4 ms·

>> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?

b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
[flagged]
Wikipedianon 5mo ago
That's the English Wikipedia community in a nutshell. The WMF knows it's an issue but can't do anything about it. There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. A shrinking pie forces cliquey political slugfests. It happened to IBM and can happen to StackOverflow/Wikipedia. I hate it now. There's so much doxxing and meanness. There's also sizable contingents of propagandists in anything controversial. Most famously, pro-Israel Icewhiz, who creates hundreds of sockpuppets and harassed people IRL, but now more recently r/Palestine's sock farm. There's similar farms in trans issues or India-Pakistan. The saddest part is that Wikipedia's original purpose was unbiased copyleft-style free knowledge. LLMs have the potential to democratize access to knowledge more than any other technology. But they are an existential threat to editors that previously did this deep research manually and served as gatekeepers with the attendant social status. As a result, there's a vitriolic hatred of any attempt to integrate LLMs into Wikipedia. Even if it's open-weights stuff running locally. So, Google will continue to eat Wikipedia alive with AI summaries. I hope Wikipedia is replaced by something AI-native run by a non-profit that has the interests of readers at heart.
- thaumasiotes 5mo ago
  > There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it. A lot of people do ask them not to do it.
  - Wikipedianon 5mo ago
    > What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it. Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them. It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much easier than starting a blog.
    - thaumasiotes 5mo ago
      Ok, but what are you saying in "there isn't enough work anymore"? What is "work"? How much is there? Enough for what?
      - Wikipedianon 5mo ago
        Most articles on notable AND interesting subjects have already been written and are of a high quality. "notability" means there are peer-reviewed/editorially controlled articles on the topic. So, if I wanted to write an article on Gas Town, I couldn't. It got a lot of technical blogs and Arxiv preprints written about it by experts, but it won't be notable.
        20after4 5mo ago
        This gets at one of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia, IMO. I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.
        ryan_lane 5mo ago
        The alternative is that the Daily Stormer is usable as a source. There has to be some mechanism of determining what should and shouldn't be usable as a source.
        5mo ago
- briandear 5mo ago
  It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see.
  - 20after4 5mo ago
    Given that editors are pseudo-anonymous, there are some limitations on enforcing this. Sure you could term-limit a given account but the same person could have several accounts. I know sock puppets are not technically allowed but it's not entirely possible to prevent without sacrificing the anonymity of account ownership.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
I've made a significant number of edits to Wikipedia over the years. I probably have an account but generally don't even bother to sign in because I don't care about credit or a dynamic IP that will change in a week being recorded in the edit history, which they've apparently stopped doing anyway. My most recent edit (a minor addition to a technical article) was instantaneously reverted as "suspected vandalism" by a bot, an unambiguous false positive. The bot seemed to think I was going to follow its instructions if I thought it was a false positive instead of finding that irritating and concluding that I should stop making edits if having them actually go through requires me to fight with a broken AI.
- pneumonic 5mo ago
  You don't have to report the false positive, the link to the place to do it is just included in explanatory edit summary so that you can conveniently use it if you want to. (The reported ones eventually are reviewed by multiple other editors, and then, true or false, are included in the training data to improve the accuracy). The retrained bot is measured against the human-verified vandalism and non-vandalism data so that the bot is expected to generate 1% false positives of all the reverts it does. By the way, the bot will only revert an edit once, so you can undo that revert and the edit goes back in (at least until a human editor decides it should be reverted). The bot has available to it not just the change text and its placement in the existing article text, but also meta information such as the editor's account information (and I believe logged-out edits happen to get dinged more often simply because those are the major source of vandalizing edits).
user01815-2 5mo ago
Maybe I'm special, but as someone who doesn't have an account and just occasionally fixes errors or adds more context I've never had that happening for me. Or actually, once where I correct a fact to something that did not seem obvious, and it got reverted, but by adding it back with a long explanation and references it stuck. Ever since then I kept writing good "commit messages" just like for code and made sure to have reference to back up my claims and it works. To be fair I try to stay away from pop culture and politically sensitive topics.

