6 ms·

Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

48 points by tokenadult 13y ago

psbp 13y ago
I'm so glad this hasn't happened...yet.
phdtree 13y ago
Anonymous editing is a real problem for Wikipedia. There are already numerous "edit wars" by anonymous editors - mostly on ideological/political issues, but also celebrity people changing articles about them to remove criticism, for example. These abuses/debates will likely continue to get worse. That's why we at phdtree wiki project (http://phdtree.org/ http://phdtree.org/) don't allow anonymous editing. What Wikipedia needs is a good karma system, like the one used by HN.
- erkose 13y ago
  Blah! Shameless plug. PR firms employ real people to edit web content to reflect clients favorably.
  - jamesmcbennett 13y ago
    They do, but no surprise that they do. Had a really interesting conversation the other night about sites that offer consumers an honest ranking of things such as a place to eat. When they monetise through businesses that care little for the honest rankings and only desire strength for their own personal ranking, there is a conflict of interest. When power is placed completely in hands of consumer, power corrupts them too as they demand a free meal otherwise leaving a bad comment despite recieving good service. I have talked to hotel managers who have been threatened with bad comments despite no problem in service and had no choice but to not charge for the room due to the dishonesty. The big question here is how do sites generate a site that is honest providing a good service that can be monetised successfully and cannot be gamed by either business or consumer. Any good examples?
- DanBC 13y ago
  The research is clear - the majority of anonymous edits are good edits.
- vacri 13y ago
  HN's karma system is awful.
tedsanders 13y ago
I know a guy who's a "Wikipedia consultant." He's a longtime editor who now sells his services to companies and people looking to polish their image. I'm glad the practice hasn't spread.
- etherealG 13y ago
  why not report him to the wider wiki community. it seems prudent to crack down on this kind of behaviour for all our benefit.
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    I'd guess because this man is his friend, and he doesn't feel any particular desire to cause trouble for him.
  - tedsanders 13y ago
    Like ZeroGravitas says, Wikipedia isn't zero sum. He frames the issue as being paid to make Wikipedia better. It's not clear that what he's doing is wrong, though it does leave a funny taste in my mouth. I suppose it really depends on how much the money biases him.
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  I don't know what this particular person does, but wikipedia isn't zero sum. It's entirely possible for businesses an wikipedia to have mutually beneficial relationships, just as many do with open source software. On the other hand the Gibraltar thing was an embarrassing abuse of the system.
Steko 13y ago
My 2005 Prediction of Wikipedia's Failure By 2010 Was Wrong http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict.htm http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict...
- tptacek 13y ago
  This analysis is off in a couple ways. First: the incentives to spam Wikipedia remain enormous; Wikipedia has incredible search mojo. The kind of spam he's talking about is of a kind with Wordpress comment spam, but the kind of spam Wikipedia deals with in reality is more sophisticated, and involves entire bogus articles. Second, flagged revisions are a tool that suppresses edit wars, and are used on (last I checked) a tiny subset of all the pages on WP. That "most important technical change" restricting "anyone from editing" WP hasn't been and never will be deployed sitewide.
  - Steko 13y ago
    Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness. FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Good luck, but I don't think you'll be successful with that, because I think notability is an extremely important part of the glue that holds the Wikipedia project together. Without it you not only get a torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff, but you also lose the critical factor that makes the editorial challenge of Wikipedia tractable; without notability, you simply have too many potential articles to fact-check, and no way to fact-check them. About 15 years ago some friends and I started a company whose technical premise boiled down to taking IRC and replacing the static tree-based "routing" system it has with a real dynamic routing protocol. No more netsplits! Arbitrary topologies! It was so simple! Why would anyone want anything other than a biconnected IRC? It turns out that the moment you lose the static tree property, the whole system goes to hell. All the sudden, messages aren't (and can't be) reliable, because the network can change out from under them while they're being forwarded. So you figure you'll just build a simple reliability scheme for messages to ride on. Oh, wait: IRC is a group messaging system, and not only is the distributed systems GMS problem not particularly easy to build in a "realistic" network, but providing reliability on it is essentially the multicast reliability problem, which is itself so annoying that it's part of why IP multicast failed. My long-winded point is, sometimes something that seems like an obvious weakness of an existing system is actually fundamental to that system's viability.
Ologn 13y ago
Wikipedia's open nature helps it. Several years ago I did a "wiki patrol" for new edits. There is an IRC channel and programs and facilities for this. Most of the cleanup I did was of well-meaning people who did not understand Wikipedia's markup format and the like. Some was vandalism. Lots of people do these "patrols". I would not underestimate Wikipedia's ability to deal with spammers. The open nature of it all helps it.
trysomething 13y ago
Separately, Jimmy Wales reportedly said that 0.7% of Wikipedia's users have made 50% of all Wikipedia edits and 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles, and he was quoted in the New York Times in June as saying “A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence...But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community” of about 1,000 Wikipedians. I believe Aaron Swartz did some statistical analysis on this and found it not to be true .. a small number of editors make the most # of edits, but the content is written by a very large number of editors. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
- deskglass 13y ago
  His analysis was better than mine in that he weighed content by persistence. Still, for what it's worth, I found that when edits were weighed by length, the 1000 most frequent editors dominated.
  - cayblood 13y ago
    Depends on how well you calculate length. Miniscule edits can produce enormous diffs.
    - deskglass 13y ago
      That's true. I forgot to mention that I capped the lengths of negative edits to 10.
tptacek 13y ago
It's useful to read this to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem WP faced even in 2006, when it already had huge traction. Wikipedia is an amazing achievement, maybe even up there in the leaderboard of western civilization, and the fact that they managed to do it despite an active decentralized motivated adversary (the forces of vanispamcruftisement) is just one aspect of that.
- diminish 13y ago
  on WP, some whole articles are carefully crafted artworks of spam, where vanispamcruftisement movement learned the encylopedia language and you never notice. One day someone will write "vanispamcruftisement manifesto", why spam is a positive moment of western civilization. Spam techniques of once become mainstream ad types with non-relevance diminished and design improved and cost increased. Many social media are flood of spammy posts about 'self'..
  - rosser 13y ago
    Examples?
    - snogglethorpe 13y ago
      I don't have them to hand, but I've certainly come across WP articles where it was pretty clear somebody just entered a company's sales-brochure more or less directly... (and if I was marketing director at a company, I'd definitely try to have a presence on Wikipedia of some sort). This isn't a diss against WP though. I've found such questionable articles to be very rare, and despite Wikipedia's flaws, it's an amazing, amazing, site, one of the best things on the web, by far, and maybe even more astonishingly, one of the few major sites that isn't commercial. I find it indispensable in my everyday life (and donate money regularly)...
      - ghshephard 13y ago
        Just one example would be useful.
erict19 13y ago
Not only wrong, but Wikipedia usage is thriving in emerging markets - thanks to Wikipedia Zero (modeled off of Facebook Zero which despite data consumption cost mobile user $0). Fascinating I say...
greglindahl 13y ago
Goldman's use of ODP as an example is really funny; all the ODP employees left for other projects within Netscape & AOL soon after ODP was acquired. And that's why it went downhill.

