FB and lots of other companies in a fairly small volume these days. But as soon as you want to access that data to process or update it the game changes rapidly. Suddenly that one cabinet explodes into a datacenter full of cabinets, or even several data centers. Storage is a solved problem for just about any amount that an ordinary company might need. Getting that data delivered to a CPU at speeds that are still usable in a practical sense if you want to say something about all of that data is a completely unrelated problem which changes amount of technology and funds required from the easy level to the extremely hard and beyond level.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    "Storing data and using data are two completely different things." That is so true. When people ask "How hard can it really be to write a search engine these days?" I have been known to ask them to speculate on how they might go about it and then point out the challenges of knowing what data you have vs what data is asked for. Search is particularly interesting because the more time you spend the better your answer can be, and its always challenging to 'draw the line' between fast and relevant. But that is also what makes it so fun :-)
mattparlane 14y ago
I can't help but think that presenting this graph on a log scale isn't the best way to do it. I mean, if the number went up linearly year-over-year, wouldn't it look like that on a log scale anyway?
- rm999 14y ago
  Yeah the log scale hides his point. A log scale is useful when you want to highlight the rate of growth, e.g. for something that grows exponentially. But I'd expect Wikipedia to grow linearly, not exponentially - on a log scale it is hard to distinguish anything that is subexponential (which includes linear growth).
  - wavesounds 14y ago
    Totally agree with you guys and came here to post the same thing, he may make some good points but this seems somewhat deceptive to the average American reader.
AustinGibbons 14y ago
I did some research on the declining editor rates for a course project. Without recreating our entire paper, I want to make this important point. Wikipedia is not (necessarily) nearing the completion of all knowledge, but rather what is feasible for its editors to contribute - indeed, there is much work to be done on "the history of sanitation and sewage in ancient Carthage" and "topic sensitive page rank", which at least has a page, let alone "trust sensitive page rank" which seems to be missing one. Our core piece of evidence was observing the _same_ trends across different languages (in both # edits and # page views). If you are interested, check out our final report here - it has its flaws, but I believe the three pieces of evidence we explored hold some merit in their own right. (http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs341/reports/09-GibbonsVetranoBiancaniCS341.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs341/reports/09-GibbonsVetran...)
- robryan 14y ago
  The more specific a topic is the few people that could actually write an accessible article on it. Paying specialized writers or even paying/ asking for donations of other works they have done could fill out these areas.
aprescott 14y ago
It seems a little misleading to have a graph with log-y values suggesting that growth has stopped because it's reaching some kind of peak. log(number of articles) looking like log(t) means it might still be growing pretty linearly.
- yk 14y ago
  Wikimedia has the numbers (some scrolling required): http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm It is recently slightly lower than linear, but by no means looking as bad as the article suggests. In fact ( reading from the plot in the Atlantic) it took Wikipedia five years (2001 - 2005) to reach 1M articles, two years for the second and roughly 1 and a half years each for the next two million. From the more detailed statistics at Wikimedia, new articles are now added at roughly 1000 a day, down from 1600 a day in 2006. [added]I just found the linear plot of en.wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaArt.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaArt.PNG
tokenadult 14y ago
I have been a Wikipedian with a registered account for a few years, and I have reflected on these issues. The article asks, "But what if the decline in engagement has little to do with culture or the design of the site? What if, instead, it's that there's just less for new Wikipedians to do?" It's the culture. There is plenty to do. Indeed, every time I read a Wikipedia article, I find something in every article that turns on my inner editor mode. But my log-in information is only stored on my office computer, not on my wife's computer or my children's computer, so when I am reading along in Wikipedia with my family and I see a mistake, I usually grumble rather than Wikignome and fix the problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT I do Wikignome regularly when I'm reading Wikipedia for one reason or another on my office computer. That gives me solely the satisfaction of fixing a problem, and no satisfaction at all of supposing that that builds up my reputation among other Wikipedians or that the fixes will even persist in further updates to the pages. Quite apart from the articles that have jump-right-out-at-you errors, convenient to fix for anyone who knows grammar, spelling, or basic facts of the world, there are many, many articles that are readily apparent examples of factual mistakes from more subtle causes such as edit wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars that often persist even after action of the Arbitration Committee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence#Case_amendments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/... A