b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago

[flagged]

Wikipedianon 5mo ago

That's the English Wikipedia community in a nutshell. The WMF knows it's an issue but can't do anything about it. There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. A shrinking pie forces cliquey political slugfests. It happened to IBM and can happen to StackOverflow/Wikipedia. I hate it now. There's so much doxxing and meanness. There's also sizable contingents of propagandists in anything controversial. Most famously, pro-Israel Icewhiz, who creates hundreds of sockpuppets and harassed people IRL, but now more recently r/Palestine's sock farm. There's similar farms in trans issues or India-Pakistan. The saddest part is that Wikipedia's original purpose was unbiased copyleft-style free knowledge. LLMs have the potential to democratize access to knowledge more than any other technology. But they are an existential threat to editors that previously did this deep research manually and served as gatekeepers with the attendant social status. As a result, there's a vitriolic hatred of any attempt to integrate LLMs into Wikipedia. Even if it's open-weights stuff running locally. So, Google will continue to eat Wikipedia alive with AI summaries. I hope Wikipedia is replaced by something AI-native run by a non-profit that has the interests of readers at heart.

thaumasiotes 5mo ago
> There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it. A lot of people do ask them not to do it.
- Wikipedianon 5mo ago
  > What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it. Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them. It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much easier than starting a blog.
  - thaumasiotes 5mo ago
    Ok, but what are you saying in "there isn't enough work anymore"? What is "work"? How much is there? Enough for what?
    - Wikipedianon 5mo ago
      Most articles on notable AND interesting subjects have already been written and are of a high quality. "notability" means there are peer-reviewed/editorially controlled articles on the topic. So, if I wanted to write an article on Gas Town, I couldn't. It got a lot of technical blogs and Arxiv preprints written about it by experts, but it won't be notable.
      - 20after4 5mo ago
        This gets at one of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia, IMO. I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.
        ryan_lane 5mo ago
        The alternative is that the Daily Stormer is usable as a source. There has to be some mechanism of determining what should and shouldn't be usable as a source.
        5mo ago
briandear 5mo ago
It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see.
- 20after4 5mo ago
  Given that editors are pseudo-anonymous, there are some limitations on enforcing this. Sure you could term-limit a given account but the same person could have several accounts. I know sock puppets are not technically allowed but it's not entirely possible to prevent without sacrificing the anonymity of account ownership.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]

AnthonyMouse 5mo ago

I've made a significant number of edits to Wikipedia over the years. I probably have an account but generally don't even bother to sign in because I don't care about credit or a dynamic IP that will change in a week being recorded in the edit history, which they've apparently stopped doing anyway. My most recent edit (a minor addition to a technical article) was instantaneously reverted as "suspected vandalism" by a bot, an unambiguous false positive. The bot seemed to think I was going to follow its instructions if I thought it was a false positive instead of finding that irritating and concluding that I should stop making edits if having them actually go through requires me to fight with a broken AI.

pneumonic 5mo ago
You don't have to report the false positive, the link to the place to do it is just included in explanatory edit summary so that you can conveniently use it if you want to. (The reported ones eventually are reviewed by multiple other editors, and then, true or false, are included in the training data to improve the accuracy). The retrained bot is measured against the human-verified vandalism and non-vandalism data so that the bot is expected to generate 1% false positives of all the reverts it does. By the way, the bot will only revert an edit once, so you can undo that revert and the edit goes back in (at least until a human editor decides it should be reverted). The bot has available to it not just the change text and its placement in the existing article text, but also meta information such as the editor's account information (and I believe logged-out edits happen to get dinged more often simply because those are the major source of vandalizing edits).

user01815-2 5mo ago

Maybe I'm special, but as someone who doesn't have an account and just occasionally fixes errors or adds more context I've never had that happening for me. Or actually, once where I correct a fact to something that did not seem obvious, and it got reverted, but by adding it back with a long explanation and references it stuck. Ever since then I kept writing good "commit messages" just like for code and made sure to have reference to back up my claims and it works. To be fair I try to stay away from pop culture and politically sensitive topics.