48 points by tokenadult 13y ago

psbp 13y ago

I'm so glad this hasn't happened...yet.

Anonymous editing is a real problem for Wikipedia. There are already numerous "edit wars" by anonymous editors - mostly on ideological/political issues, but also celebrity people changing articles about them to remove criticism, for example. These abuses/debates will likely continue to get worse. That's why we at phdtree wiki project (http://phdtree.org/ http://phdtree.org/) don't allow anonymous editing. What Wikipedia needs is a good karma system, like the one used by HN.

erkose 13y ago
Blah! Shameless plug. PR firms employ real people to edit web content to reflect clients favorably.
- jamesmcbennett 13y ago
  They do, but no surprise that they do. Had a really interesting conversation the other night about sites that offer consumers an honest ranking of things such as a place to eat. When they monetise through businesses that care little for the honest rankings and only desire strength for their own personal ranking, there is a conflict of interest. When power is placed completely in hands of consumer, power corrupts them too as they demand a free meal otherwise leaving a bad comment despite recieving good service. I have talked to hotel managers who have been threatened with bad comments despite no problem in service and had no choice but to not charge for the room due to the dishonesty. The big question here is how do sites generate a site that is honest providing a good service that can be monetised successfully and cannot be gamed by either business or consumer. Any good examples?
DanBC 13y ago
The research is clear - the majority of anonymous edits are good edits.
vacri 13y ago
HN's karma system is awful.

tedsanders 13y ago

I know a guy who's a "Wikipedia consultant." He's a longtime editor who now sells his services to companies and people looking to polish their image. I'm glad the practice hasn't spread.

etherealG 13y ago
why not report him to the wider wiki community. it seems prudent to crack down on this kind of behaviour for all our benefit.
- unimpressive 13y ago
  I'd guess because this man is his friend, and he doesn't feel any particular desire to cause trouble for him.
- tedsanders 13y ago
  Like ZeroGravitas says, Wikipedia isn't zero sum. He frames the issue as being paid to make Wikipedia better. It's not clear that what he's doing is wrong, though it does leave a funny taste in my mouth. I suppose it really depends on how much the money biases him.
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
I don't know what this particular person does, but wikipedia isn't zero sum. It's entirely possible for businesses an wikipedia to have mutually beneficial relationships, just as many do with open source software. On the other hand the Gibraltar thing was an embarrassing abuse of the system.