user who is knowledgeable about SOURCES and who has professional editing experience and academic editing experience (as I have) is hardly likely to find Wikipedia welcoming. Wikipedia's culture was set in the days when it was the "encyclopedia anyone can edit," that is, the encyclopedia where anyone can make something up, and then as Wikipedia grew an administrative apparatus, administering was used more for turf battles and point-of-view pushing than it was used for editing to encyclopedic quality or fact-checking. I think a philanthropist with a budget the size of Wikipedia's budget over a few years (a large amount of money, but pocket change for a billionaire) could build a Wikipedia competitor that could do quite a lot better. Maybe no one will ever think that that is worthwhile. For sure, many people who are well aware of how incomplete Wikipedia still is regret the off-putting culture of Wikipedia, and will be dissuaded from spending much volunteer time to improve it. AFTER EDIT: A grandchild comment noted that "One perk of competing with Wikipedia is that you can use Wikipedia articles as a base." And indeed, if a philanthropist's goal for a competing project were improving the quality of online encyclopedias, licensing the competing project's articles in the same way Wikipedia's are licensed would mean that good articles could work their way back into Wikipedia--a very disruptive strategy indeed for improving content.
nevinera 14y ago
That first chart really bugs me. You're showing us an apparent asymptote, a totally reasonable thing to do to prove your point.. but then I notice it's a log plot. That isn't showing us anything, number of seconds would make the same shape of plot.
- rhplus 14y ago
  Yes, the log version is a little misleading, but the linear version shows that growth is slowing down too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaGom.PNG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaGom.PNG
  - benmanns 14y ago
    Note the light green line under the blue growth rate line. The Size of Wikipedia article[0] says that this was the modeled growth rate as of 2010, which it only held to until 2011. This shows the danger of modeling existing data and extrapolating to the future. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
  - Jabbles 14y ago
    It's still measuring number of articles, not, say, total word count. Do you have a graph of that too?
benmanns 14y ago
Here is the data on a linear, rather than logarithmic scale[0]. Y axis is number of articles and X axis is "years since 2001". I copied the data as best I could from the chart given by the author of this article. Wikipedia has a page itself about its own size which shows a similar linear growth rate[1]. [0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%7B20%2C15000%2C100000%2C200000%2C500000%2C900000%2C1500000%2C2000000%2C2500000%2C3000000%2C3500000%2C4000000%7D http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%7B20%2C15000%2C10... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
- ygra 14y ago
  That's what I wondered too. It's easy to "show" a certain "saturation" when using a log scale and that only means it doesn't grow relative to its current size.
britta 14y ago
I found this response interesting from a person who works for Wikimedia (http://branch.com/b/surmounting-the-insurmountable-wikipedia-is-nearing-comple#was-3CT6Ooc http://branch.com/b/surmounting-the-insurmountable-wikipedia...): ...at the Foundation, we tend to call this "the Gold Rush theory" - the idea that Wikipedia's gold rush days are over. My personal view is that the problem isn't that everything is done, but that it's harder for willing new editors to find things to do. (For existing power contributors, they have no hard time finding topics, which is why overall article growth remains steady). The answer here is that the Foundation needs to work on ways to surface interesting and useful stuff to write about. Wikipedia can't afford to hope people stumble on these topics. He works on making Wikipedia's UI better in ways that encourage useful contributions, especially for new editors - see his blog posts at http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/09/24/giving-new-wikipedians-feedback-post-edit/ http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/09/24/giving-new-wikipedians-... and http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/10/24/fix-this-broken-workflow/ http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/10/24/fix-this-broken-workflo... for examples.
treelovinhippie 14y ago
Simple: remove the "must be noteworthy" rule. I remember many years ago I was heavily into the Diggnation podcast and a few others coming out of Revision3 and Leo Laporte's network. Anyway, somehow I did a search on Wikipedia and found that these podcasts were not on there at all (despite having many viewers). So long story short, I created pages for these podcasts, filled them with content, and a few days later they were removed by mods for not being "noteworthy" enough. I attempted to plead with them that these podcasts were in fact the most popular tech podcasts on the web, but the mods didn't care. I haven't edited Wikipedia since.
- britta 14y ago
  The notability guideline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability) is closely related to the verifiability policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) — from Wikipedia's perspective, if a subject has not been covered by multiple reasonably reliable secondary sources (in other words, if it isn't "notable"), we can't write a reasonably verifiable article about that subject. Every article has to include secondary sources as references, so that editors and readers can quickly fact-check. There are plenty of thoughtful discussions elsewhere about why these notability and verifiability rules are flawed, but I wanted to point out this connection because it shows that the notability guideline is possibly not as arbitrary as it seems at first. I wish I could figure out a way to help Wikipedia explain this better. Maybe "notability" is the wrong name for this guideline.
