4 ms·

What editors are interested in and what's important isn't necessarily the same, though. I try to focus my efforts on areas with the lowest ratio of editors to v

by mjn 14y ago

What editors are interested in and what's important isn't necessarily the same, though. I try to focus my efforts on areas with the lowest ratio of editors to value of the content. I find that provides a much better effort-to-results ratio than trying to throw in my $0.02 on Israel-Palestine with 100 other people. It also leads to more pleasant colleagues, because when I'm writing about ancient Greek archaeological sites or mathematical theorems, my co-editors are typically other idealistic people who genuinely want to improve the Wikipedia articles on those subjects. If you're writing on something political, then a lot of your co-editors are going to be people with political agendas. On contentious areas where a lot of people are interested and strongly disagree, I'm not really sure how to do it better. Wikipedia is often suboptimal, but so is the opposite, "expert-based" model. I'm an academic, and if you get bunch of us in a room, from different strongly opposed viewpoints, and ask us to try to come up with a consensus survey article, that experience is usually going to end up being painful. I think I'd actually rather wade into a Wikipedia edit war than serve on those kinds of document-writing committees.

chc 14y ago
It's not just political "hot button" topics. No matter how innocuous the topic, if somebody takes notice of it, you'll often find yourself constantly having to fight random people — who are not the normal contributors to the articles — over stupid legalistic crap. This article with five sections and 20 references should really be a short subsection of that article because, well, he likes shuffling things around; another one should be deleted because the guy has never heard of it and most of the publications that covered it are online-only, etc. If your particular niche has avoided this, bully on you. But I personally wouldn't want to join it, because if more people come on board, that means more attention and thus (in my mind, at least) greater likelihood of attracting the wikilawyers.
- tptacek 14y ago
  So, where did this happen to you, or anyone you know? It should be very easy to cite a source to "the jerk brigade" glomming onto some innocuous bit of good content. Most of what happens on the project is logged. Deleted articles "vanish", because the point of deleting content from the project is not to host it at all, but the discussions and talk page articles and AfD debates are still there.
  - chc 14y ago
    Remember the great programming language purge? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 Just Googling around Hacker News, I find a number of innocuous pages whose maintainers have had to defend themselves against deletion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200 You might agree or disagree with some particular cases, and sometimes things go the right way, but either way it's still a hassle that you have to fight. Personally, I don't remember what the specific pages were I used to help maintain. I was doing it because I wanted to help out and I saw those pages could use it rather than because I cared a lot about the topics. But I do remember it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Oh come on. Clojure has a Wikipedia page. _why has a Wikipedia page. Y Combinator has a Wikipedia page, as does Paul Graham. Cite the Wikipedia debates you say are happening. Citing HN freakouts isn't a valid argument, because anyone in the world can spark one at any time, because anybody can nominate any article for deletion.
      - chc 14y ago
        What are you even talking about? I don't know about these "Wikipedia debates" I apparently brought up, unless you mean the AfD discussions that go along with the HN articles I just linked. Yes, Clojure and Why and all those things have pages, but that's because people fought for them. Nemerle wouldn't have a page if people hadn't fought for it — nor would Why or any number of other things. You yourself said in that thread you found the state of the Y Combinator discussion offputting. The thing is, even when you succeed in fending off all that, it doesn't really feel good to have spent time on Wikipedia politics. The fact that anybody can nominate any article for deletion doesn't really run counter to my point, which is, to reiterate: > No matter how innocuous the topic, if somebody takes notice of it, you'll often find yourself constantly having to fight random people … it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.
