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Wikipedia’s Emergency
- aaron695 13y agoLol, yes I did notice I've stopped using wikipedia.... no that was Myspace. Very strange article.
- mosqutip 13y agoThe Wikipedia ideals of having open, unbiased, and free access to information and being able to freely collaborate and edit articles directly conflict. If editing is "free", so too is slander and misinformation. Unfortunately, I have no good solution to this problem. But then again, neither does Wikipedia.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThey can start by actively discouraging lawyering and deletionism.
- atdt 13y agoHow?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lazugod 13y ago"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers and deleters."
- guard-of-terra 13y agoYou want axes? You want them big? You want to swing your axe into the guts of lawyers? Do the lawyers have HUGE GUTS you want to RIP AND TEAR? Then this axe is for you.
- derleth 13y agoDeletionism is the only reason Wikipedia remains using. Without deletions, it would have sunk into the world of spam-trap and personal blog platform long ago.
- ars 13y agoDelete the garbage, but leave the trivial. I hate deletionists.
- derleth 13y ago> Delete the garbage Which is still deletionism.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoWhy? If they define an article "A blog of John Ass", I just won't read it and my experience would not degrade. I still get nuclear physics in "Nuclear Physics" article, amn't I? I can't see how having more articles will make things worse.
- derleth 13y ago> I still get nuclear physics in "Nuclear Physics" article, amn't I? Not at the same level of quality, because they also won't be deleting the nonsense crank pseudo-science version of "Nuclear Physics" which would confuse you terribly. Deleting crap is one of the best ways to make the project as a whole useful.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoWell, I won't read that version, I'll only read the "real" one. Bonus points: journalists and common folk will stop pretending everything in wikipedia is true like they do now.
- derleth 13y ago> Well, I won't read that version, I'll only read the "real" one. You won't know which is which unless you already know enough to not need to look it up in a general reference such as Wikipedia. That's the point.
- stfu 13y agoThe idea of an unbiased article is in my opinion just an illusion. In reality truth is a negotiation between different stakeholders and some form of settlement at the end where each side can somehow get away with. I personally find the next posting of the author much more revealing [1]. It is a discussion on how much meaning one can find in a simple sentence such as "____ is a Jewish-American politician" all the way to the suggestion that some by "tagging all the Jews in Wikipedia dream of a time when those lists might be of service to the police." Just goes to illustrate how much subjectivity can be infused into a few words that are in itself unquestionable facts. [1] http://www.markbernstein.org/May13/WikipediaAndTheJews.html http://www.markbernstein.org/May13/WikipediaAndTheJews.html
- derleth 13y ago> If editing is "free", so too is slander and misinformation. Edrogan said much the same thing about Twitter.
- gnu8 13y agoI’ve been pointing for years to the fundamental rhetorical problem of wikis — that making the link target and the link label the same, as Ward’s Wiki did, moves all links to nouns and noun phrases with disastrous impact on the link structure. Wikipedia no longer uses WikiLinks, unfortunately, but almost every link remains anchored to a noun and almost no editors use links intelligently or creatively. I don't see a problem with most links being nouns and noun phrases. Wikipedia is a reference, not a literary masterwork, and so consistency and the principle of least surprise should be followed. There's also no guideline that I know of that forbids the use of links creatively or intelligently for non-nouns, as long as they wouldn't negatively impact readability. I also don't believe Wikipedia/Mediawiki has required link labels to match link targets in something like ten years. It's often desirable or necessary to do that purely for semantic reasons.
- JoshTriplett 13y agoUsing nouns rather than verbs in links does not specifically relate to wikis and WikiWords. See this more general advice from the W3C in 2001: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere.html.en http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere.html.en > we do not recommend putting verb phrases in link text More generally, links should identify what they link to, and more often than not that will mean a noun phrase, not a verb phrase.