  - derleth 14y ago
    It isn't about explaining it better, it's about the fact people have a need to feel special and some people peg that specialness to having an article about Their Thing on Wikipedia. Patiently explaining to them that, without external verification, there's no way to prevent them from simply making shit up is not going to reduce their sense of indignation when their unverifiable stuff is deleted.
    - saurik 14y ago
gbog 14y ago
In the first comment on the linked page, a guy says rightly that the number of missing articles is still enormous, but in parts of knowledge that are further from that of the median Wikipedian. In a comment here someone says the foundation has the goal to find and purpose interesting things to write on Wikipedia to new editors. The sum of these the interesting problem of crossing culture barriers. How to get the regular geek interested in the many kings and warlords of China's Warring States?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
_feda_ 14y ago
It's always seemed weird to me that wikipedia has a problem with scaring away potential editors. I for one love editing wikipedia and never found it in anyway intimidating when I started editing in my teens, although I'm probably part of a sizable edge case of humanity that enjoys the relative complexity of the process of editing itself, markdown et al. I don't find the culture to be off-putting either, because the culture gels nicely with my personality traits and those of any person who would enjoy contributing to an encyclopedia. Wikipedia has a learning curve sure, but like learning to use a shell instead of a gui, the pain is certainly ultimately worth the gain. The barriers to entry are nowhere near as high as those I imagine serious, academic editors face in their careers.
- mjn 14y ago
  As an academic I generally agree. I have mostly good experiences editing Wikipedia, with a handful of bad ones. By and large it's much more reasonable than some of the things I've run into in academia. My main wish on Wikipedia is that I got more feedback of any kind. Often I will write an article and never hear from anyone about it. Maybe I pick too obscure topics, but it'd be nice to hear some constructive feedback more often.
  - _feda_ 14y ago
    It's regrettable you're not getting the feedback you should be getting, as this is something that will really help you stick to it. On the other hand, the very reason you aren't getting feedback is a good one: you're working on obscure articles, which is precisely the area wikipedia needs work done on in order to become the fully-fledged, echt encyclopedia (as I'm sure you know in the case of proprietary equivalents professionals are hired to fulfill the role you are fulfilling). Anyway, consider yourself a lonely pioneer ;)
anuraj 14y ago
Very myopic view restricted only to English language. There are more than a 100 major languages in the world. So now Wikipedia has to concentrate on other languages.
pixelcort 14y ago
One big opportunity is the differences in content between different language editions of Wikipedia. In many cases the content for an article varies widely between languages, and I still run across articles that are not yet available in English yet.
chris_wot 14y ago
I think the best metric I'd use to see if Wikipedia is "complete" us to look at the major articles and see what proportion have [citation needed] on them. Of course, I'm a little biased as that tag is the one I created so its really my baby. But I designed it for obsolescence, so I suppose I can't complain :-)
- Xcelerate 14y ago
  Whoa, hold on... you were the guy that invented that tag?!
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Yup. You can find my greatest hits under ta bu shi da yu.
ErrantX 14y ago
As a highly active Wikipedian this article is rather wrong: Wikipedia is far from complete. It has a lot of articles, covering a huge range of topics (and in that sense is perhaps nearing "completion"). But those articles are almost always far from complete. As someone who has written multiple peer reviewed "Good Articles" and one "A-Class" (a step below "Featured Article") - as well as numerous other fairly well rounded articles - the act of taking material from a stub or short overview to a complete encyclopaedic article is MASSIVE. I wrote an article about Dudley Clarke; a British chap who was responsible for military deception planning in North Africa during the Second World War. That took nearly 3 months of research and writing, and cost me around £50 in text books. "but the bulk of the work, the actual writing and structuring of the articles, has already been done" No. The easy thing of slapping up and article with some information in it has been done. The bulk of the work is completing each article. This article does actually nail why Wikipedia editorship is declining: "With the exciting work over, editors are losing interest" They just get the reason wrong. This is why we are plagued by a massive community of vandalism patrol/administrative types and those who treat it as a social network - content creation is a minor facet of Wikipedia because of the massive investment required to finish up an article.
davidw 14y ago
Am I the only one who has memories of 'Raid on Bungeling Bay' triggered by the words 'nearing completion'? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay "Battleship nearing completion!" or something to that effect.