- mjn 14y ago
  I guess I haven't actually found that to be true, despite editing in many niches. Sure, sometimes stuff gets shuffled around, but that's okay too: I want people to improve on my work, which sometimes means moving it elsewhere, splitting it up, whatever. I don't feel the need to "own" the articles I write. If anything, I want more people to do so! I've written articles that are 100% untouched years later even though I know they are not really "done", and someone could improve them. It can be quite nice when someone comes by and tidies up a rough draft: fixes some spelling, adds an infobox and geographical coordinates, rearranges my text-dump into some nice sections, formats my citations nicely and adds ISBNs and DOIs to them, etc. The people I've seen run into problems most often are either in political hot-button areas, or have too close connection to a subject: someone writing an article on their own programming language, on their own academic contributions, their own company, or that of someone/something they have a close relationship to. If anything, that kind of CoI editing is still rather laxly tolerated, rather than too strongly policed. I know of at least one university that actually has paid staff writing puff pieces on their professors, and most of them are sadly still there, untouched, because there honestly isn't that much close scrutiny. Imo experiences are much better if you start from the perspective of wanting to improve the encyclopedia, rather than from the perspective of wanting to get a particular thing into it and then maintain/defend that article. The way I usually work: start with a good source I have no personal connection to, and write articles based on it (and citing it!). For example, pick up Knuth's TAOCP, find some interesting subjects it discusses that are not yet covered in Wikipedia, and write a well-cited article. There are >99% odds that people are going to be happy with that kind of contribution, not try to delete it. I've recently been doing that with some books on archaeological sites, and I've gotten only positive comments about it; people are generally happy that I'm filling in articles on important sites that Wikipedia still lacks articles on, and that I'm doing so with references to good scholarly literature on them. That's not to say every encounter with another editor I've had is positive, just that I think it works reasonably well on the whole, especially given the scope of the endeavor, which I would have guessed was frankly impossible, if you had asked me 10 years ago ("random people on the internet writing the superset of all subject encyclopedias?! won't it just be filled with cranks and nonsense?!"). Actually that's an interesting aspect of the HN reaction: HN is generally worried about Wikipedia being too closed, too deletionist, etc, whereas I'd guess that 90% of the world is worried about Wikipedia being too permissive, not fact-checking or insisting on sources strongly enough, etc. The most common criticism outside HN is pressure to add more reviewing and quality-control mechanisms, which gets especially strong in the wake of occasional hoaxes or libel scandals.
gojomo 14y ago
…focus my efforts on areas with the lowest ratio of editors to value of the content… This sounds quite interesting. Do you do this by rough intuitive feel, or is there any quantitative/analytical data from Wikipedia that can be used to prioritize attention this way? (For example: a list of places where the imbalance between readers/inbound-Google-referrals and content/active-editors is greatest?)
- mjn 14y ago
  I generally do it by feel, partly because I'm treating "value" somewhat subjectively, something like "intellectual value" or "scholarly value" rather than "number of hits". So I look for things that Wikipedians don't seem to be spending a lot of effort on, but which imo a good encyclopedia should cover.