- sdoowpilihp 13y agoIn regards to the Wikipedia list of American Novelists, could it not be that sexism for the last many hundreds of years have rendered a collection of what many consider to be the "most prominent authors" being primarily male. I am not saying that it's right, but it would seem that given our propensity as a culture through the years to over value the opinion of a man, a list of mainly male authors is all but inevitable.
- Fomite 13y ago"History did it" is never a good reason to support marginalization. Especially when there are other, more neutral ways to split up "American Novelists".
- narwally 13y agoI don't think sdoowpilihp said anything about supporting marginalization. It was just simply pointed out that the chosen hierarchy of the Wikipedia page could be seen as a cultural artifact of centuries of sexism.
- plorkyeran 13y agoIt's not a list of the "most prominent authors"; it's a list of all American Novelists. In addition, it was not being turned into a list of "mainly male authors"; it was being turned into a list of only male authors.
- Zweihander 13y agoWikipedia has a failure which unearths some deeply embedded problems and then proceeds to fix them. This has happened how many times now? Until I can get the same level of information (quantity wise) from another source, Wikipedia has immense value that fills a very large market gap -- even if they can't get their taxonomy of American authors quite right. To say "Wikipedia’s about over" ignores the actual value of the site and greatly over-reacts to another mishap in the history of the user-run site.
- caseydurfee 13y agoTaxonomy is hard, especially if you don't want it to be a collection of poorly-aging cultural biases. Even professional librarians have problems creating and maintaining future-proof ones. Why does the Dewey Decimal System still have 10x as much space for Unitarianism as it does for all of Buddhism? [1] Well, think about what it would take to fix Dewey's initial biases post-hoc... either you have to get it exactly right the first time, or have a system that is designed to evolve. It's unsurprising the wikipedia hive mind hasn't gotten it right. It's orthogonal to everything Wikipedia has generally done well. Seems like the best solution would be to have a separate taxonomy project that is overlaid on top of core wikipedia data by a set of flexible rules and not hardcoded in articles themselves. [1] http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-sep03-04.html#dewey http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-sep03-04.html#dewey
- CleanedStar 13y agoWikipedia doesn't have an emergency. Jimbo Wales had large ideological axes from the beginning, including topics such as who started Wikipedia. As Wales once said that conservative "[Friedrich von] Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". Wales went from running an Ayn Rand mailing list to running Wikipedia...but he's totally neutral of course. As an example of this bias, Wales appointed the rabid editor JayJG to the highest authority, the ArbCom in mid-2005. He was voted out in early 2006 - but Wales used his power to reappoint him any how. Most of Wales's political position pushing has been behind the scenes, but here it was blatantly obvious. I got tired of this sort of thing and pulled back from Wikipedia around that time. I'm very skeptical of the idea that everything has changed since Wales has less power now though. It's kind of like when the military takes over in a coup, kills off or exiles the opposition, and then holds an election. Once you have sculpted the infrastructure enough to your advantage, you don't need to be as heavy-handed any more. I guess I would be one of the exiles (and some excellent editors threw in the towel over this sort of thing - very educated people who could write well).
- troym 13y agoHayek was not a conservative. http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-...
- jpatokal 13y agoWe don’t edit Wikipedia anymore. We don’t consult it for things that matter. It’s merely a good resource for finding odd facts no one cares much about. Snort. Explain this then: Wikipedia's getting more views than ever, more edits than ever, and more editors than ever. http://reportcard.wmflabs.org http://reportcard.wmflabs.org There are plenty of things broken in Wikipedia alright, but none of them fatal, least of all some misguided categorization (oh, the humanity!) by some two-bit hack with an axe to grind. Everybody on Wikipedia has their own point of view, and while some people manage to game the system for a while, Wikipedia's core strength is precisely that it's self-correcting in the long run.
- gojomo 13y agoUm, I'm looking at the charts on that page, and: • 'active editors' are stagnant to slightly declining globally for the last 3 years – and definitely down in EN and DE (largest) Wikipedias • 'pageviews' growth has been slowing for a while, and since the start of 2013, total pageviews are down for 'all', EN, and DE • 'edits per month' (on the secondary page) seems stagnant-to-very-slightly-improving globally, but definitely on the downtrend in EN Sure, the the original article is an opinionated, possibly premature diagnosis of crisis... but your confident assertion of 'more activity than ever' isn't supported by those graphs!