110 points by kevbin 14y ago

pebb 14y ago

Yup, from now on all edits done by outsiders shall be reverted with extreme prejudice.

"Jensen believes that there is a way out of this: "Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. The problem is that it is not mature in a scholarly sense." Wikipedia should devote more resources toward getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences, and maybe even training in the field of historiography, so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard." I think that this is the most interesting part of the article. What if Wikipedia was funded well enough to act as both a traditional encyclopedia with full-time editors/writers and as a place where everyone can add/edit content? We need a modern Andrew Carnegie to step up.

gojomo 14y ago
They're not hurting for funding. The Wikimedia Foundation had a $28 million budget for its current year and is projecting $46 million in revenues for 2012-2013: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Q... Also, hiring editors/writers might crowd out the volunteer motivations, costing the project far more in the loss of donated effort. I believe Wikipedia's challenges are more strategic -- deciding the right things to do and in what proportions -- than financial.
- jessriedel 14y ago
  What makes you think $40 million is a lot? That seems like a very tiny amount to me, especially considering that most (nearly all?) is spent on technical requirements rather than editing.
  - gojomo 14y ago
    I believe $40 million per year is a lot because it could, just based on crude rules-of-thumb, support a strong technical staff of well over 100 people indefinitely. Indeed, according the 2012-2013 Plan document, current Wikimedia Foundation headcount was about 119 at the time of writing and expected to grow to 174 next year. I'm not sure what you mean by 'technical requirements', but if you specifically mean hosting costs (other than staffing) and capital expenditures on equipment, per the plan's page 69 that is forecast to be about $5.3MM of the total $42MM budget -- around 13%. Staff is the major cost -- I believe it is chiefly technical, administrative, legal, and community/chapter outreach roles. I also believe there's a not single person with explicit 'editing' duties on their payroll, as a matter of strategy and doctrine: Wikipedia is edited by unpaid volunteers, the Foundation supports those volunteers. Adding any 'official' and compensated editors would tamper with the formula/culture that's worked so far. In one respect, crossing that threshold by adding just a single paid editor would be 'cheap', but if that steps makes the volunteers feel less appreciated, or start thinking of things in terms of a salary (aka: 'motivation crowding'), the loss in productive contributions could be much larger. Why do you think $40MM-per-year is a "very tiny amount", and how big of an editorial staff do you think they'd need under some new model including professionalized editors?
    - jessriedel 14y ago
      There are 4 million articles on Wikipedia and 50k active editors. 100 people, even working full time, would hardly make a dent. This is true even ignoring the serious impact of tampering with the all-volunteer philosophy. I'd wager you'd need at least 10 times the number of people/money to seriously improve the content of wikipedia by hiring editors.
      - gojomo 14y ago
        The definition of 'active editor' that gives totals in the tens of thousands is anything more than 5 edits a month. That could just be minutes of time, so I doubt you can draw any sensible conclusions about sizing a paid full-time staff from '5+ edit' volunteer counts. FWIW, the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia Britannica suggests that in 2007, Britannica had a credited staff of about 60, with another dozen editorial advisors. (While thousands of other advisors contributed over the decades, they're not required as continuing full-time staff.) So your suggestion that the Foundation would need a "at least 10 times the number of people/money" -- 1000+ full-time paid editors, a $400 million/year+ budget?!? -- for serious improvements seems wildly extravagant. Is it extrapolated from the known size/cost of any real-world professional/academic editorial efforts?
saurik 14y ago
While I agree that that would be interesting, that seems incredibly far-fetched as every one of those categories of scholarship--even including reading JSTOR to a real extent--is what Wikipedia would call "original research". Instead, Wikipedia believes strongly that it should only base itself on secondary sources, and thereby would much prefer to cite a New York Times article over a peer-reviewed journal article (which you are technically allowed to do, but the rules severely discourage it). The problem, therefore, isn't about helping editors get access to these more professional sources, it is making Wikipedia believe that they are even valuable sources in the first place. Until then, it simply will not happen. (To demonstrate the issue, I have pasted below a section of the rules on the usage of primary sources on Wikipedia. The idea of sending someone to a "military-history conference" with this rule still in place, obviously would do no help.) > A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge.
- ErrantX 14y ago
  A journal article would certainly count as a secondary source (unless of course you were talking about the source itself)! And is always preferred over a media report. Now if your argument was that Wikipedia suffers from "recentism", whereby lots of topics are based on media reports and lack more in depth literature to establish historical interest, then we would be in agreement. But the Wikipedia community is well aware of the importance of peer reviewed literature. The Medicine wiki-project, for example, has specific sourcing policies[1] for medical articles that specifies literature reviews as good sources. In fact, Wikipedians are working to get access to professional literature. There is a resource exchange page where we help each other get access to specific journal articles. And one particular editor has been working hard to get free accounts for things like Credo reference etc. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS
  - saurik 14y ago
    I found your response highly surprising, and I see my confusion now: Wikipedia is making (I will even admit correctly) a distinction between actual research (which it very clearly calls a "primary source") and a "review paper" (which it calls a "secondary source"). [references below] You really thereby can't say "a journal article would certainly count as a secondary source", as most journal articles are research, not reviews of research: the page you link to even very directly states "many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources". Of course, I will totally admit that at least some of the articles in JSTOR are going to be review papers, and thereby must retract part of my previous statement as written. In the specific case of JSTOR from those examples, and thereby my entire first aside, there would be at least some marginal benefit, even under Wikipedia's rules. However, I will point out that the underlying argument I was making quite stands: sending people to conferences, teaching them more about historiography, and getting them access to more sources of research, are all ways to make people better at performing what Wikipedia continues to call "original research" (and clearly wants no part in). Put differently, the goal of these activities is to make people better at interpreting primary information, not copy/pasting secondary information. Indeed, Wikipedia makes it quite clear that primary sources may only be used in cases where people with no specialized knowledge can plainly understand the information (which, honestly, to me seems unlikely to be plausible: journal articles are not written for the layperson), and even goes so far as to be quite explicit that secondary sources must be used to make the primary sources trustworthy. <edit> It does, however, at least seem like the medical parts of Wikipedia do not believe that a newspaper article is even a valid secondary source, so good on them. ;P I tried to find a similar document for the field of History, and they do seem to be working on a similar document (still marked "essay") and it also looks like it could be pretty good (as in, "no journalism"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(history) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_... (I imagine an interesting benefit with Wikipedia/History is that you don't run experiments, so of course much of the material you find is technically a secondary source; you thereby don't actually find the usual discussion of "primary" vs. "secondary" in this essay: "primary" gets defined as the actual source documents, as arguably history is all opinion ;P.) Even reading the history-specific documentation, however, does not seem to indicate that you could both follow the rules and get much value out of having a strong background in history and history research: I maintain that attending conferences and taking courses in the field is seemingly not something that Wikipedia would look favorably on. This quote, however, was quite uplifting: "Historical articles on wikipedia should be the result of scholarly works.". </edit> (additional quotes from Wikipedia backing up my statements:) "...similarly, a scientific paper documenting a new experiment is a primary source on the outcome of that experiment." "A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the source but without further, specialized knowledge." "For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research "A primary source in medicine is one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. ... Many, but not all, papers published in medical journals are primary sources for facts about the research and discoveries made." "A secondary source is... Examples include literature reviews or systematic reviews found in medical journals, specialist academic or professional books, and medical guidelines or position statements published by major health organizations." "All Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources. Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse." (emphasis copied from original) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MEDRS

