6 ms·

Doomed: Why Wikipedia [may] fail

12 points by boredguy8 18y ago

tptacek 18y ago
The thesis of this article is built around an anecdote and two assertions. The anecdote is that someone inserted a "Wilhelm" into finance minister Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg's name. I think K. T. M. N. J. J. "Phil" F. J. S. F. von und zu Guttenberg has a sense of humor about it by now. Similar (though less amusing) anecdotes have been breathlessly reported for years now. The assertions: first, that the greater part of all edits made by newcomers to the site are reverted by a new breed of xenophobic editors. This is an extraordinary claim. It's easy to disprove; go pull up Special:NewPages and watch dozens of new users create superfluous new pages every hour, most of which won't get reverted. The second assertion, that attrition is taking a toll on WP administrators, is even more laughable. Go pull up Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship. Status-obsessed WP dorks spend weeks and months doing menial work (like patrolling new pages) to build a case for adminship. If anything, WP's problem is that it has too many of them.
- zby 18y ago
  You are technically right, but if it takes to be a "tatus-obsessed WP dork" to become a WP administrator - then it is a problem in itself, isn't it?
  - time_management 18y ago
    Most WP administrators are jackasses, idiots, and blowhards, both online and in real life. Their idiocy was one of the reasons I quit the project. I think that most serious Wikipedia vandalism (not page-blanking, but the kind of shit that is difficult to spot and refute, such as transposing digits in population figures) is done to spite those assclowns.
    - THEFIEND 18y ago
      I have just come off of three absolutely exasperating days trying to comply with these idiots' ever changing policy requirements. Each one has an opinion, albeit as or more negative than the previous clown, and if you go left, someone else tells you to go right. They should seriously reconsider putting 19 year olds (or frustrated housewives) who have serious chips on their shoulders in positions of anything resembling authority or power. I can tell you, from an end-user standpoint, I have lost ALL respect for the validity of anything at all on Wikipedia. It all depends what mood the child on the help desk or admin pool was in when they decided to wreak havoc on someone's hard, valid and substantiated-beyond-ANY-reasonable-doubt work. I say, they suck. And I am sure I learned something from this utterly harrowing experience, I just haven't figured out what, yet.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand WP adminship means so little that it's effectively flypaper for the drama club. Admins are essentially powerless against solid contributions, and the cliques and internal strife function as a fine system of checks and balances against overt abuse. The worst you can say about it is that the admin culture repulses newcomers. But the WP model doesn't really demand long-term commitment from contributors in order to work. WP will improve steadily based on casual contributions. And so adminship is really more of an inefficiency than a serious problem.
    - gruseom 18y ago
      flypaper for the drama club Did you just make that up? I like it.
      - tapostrophemo 18y ago
        Even better - fftdc.com is still available. Quick! Register it!
    - zby 18y ago
      I don't know if it is so harmless drama - for example see this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/wikipedia_and_naked_shorting/print.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/wikipedia_and_naked_... it is certainly overdramatized on itself by the journalist - but even if there is just a trace of truth - then it seems quite serious.
      - tptacek 18y ago
        Exactly how is any of this quite serious? The only serious threat to the encyclopedia would be a force that would prevent strong writing on relevant subjects from being incorporated into it, or a force that persistantly corrupted that strong writing once it was incorporated. This link is just drama. What lazy or corrupt journalists choose to do with the content in the encyclopedia is a problem outside the purview of the encyclopedia.
- time_management 18y ago
  Wikipedia's not perfect, but it's as solid as print encyclopedias, which are made by humans and subject to error-- not tomes of platonic truth. Obviously, the danger of untruths virally propagating is there and should be taken seriously. One would hope that few people are using Wikipedia for scholarly citations. Also, if you encounter mention of a college tradition on Wikipedia, you should be extremely suspicious, because most of those are apocryphal. That was one of my vandalisms that tended to "make it", since the existence of a college tradition is nearly impossible to refute. Some of them are still extant, despite being made in 2003-04.
jacquesm 18y ago