- hobs 13y agoAnd counting how many edits are being made is akin to saying that you corrected 1000 loc because you found a spelling mistake in each. There is not an obvious connection to "contributing content" "meaningful content" or even "long form content". The site really allows you to draw hardly any conclusions regarding this article's statements.
- jpatokal 13y agoYou'll note that the primary graph on the first page is new editors per month, which is fairly stable at ~20k/mo total and ~7k/mo English. As long as that number doesn't start plummeting, there's fresh blood coming in and Wikipedia's future is assured. Also, I think edits per month on EN and DE are slowly down simply because they're already so large and mature: these days most articles on most major topics that are, from a functional point of view, complete. This wasn't the case a few years ago, when even a layman could find things to fix everywhere and Wikipedia's article and edit counts were rocketing. As for page views, my theory is that Google's Knowledge Graph has reduced the need for actually clicking through to WP, since most Google searches for basic Wikipedia-type info now come up with capsule summaries (often extracted from WP) that may well answer your question.
- needacig 13y agoWikipedia, for better or worse, serves an indispensable role for millions of people. So even if you disagree with its leadership and its editors with biased agendas and would like to see its demise, a more realistic solution seems, to me, to be to put on your writing cap and become an editor yourself. In this case, it is actually very possible to live according to the saying, "Become the change you wish to see in the world." A bunch of new contributors focused on fixing things might help. Although I do remember reading stories at one point about new contributors' edits getting frequently rolled back by Wikipedians with more permissions. That could be a barrier to entry, but it's unclear to me how much of a problem this really is.
- bradleyjg 13y agoThe second you try and do anything non-trivial without first "paying your dues" (and kissing the right asses) you find all your work trashed. If you complain or try to keep it in place you'll see a dozen different bureaucratic maneuvers involving obscure jargon and weird, diificult to use, administrative pages and processes to thwart you. It's amazing the wikipedia is as useful as it is given how utterly hostile it is to new contributors. I hope it continues to be useful and thrives, but I'm not so masochistic to actually fight to volunteer.
- belorn 13y agoSo here we have a article complaining about an category problem that do no longer exist, and a user that got banned because he failed to follow the rules of the site. Its a community site where decision is made through consensus, and consensus was to fix the problems. So where is the emergency, and why is this article trying to declare the site as doomed?
- pyre 13y agoBut it wasn't a unanimous decision to ban the malicious user! Someone had a different opinion! The Horror!
- languagehacker 13y agoCategories suck in general because they're basically tags. That is, they're not structured. I find the category system for MediaWiki in general pretty useless specifically because it is impossible to create a taxonomy and apply it in a structured or hierarchical way across your document set. Wikipedia's core admins are pretty notorious for lording over the content they consider their domain in pretty unforgiving ways. Luckily, Wikipedia is an implementation of a specific type of platform, of which many free hosting options are readily available for your own wiki. I think it's pretty naive to think that editorialization hasn't happened in some flavor throughout the history of the encyclopedia, as far back as Diderot. Those biases just happened to be engrained in different ways: platonism, the academy system, ethnic or national bigotry, etc. As human knowledge expands, so comes the need for all willing people to contribute to our collective intelligence. There will always be stories of people gaming the system for their own end. MediaWiki as a platform has a revision system that allows us to review specific changes made by authors and revert them if they are in some way problematic or unacceptable. So without getting around to the inscrutability of facts in general, I think it's preposterous to claim that Wikipedia faces an insurmountable problem due to its issues with taxonomy (a non-primary concern) or sexism (a concern relating to specific members of the community, and not of the knowledge being produced). So that being said, what's the point of this post?