kiba 14y ago

Wikipedia may be getting more mature, but I think barrier to entry is also cause for lack of outsider edits. Also, being a wikipedian isn't like being a professor. You don't get much outsider respect. Due to their policies, you also see "forks" or more specialist wiki such as comixpedia, or libregamewiki(A wiki that I actually found) for subjects like webcomics or open source video games that keeps getting deleted. Gwern, who is a veteran editor, got so tired of the wikipolitics(Even though he's really good at wikilawyering to protect his contribution when needed), so he started http://gwern.net http://gwern.net He benefit from the reputation and traffic that would otherwise goes to wikipedia.

DanBC 14y ago

There is less for people to do, but there is still plenty of "wiki gnoming" to do. This is exactly the kind of thing that could attract some new editors. The minor fixing of small details should be an excellent use of crowdsourcing. I seem to have lousy experiences at Wikipedia whenever I try to edit anything, even if it's a minor edit. Last time I tried: My IP had already been blocked because it had been used by a vandal. I thought that was a bit odd (blocking a dynamic IP range), so I made an unblock request. The template is confusing, and doesn't tell users to include the reason for being blocked as well as the reason for being unblocked, so I got an error message. While I was fixing the mistake I made my unblock request was declined. (This happened within a few minutes of me posting it.) Thus, I fixed the mistake I made, saved the page, (working past the edit conflict) and find that my request has been declined. I read why it's declined. I make another unblock request. I get a friendly, polite, sympathetic reply. But it's not actually much use - it doesn't help new users to understand WP. And the block remains. I try to reply. Because the talk page includes links to templates WP thinks I'm entering external links and asks me to enter capchas. I enter the capchas and reply. I say that blocking a troll by blocking some dynamic IPs is odd - they just log off the Internet and log back on to get a new IP address, which may be outside the blocked range. Determined trolls (the kind who attract IP range blocks) will find this trivial to do. Newbies, the kind of people who are being targeted for this retention programme, may not find this quite so easy. What kind of person will willingly jump through these hoops? People who are great at grammar and copy editing? Or cranks who want to put homeopathy in every article, or who want to mention Armenian genocide in many articles?

ErrantX 14y ago
Putting my admin hat on for a moment... rangeblocks are fairly rare for the reason you cite. But when used they are deployed in situations where a vandal has been noted to be using IP addresses from the same range. Although you seem skeptical it often works! As these are not the smartest cookies in the crumble. Unfortunately, the only way to fix your problem is to create an account on another IP address and log in (or alternately ask someone to create it for you, a service Wikipedia can provide). Because the talk page includes links to templates WP thinks I'm entering external links and asks me to enter capchas. That's rather odd, I've never come across that before! I thought internal Wikipedia links were excluded from that filter. I will raise that when I find someone who is responsible for such things :)

binxbolling 14y ago

I think this article makes a great point, but there might be other, more unpopular reasons fewer people are editing. For example, in my opinion, the barrier to entry has gotten much higher. Fanatical editors revert aggressively, red tape holds up even great changes, and the rites & mores of the Wikipedia community become ever more convoluted & impenetrable to outsiders. It's a myth, albeit popular, that one can just read an article and quickly edit a mistake (whether major or minor). Perhaps this facade is crumbling a bit, and more people are realizing that "contributing" is not actually all that easy. I actually love Wikipedia, so don't take this as petty sniping, it's just what I've experienced.

jarek 14y ago
I'm actually rather curious as I see this argument repeatedly and it doesn't match my personal experience (I've corrected plenty of mistakes both with a user account and as an IP and I don't think I've been reverted once). Do you mind sharing what kind of articles or mistakes have you had this experience with?
- JustSomeAnon 14y ago
  Unfortunately I have to comment as anonymous. My experience totally matches binxbolling. As a new contributor my entries were either blanked by trolls (and left for dead for weeks without end) or have been deleted by over-zealous editors whose only reference seems to be their own opinion and the spouting of endless WP this and WP that rules. I was appalled by the bullying and mob mentality I found in there.
  - jarek 14y ago
    Can you comment on the articles or fields you were editing in, or would that jeopardize your anonymity?
    - JustSomeAnon 14y ago
      The field is, broadly speaking, Computer Science.