Wikipedia is the content stored in wikipedia and an editorial process. The first is here to stay, with caveats to its quality, the second can - and probably will - be fixed. This article is grandly exaggerating the problems wikipedia is facing, I think we should be surprised how well it worked and fix the few problems that are there rather than to start predicting its demise. That content will certainly outlast everybody who claims it will die soon.
- Radix 18y ago
  And, now that wikipedia has reached a large enough size it can plan out a change to the editorial process without crippling itself. There are some academics who hate wp, but they might be willing to fix a few problem articles out of frustration if they were given special powers.
- mynameishere 18y ago
  All they need is to have experts occasionally read articles, and mark them as "verified". Then, every page will display the latest edit, just as now, but have a "last verified" button that will go to the historical page, previously mentioned.
  - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    That's a great idea, though I think "All they need..." trivializes the scope of the implementation a bit :)
scott_s 18y ago
'"I think Wikipedia is great," he said when wrapping up his talk, and he wants to see it succeed, but he has trouble seeing how that can happen as the project continues to grow.' If someone had explained Wikipedia to you ten years ago, would you have thought it had a chance? I'll be honest, I doubt I would have. I think of the success of Wikipedia as similar to evolution. We're just not good at grasping the scale at which either work, so our intuition betrays us.
- jrockway 18y ago
  > would you have thought it had a chance? Sure... we had open source projects in 1999, too. Ten years is not that long ago.
  - scott_s 18y ago
    Wikipedia follows a different model than all open source software projects. Even if there are a large number of contributors in an open source software project, there are still a disproportionately small number of arbiters. Any random person can submit a patch, but there's no guarantee it will get in. The larger the project, the less likely it will. Wikipedia is everyone can be a contributor, and everyone can be an arbiter.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      > Wikipedia is everyone can be a contributor, and everyone can be an arbiter. Open source is no different. Click the "fork" button on Github, and the project is now yours. > Even if there are a large number of contributors in an open source software project, there are still a disproportionately small number of arbiters. Any random person can submit a patch, but there's no guarantee it will get in. > The larger the project, the less likely it will. This is not really true. Send a patch to any open source project, and it will probably get in if it needs to be in. (Sure patches get rejected -- not everything needs to be "core", the code might not work, it might not be useful, etc., etc. But if you send a useful patch, it will get in regardless of how big or how small the project is.) Anyway, Wikipedia really has the same model, it just looks different. You can edit anything, and the edit sticks immediately. But eventually an arbiter will review your edit, and if it's bad, it will be reverted. (There are "WikiProjects" dedicated to making sure every edit in their project gets looked at.) Bad edits rarely slip by completely undetected, and if they do, that's life. Bad patches are committed to open source projects. Paper books have errata. I am not sure why Wikipedia needs to be held to some higher standard than any other form of media ever.
Danmatt 18y ago
Wikipedia never claimed to be 100 per cent accurate and is rarely quoted as a source by an authority wanting to prove a 'fact' - but that doesn't mean it isn't brilliant or successful. It is a useful website for many reasons, all of which come together to prove its worthiness, and it's success.
Tangurena 18y ago
I think the real underlying presumption by the article's author is that he wants someone to be responsible. Similar wikis where some editor is ultimately responsible for approving/disapproving content have many orders of magnitude less pages, less content, and less edits.
biohacker42 18y ago
Many people (me!) don't trust Wikipedia, never have, and don't care who gets screwed by erroneous Wikipedia information. For all others, Wikipedia is convenient and it will have to go horribly wrong before it's bad enough for most people to stop using it. The real thread to Wikipedia is a better free online encyclopedia.
- bbgm 18y ago
  The real threat to Wikipedia is over reaction from the powers that be. It's very successful, quite useful, and hopefully isn't going anywhere. Is it perfect, no, but I haven't seen anything at this scale and ambition being 100% perfect.
njharman 18y ago
I'm soooooooo fucking tired or hearing this bullshit argument. Wikipedia will fail cause it's open. And the false dichotomy between quality and openness.