- derleth 13y ago> I think it's pretty naive to think that editorialization hasn't happened in some flavor throughout the history of the encyclopedia, as far back as Diderot. Everyone has a bias. That much is taken for granted, right? Now, the questions: Is everyone equally biased? Can anyone overcome bias? Are all biases equally severe? Are all biases bad? Is it futile to attempt to overcome bias? How you answer these questions will determine whether you think encyclopedias are even a valid enterprise, let alone your ideas on how to construct one. The point remains, however, that none of these questions are new, and bringing all of them up at once, implicitly or explicitly, every time the topic is discussed does nothing to move anything forwards. It seems fundamental and exactly the kind of thing we need to get hammered out before anything else can begin, but it's really a pointless waste of time, like arguing about whether the physical world really exists every time you want to decide what to eat.
- languagehacker 13y agoCategories suck in general because they're basically tags. That is, they're not structured. I find the category system for MediaWiki in general pretty useless specifically because it is impossible to create a taxonomy and apply it in a structured or hierarchical way across your document set. Wikipedia's core admins are pretty notorious for lording over the content they consider their domain in pretty unforgiving ways. Luckily, Wikipedia is an implementation of a specific type of platform, of which many free hosting options are readily available for your own wiki. I think it's pretty naive to think that editorialization hasn't happened in some flavor throughout the history of the encyclopedia, as far back as Diderot. Those biases just happened to be engrained in different ways: platonism, the academy system, ethnic or national bigotry, etc. As human knowledge expands, so comes the need for all willing people to contribute to our collective intelligence. There will always be stories of people gaming the system for their own end. MediaWiki as a platform has a revision system that allows us to review specific changes made by authors and revert them if they are in some way problematic or unacceptable. So without getting around to the inscrutability of facts in general, I think it's preposterous to claim that Wikipedia faces an insurmountable problem due to its issues with taxonomy (a non-primary concern) or sexism (a concern relating to specific members of the community, and not of the knowledge being produced). So that being said, what's the point of this post?
- chris_mahan 13y agoI started in wikipedia in february of 2002. I was an admin, did over 3000 edits, most typos and grammar... I gave up eventually. Last year they revoked my adminship for non-use, but I don't care, because I don't use it. I was active for quite a while, but gave up eventually, under the crushing mind-numbness of endless layers of rules and procedures.
- jacques_chester 13y agoThe most important handbook for understanding Wikipedia's self-governing mechanisms is The Trial by Franz Kafka.
- derleth 13y agoYou're not even trying, are you?
- homosaur 13y agoThe biggest problem I've seen over the years is that Wikipedia is not edited by experts, and in general is edited by losers. These are the sorts of losers that watch the RSS feeds of the little kingdom of bullshit they've carved out in their own corner of Wikipedia and relentlessly fight anyone trying to edit THEIR articles. Until Wikipedia gives some sort of weight to experts (paid perhaps?) instead of unemployed shut ins, the quality will continue to deteriorate.
- imsofuture 13y agoSpot on. The power of crowds is immense, but it lacks the ability to focus for for sustained periods of time. Hence, experts.
- derleth 13y agoNature disagrees, but of course you know better.
- azov 13y agoWikipedia was never intended to be a formalization of semantic web (wikidata.org is more along those lines, if that's what you're looking for). So what's the emergency? The decline in number/quality of editors is alarming, but what does it have to do with taxonomy? And how do the links fit into the picture? TL;DR A random set of barely coherent assertions followed by OMG, Wikipedia is over
- JackpotDen 13y ago>slower for women to gain equality in the literary world That's NOT a thing, one of the richest women is JK Rowling and students are often mandated to read works by Jane Austen and the Bell Jar. It always seems that for every person actually achieving something, there'll be five others circlejerking over how hard it is to achieve things when you're X. That's not to say the wikipedians didn't fuck up, because the least interesting way of diving people of any work type is gender. EDIT : Works by Amanda : Love creeps Nude men Vapor : a novel Here's a hint, if you want to gain equality, write better books.