Jabbles 14y ago

I suspect many articles are approaching a local maximum, and it will be very difficult to do a significant reorganisation of an article in order to reach "the global maximum". It is possible to have two very dissimilar, balanced and detailed articles on the same subject. Wikipedia makes an arbitrary choice and this is difficult to undo. I can't think of any articles that I can point to and say "this was the wrong choice", but it's certainly something to think about.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

This is the other end of extrapolation. There is a lot of stuff in the world, but its finite stuff. And information, like lots of things, has its own inverse power law. When building a search engine folks say "Gee you don't have nearly the hardware that Google does, how can you ever hope to compete?" and the answer is the inverse power law. Looking at queries that are served out of the index vs being served off the long tail it drops off dramatically. How many companies are there in the world? 100M? Give them each a a megabyte for a pictures and their information, that is 100 TB of data, 50 disk drives, 150 if they are triply replicated. And what are the net new businesses in a given year? 2% annual growth rate for the worlds economies over the long scale, that's maybe 2M new businesses a year, or 2TB of data, or 1 (or 3) new disks a year? A billion people on Facebook? 1/7th of the world population? What a megabyte for each of them is PB of data? The Backblaze guys can put a petabyte of storage in a single cabinet. For a long time the Internet was playing 'catch-up' now it is asymptotically approaching 'caught up.' Different problems and different opportunities for folks now who are basing their endeavors on the net.

tisme 14y ago
Storing data and using data are two completely different things. You can store all of FB and lots of other companies in a fairly small volume these days. But as soon as you want to access that data to process or update it the game changes rapidly. Suddenly that one cabinet explodes into a datacenter full of cabinets, or even several data centers. Storage is a solved problem for just about any amount that an ordinary company might need. Getting that data delivered to a CPU at speeds that are still usable in a practical sense if you want to say something about all of that data is a completely unrelated problem which changes amount of technology and funds required from the easy level to the extremely hard and beyond level.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  "Storing data and using data are two completely different things." That is so true. When people ask "How hard can it really be to write a search engine these days?" I have been known to ask them to speculate on how they might go about it and then point out the challenges of knowing what data you have vs what data is asked for. Search is particularly interesting because the more time you spend the better your answer can be, and its always challenging to 'draw the line' between fast and relevant. But that is also what makes it so fun :-)

mattparlane 14y ago

I can't help but think that presenting this graph on a log scale isn't the best way to do it. I mean, if the number went up linearly year-over-year, wouldn't it look like that on a log scale anyway?

rm999 14y ago
Yeah the log scale hides his point. A log scale is useful when you want to highlight the rate of growth, e.g. for something that grows exponentially. But I'd expect Wikipedia to grow linearly, not exponentially - on a log scale it is hard to distinguish anything that is subexponential (which includes linear growth).
- wavesounds 14y ago
  Totally agree with you guys and came here to post the same thing, he may make some good points but this seems somewhat deceptive to the average American reader.

AustinGibbons 14y ago

I did some research on the declining editor rates for a course project. Without recreating our entire paper, I want to make this important point. Wikipedia is not (necessarily) nearing the completion of all knowledge, but rather what is feasible for its editors to contribute - indeed, there is much work to be done on "the history of sanitation and sewage in ancient Carthage" and "topic sensitive page rank", which at least has a page, let alone "trust sensitive page rank" which seems to be missing one. Our core piece of evidence was observing the _same_ trends across different languages (in both # edits and # page views). If you are interested, check out our final report here - it has its flaws, but I believe the three pieces of evidence we explored hold some merit in their own right. (http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs341/reports/09-GibbonsVetranoBiancaniCS341.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs341/reports/09-GibbonsVetran...)

robryan 14y ago
The more specific a topic is the few people that could actually write an accessible article on it. Paying specialized writers or even paying/ asking for donations of other works they have done could fill out these areas.

aprescott 14y ago

It seems a little misleading to have a graph with log-y values suggesting that growth has stopped because it's reaching some kind of peak. log(number of articles) looking like log(t) means it might still be growing pretty linearly.