12 points by boredguy8 18y ago

The thesis of this article is built around an anecdote and two assertions. The anecdote is that someone inserted a "Wilhelm" into finance minister Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg's name. I think K. T. M. N. J. J. "Phil" F. J. S. F. von und zu Guttenberg has a sense of humor about it by now. Similar (though less amusing) anecdotes have been breathlessly reported for years now. The assertions: first, that the greater part of all edits made by newcomers to the site are reverted by a new breed of xenophobic editors. This is an extraordinary claim. It's easy to disprove; go pull up Special:NewPages and watch dozens of new users create superfluous new pages every hour, most of which won't get reverted. The second assertion, that attrition is taking a toll on WP administrators, is even more laughable. Go pull up Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship. Status-obsessed WP dorks spend weeks and months doing menial work (like patrolling new pages) to build a case for adminship. If anything, WP's problem is that it has too many of them.

zby 18y ago
You are technically right, but if it takes to be a "tatus-obsessed WP dork" to become a WP administrator - then it is a problem in itself, isn't it?
- time_management 18y ago
  Most WP administrators are jackasses, idiots, and blowhards, both online and in real life. Their idiocy was one of the reasons I quit the project. I think that most serious Wikipedia vandalism (not page-blanking, but the kind of shit that is difficult to spot and refute, such as transposing digits in population figures) is done to spite those assclowns.
  - THEFIEND 18y ago
    I have just come off of three absolutely exasperating days trying to comply with these idiots' ever changing policy requirements. Each one has an opinion, albeit as or more negative than the previous clown, and if you go left, someone else tells you to go right. They should seriously reconsider putting 19 year olds (or frustrated housewives) who have serious chips on their shoulders in positions of anything resembling authority or power. I can tell you, from an end-user standpoint, I have lost ALL respect for the validity of anything at all on Wikipedia. It all depends what mood the child on the help desk or admin pool was in when they decided to wreak havoc on someone's hard, valid and substantiated-beyond-ANY-reasonable-doubt work. I say, they suck. And I am sure I learned something from this utterly harrowing experience, I just haven't figured out what, yet.
- tptacek 18y ago
  On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand WP adminship means so little that it's effectively flypaper for the drama club. Admins are essentially powerless against solid contributions, and the cliques and internal strife function as a fine system of checks and balances against overt abuse. The worst you can say about it is that the admin culture repulses newcomers. But the WP model doesn't really demand long-term commitment from contributors in order to work. WP will improve steadily based on casual contributions. And so adminship is really more of an inefficiency than a serious problem.
  - gruseom 18y ago
    flypaper for the drama club Did you just make that up? I like it.
    - tapostrophemo 18y ago
      Even better - fftdc.com is still available. Quick! Register it!
  - zby 18y ago
    I don't know if it is so harmless drama - for example see this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/wikipedia_and_naked_shorting/print.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/01/wikipedia_and_naked_... it is certainly overdramatized on itself by the journalist - but even if there is just a trace of truth - then it seems quite serious.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      Exactly how is any of this quite serious? The only serious threat to the encyclopedia would be a force that would prevent strong writing on relevant subjects from being incorporated into it, or a force that persistantly corrupted that strong writing once it was incorporated. This link is just drama. What lazy or corrupt journalists choose to do with the content in the encyclopedia is a problem outside the purview of the encyclopedia.
time_management 18y ago
Wikipedia's not perfect, but it's as solid as print encyclopedias, which are made by humans and subject to error-- not tomes of platonic truth. Obviously, the danger of untruths virally propagating is there and should be taken seriously. One would hope that few people are using Wikipedia for scholarly citations. Also, if you encounter mention of a college tradition on Wikipedia, you should be extremely suspicious, because most of those are apocryphal. That was one of my vandalisms that tended to "make it", since the existence of a college tradition is nearly impossible to refute. Some of them are still extant, despite being made in 2003-04.

jacquesm 18y ago

Wikipedia is the content stored in wikipedia and an editorial process. The first is here to stay, with caveats to its quality, the second can - and probably will - be fixed. This article is grandly exaggerating the problems wikipedia is facing, I think we should be surprised how well it worked and fix the few problems that are there rather than to start predicting its demise. That content will certainly outlast everybody who claims it will die soon.