by mjn 14y ago

chc 14y ago

It's not just political "hot button" topics. No matter how innocuous the topic, if somebody takes notice of it, you'll often find yourself constantly having to fight random people — who are not the normal contributors to the articles — over stupid legalistic crap. This article with five sections and 20 references should really be a short subsection of that article because, well, he likes shuffling things around; another one should be deleted because the guy has never heard of it and most of the publications that covered it are online-only, etc. If your particular niche has avoided this, bully on you. But I personally wouldn't want to join it, because if more people come on board, that means more attention and thus (in my mind, at least) greater likelihood of attracting the wikilawyers.

tptacek 14y ago
So, where did this happen to you, or anyone you know? It should be very easy to cite a source to "the jerk brigade" glomming onto some innocuous bit of good content. Most of what happens on the project is logged. Deleted articles "vanish", because the point of deleting content from the project is not to host it at all, but the discussions and talk page articles and AfD debates are still there.
- chc 14y ago
  Remember the great programming language purge? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 Just Googling around Hacker News, I find a number of innocuous pages whose maintainers have had to defend themselves against deletion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200 You might agree or disagree with some particular cases, and sometimes things go the right way, but either way it's still a hassle that you have to fight. Personally, I don't remember what the specific pages were I used to help maintain. I was doing it because I wanted to help out and I saw those pages could use it rather than because I cared a lot about the topics. But I do remember it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Oh come on. Clojure has a Wikipedia page. _why has a Wikipedia page. Y Combinator has a Wikipedia page, as does Paul Graham. Cite the Wikipedia debates you say are happening. Citing HN freakouts isn't a valid argument, because anyone in the world can spark one at any time, because anybody can nominate any article for deletion.
    - chc 14y ago
      What are you even talking about? I don't know about these "Wikipedia debates" I apparently brought up, unless you mean the AfD discussions that go along with the HN articles I just linked. Yes, Clojure and Why and all those things have pages, but that's because people fought for them. Nemerle wouldn't have a page if people hadn't fought for it — nor would Why or any number of other things. You yourself said in that thread you found the state of the Y Combinator discussion offputting. The thing is, even when you succeed in fending off all that, it doesn't really feel good to have spent time on Wikipedia politics. The fact that anybody can nominate any article for deletion doesn't really run counter to my point, which is, to reiterate: > No matter how innocuous the topic, if somebody takes notice of it, you'll often find yourself constantly having to fight random people … it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.
mjn 14y ago
I guess I haven't actually found that to be true, despite editing in many niches. Sure, sometimes stuff gets shuffled around, but that's okay too: I want people to improve on my work, which sometimes means moving it elsewhere, splitting it up, whatever. I don't feel the need to "own" the articles I write. If anything, I want more people to do so! I've written articles that are 100% untouched years later even though I know they are not really "done", and someone could improve them. It can be quite nice when someone comes by and tidies up a rough draft: fixes some spelling, adds an infobox and geographical coordinates, rearranges my text-dump into some nice sections, formats my citations nicely and adds ISBNs and DOIs to them, etc. The people I've seen run into problems most often are either in political hot-button areas, or have too close connection to a subject: someone writing an article on their own programming language, on their own academic contributions, their own company, or that of someone/something they have a close relationship to. If anything, that kind of CoI editing is still rather laxly tolerated, rather than too strongly policed. I know of at least one university that actually has paid staff writing puff pieces on their professors, and most of them are sadly still there, untouched, because there honestly isn't that much close scrutiny. Imo experiences are much better if you start from the perspective of wanting to improve the encyclopedia, rather than from the perspective of wanting to get a particular thing into it and then maintain/defend that article. The way I usually work: start with a good source I have no personal connection to, and write articles based on it (and citing it!). For example, pick up Knuth's TAOCP, find some interesting subjects it discusses that are not yet covered in Wikipedia, and write a well-cited article. There are >99% odds that people are going to be happy with that kind of contribution, not try to delete it. I've recently been doing that with some books on archaeological sites, and I've gotten only positive comments about it; people are generally happy that I'm filling in articles on important sites that Wikipedia still lacks articles on, and that I'm doing so with references to good scholarly literature on them. That's not to say every encounter with another editor I've had is positive, just that I think it works reasonably well on the whole, especially given the scope of the endeavor, which I would have guessed was frankly impossible, if you had asked me 10 years ago ("random people on the internet writing the superset of all subject encyclopedias?! won't it just be filled with cranks and nonsense?!"). Actually that's an interesting aspect of the HN reaction: HN is generally worried about Wikipedia being too closed, too deletionist, etc, whereas I'd guess that 90% of the world is worried about Wikipedia being too permissive, not fact-checking or insisting on sources strongly enough, etc. The most common criticism outside HN is pressure to add more reviewing and quality-control mechanisms, which gets especially strong in the wake of occasional hoaxes or libel scandals.

gojomo 14y ago

…focus my efforts on areas with the lowest ratio of editors to value of the content… This sounds quite interesting. Do you do this by rough intuitive feel, or is there any quantitative/analytical data from Wikipedia that can be used to prioritize attention this way? (For example: a list of places where the imbalance between readers/inbound-Google-referrals and content/active-editors is greatest?)

mjn 14y ago
I generally do it by feel, partly because I'm treating "value" somewhat subjectively, something like "intellectual value" or "scholarly value" rather than "number of hits". So I look for things that Wikipedians don't seem to be spending a lot of effort on, but which imo a good encyclopedia should cover.