yk 14y ago
Wikimedia has the numbers (some scrolling required): http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm It is recently slightly lower than linear, but by no means looking as bad as the article suggests. In fact ( reading from the plot in the Atlantic) it took Wikipedia five years (2001 - 2005) to reach 1M articles, two years for the second and roughly 1 and a half years each for the next two million. From the more detailed statistics at Wikimedia, new articles are now added at roughly 1000 a day, down from 1600 a day in 2006. [added]I just found the linear plot of en.wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaArt.PNG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaArt.PNG

tokenadult 14y ago

I have been a Wikipedian with a registered account for a few years, and I have reflected on these issues. The article asks, "But what if the decline in engagement has little to do with culture or the design of the site? What if, instead, it's that there's just less for new Wikipedians to do?" It's the culture. There is plenty to do. Indeed, every time I read a Wikipedia article, I find something in every article that turns on my inner editor mode. But my log-in information is only stored on my office computer, not on my wife's computer or my children's computer, so when I am reading along in Wikipedia with my family and I see a mistake, I usually grumble rather than Wikignome and fix the problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT I do Wikignome regularly when I'm reading Wikipedia for one reason or another on my office computer. That gives me solely the satisfaction of fixing a problem, and no satisfaction at all of supposing that that builds up my reputation among other Wikipedians or that the fixes will even persist in further updates to the pages. Quite apart from the articles that have jump-right-out-at-you errors, convenient to fix for anyone who knows grammar, spelling, or basic facts of the world, there are many, many articles that are readily apparent examples of factual mistakes from more subtle causes such as edit wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars that often persist even after action of the Arbitration Committee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence#Case_amendments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/... A user who is knowledgeable about SOURCES and who has professional editing experience and academic editing experience (as I have) is hardly likely to find Wikipedia welcoming. Wikipedia's culture was set in the days when it was the "encyclopedia anyone can edit," that is, the encyclopedia where anyone can make something up, and then as Wikipedia grew an administrative apparatus, administering was used more for turf battles and point-of-view pushing than it was used for editing to encyclopedic quality or fact-checking. I think a philanthropist with a budget the size of Wikipedia's budget over a few years (a large amount of money, but pocket change for a billionaire) could build a Wikipedia competitor that could do quite a lot better. Maybe no one will ever think that that is worthwhile. For sure, many people who are well aware of how incomplete Wikipedia still is regret the off-putting culture of Wikipedia, and will be dissuaded from spending much volunteer time to improve it. AFTER EDIT: A grandchild comment noted that "One perk of competing with Wikipedia is that you can use Wikipedia articles as a base." And indeed, if a philanthropist's goal for a competing project were improving the quality of online encyclopedias, licensing the competing project's articles in the same way Wikipedia's are licensed would mean that good articles could work their way back into Wikipedia--a very disruptive strategy indeed for improving content.

nevinera 14y ago

That first chart really bugs me. You're showing us an apparent asymptote, a totally reasonable thing to do to prove your point.. but then I notice it's a log plot. That isn't showing us anything, number of seconds would make the same shape of plot.

rhplus 14y ago
Yes, the log version is a little misleading, but the linear version shows that growth is slowing down too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaGom.PNG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnwikipediaGom.PNG
- benmanns 14y ago
  Note the light green line under the blue growth rate line. The Size of Wikipedia article[0] says that this was the modeled growth rate as of 2010, which it only held to until 2011. This shows the danger of modeling existing data and extrapolating to the future. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
- Jabbles 14y ago
  It's still measuring number of articles, not, say, total word count. Do you have a graph of that too?

benmanns 14y ago

Here is the data on a linear, rather than logarithmic scale[0]. Y axis is number of articles and X axis is "years since 2001". I copied the data as best I could from the chart given by the author of this article. Wikipedia has a page itself about its own size which shows a similar linear growth rate[1]. [0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%7B20%2C15000%2C100000%2C200000%2C500000%2C900000%2C1500000%2C2000000%2C2500000%2C3000000%2C3500000%2C4000000%7D http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%7B20%2C15000%2C10... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

ygra 14y ago
That's what I wondered too. It's easy to "show" a certain "saturation" when using a log scale and that only means it doesn't grow relative to its current size.

britta 14y ago

I found this response interesting from a person who works for Wikimedia (http://branch.com/b/surmounting-the-insurmountable-wikipedia-is-nearing-comple#was-3CT6Ooc http://branch.com/b/surmounting-the-insurmountable-wikipedia...): ...at the Foundation, we tend to call this "the Gold Rush theory" - the idea that Wikipedia's gold rush days are over. My personal view is that the problem isn't that everything is done, but that it's harder for willing new editors to find things to do. (For existing power contributors, they have no hard time finding topics, which is why overall article growth remains steady). The answer here is that the Foundation needs to work on ways to surface interesting and useful stuff to write about. Wikipedia can't afford to hope people stumble on these topics. He works on making Wikipedia's UI better in ways that encourage useful contributions, especially for new editors - see his blog posts at http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/09/24/giving-new-wikipedians-feedback-post-edit/ http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/09/24/giving-new-wikipedians-... and http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/10/24/fix-this-broken-workflow/ http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/10/24/fix-this-broken-workflo... for examples.

treelovinhippie 14y ago

Simple: remove the "must be noteworthy" rule. I remember many years ago I was heavily into the Diggnation podcast and a few others coming out of Revision3 and Leo Laporte's network. Anyway, somehow I did a search on Wikipedia and found that these podcasts were not on there at all (despite having many viewers). So long story short, I created pages for these podcasts, filled them with content, and a few days later they were removed by mods for not being "noteworthy" enough. I attempted to plead with them that these podcasts were in fact the most popular tech podcasts on the web, but the mods didn't care. I haven't edited Wikipedia since.