Radix 18y ago
And, now that wikipedia has reached a large enough size it can plan out a change to the editorial process without crippling itself. There are some academics who hate wp, but they might be willing to fix a few problem articles out of frustration if they were given special powers.
mynameishere 18y ago
All they need is to have experts occasionally read articles, and mark them as "verified". Then, every page will display the latest edit, just as now, but have a "last verified" button that will go to the historical page, previously mentioned.
- ryanwaggoner 18y ago
  That's a great idea, though I think "All they need..." trivializes the scope of the implementation a bit :)

scott_s 18y ago

'"I think Wikipedia is great," he said when wrapping up his talk, and he wants to see it succeed, but he has trouble seeing how that can happen as the project continues to grow.' If someone had explained Wikipedia to you ten years ago, would you have thought it had a chance? I'll be honest, I doubt I would have. I think of the success of Wikipedia as similar to evolution. We're just not good at grasping the scale at which either work, so our intuition betrays us.

jrockway 18y ago
> would you have thought it had a chance? Sure... we had open source projects in 1999, too. Ten years is not that long ago.
- scott_s 18y ago
  Wikipedia follows a different model than all open source software projects. Even if there are a large number of contributors in an open source software project, there are still a disproportionately small number of arbiters. Any random person can submit a patch, but there's no guarantee it will get in. The larger the project, the less likely it will. Wikipedia is everyone can be a contributor, and everyone can be an arbiter.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    > Wikipedia is everyone can be a contributor, and everyone can be an arbiter. Open source is no different. Click the "fork" button on Github, and the project is now yours. > Even if there are a large number of contributors in an open source software project, there are still a disproportionately small number of arbiters. Any random person can submit a patch, but there's no guarantee it will get in. > The larger the project, the less likely it will. This is not really true. Send a patch to any open source project, and it will probably get in if it needs to be in. (Sure patches get rejected -- not everything needs to be "core", the code might not work, it might not be useful, etc., etc. But if you send a useful patch, it will get in regardless of how big or how small the project is.) Anyway, Wikipedia really has the same model, it just looks different. You can edit anything, and the edit sticks immediately. But eventually an arbiter will review your edit, and if it's bad, it will be reverted. (There are "WikiProjects" dedicated to making sure every edit in their project gets looked at.) Bad edits rarely slip by completely undetected, and if they do, that's life. Bad patches are committed to open source projects. Paper books have errata. I am not sure why Wikipedia needs to be held to some higher standard than any other form of media ever.

Danmatt 18y ago

Wikipedia never claimed to be 100 per cent accurate and is rarely quoted as a source by an authority wanting to prove a 'fact' - but that doesn't mean it isn't brilliant or successful. It is a useful website for many reasons, all of which come together to prove its worthiness, and it's success.

Tangurena 18y ago

I think the real underlying presumption by the article's author is that he wants someone to be responsible. Similar wikis where some editor is ultimately responsible for approving/disapproving content have many orders of magnitude less pages, less content, and less edits.

biohacker42 18y ago

Many people (me!) don't trust Wikipedia, never have, and don't care who gets screwed by erroneous Wikipedia information. For all others, Wikipedia is convenient and it will have to go horribly wrong before it's bad enough for most people to stop using it. The real thread to Wikipedia is a better free online encyclopedia.

bbgm 18y ago
The real threat to Wikipedia is over reaction from the powers that be. It's very successful, quite useful, and hopefully isn't going anywhere. Is it perfect, no, but I haven't seen anything at this scale and ambition being 100% perfect.

njharman 18y ago

I'm soooooooo fucking tired or hearing this bullshit argument. Wikipedia will fail cause it's open. And the false dichotomy between quality and openness.