britta 14y ago
The notability guideline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability) is closely related to the verifiability policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) — from Wikipedia's perspective, if a subject has not been covered by multiple reasonably reliable secondary sources (in other words, if it isn't "notable"), we can't write a reasonably verifiable article about that subject. Every article has to include secondary sources as references, so that editors and readers can quickly fact-check. There are plenty of thoughtful discussions elsewhere about why these notability and verifiability rules are flawed, but I wanted to point out this connection because it shows that the notability guideline is possibly not as arbitrary as it seems at first. I wish I could figure out a way to help Wikipedia explain this better. Maybe "notability" is the wrong name for this guideline.
- derleth 14y ago
  It isn't about explaining it better, it's about the fact people have a need to feel special and some people peg that specialness to having an article about Their Thing on Wikipedia. Patiently explaining to them that, without external verification, there's no way to prevent them from simply making shit up is not going to reduce their sense of indignation when their unverifiable stuff is deleted.
  - saurik 14y ago

gbog 14y ago

In the first comment on the linked page, a guy says rightly that the number of missing articles is still enormous, but in parts of knowledge that are further from that of the median Wikipedian. In a comment here someone says the foundation has the goal to find and purpose interesting things to write on Wikipedia to new editors. The sum of these the interesting problem of crossing culture barriers. How to get the regular geek interested in the many kings and warlords of China's Warring States?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

_feda_ 14y ago

It's always seemed weird to me that wikipedia has a problem with scaring away potential editors. I for one love editing wikipedia and never found it in anyway intimidating when I started editing in my teens, although I'm probably part of a sizable edge case of humanity that enjoys the relative complexity of the process of editing itself, markdown et al. I don't find the culture to be off-putting either, because the culture gels nicely with my personality traits and those of any person who would enjoy contributing to an encyclopedia. Wikipedia has a learning curve sure, but like learning to use a shell instead of a gui, the pain is certainly ultimately worth the gain. The barriers to entry are nowhere near as high as those I imagine serious, academic editors face in their careers.

mjn 14y ago
As an academic I generally agree. I have mostly good experiences editing Wikipedia, with a handful of bad ones. By and large it's much more reasonable than some of the things I've run into in academia. My main wish on Wikipedia is that I got more feedback of any kind. Often I will write an article and never hear from anyone about it. Maybe I pick too obscure topics, but it'd be nice to hear some constructive feedback more often.
- _feda_ 14y ago
  It's regrettable you're not getting the feedback you should be getting, as this is something that will really help you stick to it. On the other hand, the very reason you aren't getting feedback is a good one: you're working on obscure articles, which is precisely the area wikipedia needs work done on in order to become the fully-fledged, echt encyclopedia (as I'm sure you know in the case of proprietary equivalents professionals are hired to fulfill the role you are fulfilling). Anyway, consider yourself a lonely pioneer ;)

anuraj 14y ago

Very myopic view restricted only to English language. There are more than a 100 major languages in the world. So now Wikipedia has to concentrate on other languages.

pixelcort 14y ago

One big opportunity is the differences in content between different language editions of Wikipedia. In many cases the content for an article varies widely between languages, and I still run across articles that are not yet available in English yet.

chris_wot 14y ago

I think the best metric I'd use to see if Wikipedia is "complete" us to look at the major articles and see what proportion have [citation needed] on them. Of course, I'm a little biased as that tag is the one I created so its really my baby. But I designed it for obsolescence, so I suppose I can't complain :-)

Xcelerate 14y ago
Whoa, hold on... you were the guy that invented that tag?!
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Yup. You can find my greatest hits under ta bu shi da yu.

ErrantX 14y ago

As a highly active Wikipedian this article is rather wrong: Wikipedia is far from complete. It has a lot of articles, covering a huge range of topics (and in that sense is perhaps nearing "completion"). But those articles are almost always far from complete. As someone who has written multiple peer reviewed "Good Articles" and one "A-Class" (a step below "Featured Article") - as well as numerous other fairly well rounded articles - the act of taking material from a stub or short overview to a complete encyclopaedic article is MASSIVE. I wrote an article about Dudley Clarke; a British chap who was responsible for military deception planning in North Africa during the Second World War. That took nearly 3 months of research and writing, and cost me around £50 in text books. "but the bulk of the work, the actual writing and structuring of the articles, has already been done" No. The easy thing of slapping up and article with some information in it has been done. The bulk of the work is completing each article. This article does actually nail why Wikipedia editorship is declining: "With the exciting work over, editors are losing interest" They just get the reason wrong. This is why we are plagued by a massive community of vandalism patrol/administrative types and those who treat it as a social network - content creation is a minor facet of Wikipedia because of the massive investment required to finish up an article.

davidw 14y ago

Am I the only one who has memories of 'Raid on Bungeling Bay' triggered by the words 'nearing completion'? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay "Battleship nearing completion!" or something to that effect.