Steko 13y ago

My 2005 Prediction of Wikipedia's Failure By 2010 Was Wrong http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict.htm http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict...

tptacek 13y ago
This analysis is off in a couple ways. First: the incentives to spam Wikipedia remain enormous; Wikipedia has incredible search mojo. The kind of spam he's talking about is of a kind with Wordpress comment spam, but the kind of spam Wikipedia deals with in reality is more sophisticated, and involves entire bogus articles. Second, flagged revisions are a tool that suppresses edit wars, and are used on (last I checked) a tiny subset of all the pages on WP. That "most important technical change" restricting "anyone from editing" WP hasn't been and never will be deployed sitewide.
- Steko 13y ago
  Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness. FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Good luck, but I don't think you'll be successful with that, because I think notability is an extremely important part of the glue that holds the Wikipedia project together. Without it you not only get a torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff, but you also lose the critical factor that makes the editorial challenge of Wikipedia tractable; without notability, you simply have too many potential articles to fact-check, and no way to fact-check them. About 15 years ago some friends and I started a company whose technical premise boiled down to taking IRC and replacing the static tree-based "routing" system it has with a real dynamic routing protocol. No more netsplits! Arbitrary topologies! It was so simple! Why would anyone want anything other than a biconnected IRC? It turns out that the moment you lose the static tree property, the whole system goes to hell. All the sudden, messages aren't (and can't be) reliable, because the network can change out from under them while they're being forwarded. So you figure you'll just build a simple reliability scheme for messages to ride on. Oh, wait: IRC is a group messaging system, and not only is the distributed systems GMS problem not particularly easy to build in a "realistic" network, but providing reliability on it is essentially the multicast reliability problem, which is itself so annoying that it's part of why IP multicast failed. My long-winded point is, sometimes something that seems like an obvious weakness of an existing system is actually fundamental to that system's viability.

Ologn 13y ago

Wikipedia's open nature helps it. Several years ago I did a "wiki patrol" for new edits. There is an IRC channel and programs and facilities for this. Most of the cleanup I did was of well-meaning people who did not understand Wikipedia's markup format and the like. Some was vandalism. Lots of people do these "patrols". I would not underestimate Wikipedia's ability to deal with spammers. The open nature of it all helps it.

trysomething 13y ago

Separately, Jimmy Wales reportedly said that 0.7% of Wikipedia's users have made 50% of all Wikipedia edits and 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles, and he was quoted in the New York Times in June as saying “A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence...But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community” of about 1,000 Wikipedians. I believe Aaron Swartz did some statistical analysis on this and found it not to be true .. a small number of editors make the most # of edits, but the content is written by a very large number of editors. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

deskglass 13y ago
His analysis was better than mine in that he weighed content by persistence. Still, for what it's worth, I found that when edits were weighed by length, the 1000 most frequent editors dominated.
- cayblood 13y ago
  Depends on how well you calculate length. Miniscule edits can produce enormous diffs.
  - deskglass 13y ago
    That's true. I forgot to mention that I capped the lengths of negative edits to 10.

tptacek 13y ago

It's useful to read this to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem WP faced even in 2006, when it already had huge traction. Wikipedia is an amazing achievement, maybe even up there in the leaderboard of western civilization, and the fact that they managed to do it despite an active decentralized motivated adversary (the forces of vanispamcruftisement) is just one aspect of that.

diminish 13y ago
on WP, some whole articles are carefully crafted artworks of spam, where vanispamcruftisement movement learned the encylopedia language and you never notice. One day someone will write "vanispamcruftisement manifesto", why spam is a positive moment of western civilization. Spam techniques of once become mainstream ad types with non-relevance diminished and design improved and cost increased. Many social media are flood of spammy posts about 'self'..
- rosser 13y ago
  Examples?
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    I don't have them to hand, but I've certainly come across WP articles where it was pretty clear somebody just entered a company's sales-brochure more or less directly... (and if I was marketing director at a company, I'd definitely try to have a presence on Wikipedia of some sort). This isn't a diss against WP though. I've found such questionable articles to be very rare, and despite Wikipedia's flaws, it's an amazing, amazing, site, one of the best things on the web, by far, and maybe even more astonishingly, one of the few major sites that isn't commercial. I find it indispensable in my everyday life (and donate money regularly)...
    - ghshephard 13y ago
      Just one example would be useful.

erict19 13y ago

Not only wrong, but Wikipedia usage is thriving in emerging markets - thanks to Wikipedia Zero (modeled off of Facebook Zero which despite data consumption cost mobile user $0). Fascinating I say...

greglindahl 13y ago

Goldman's use of ODP as an example is really funny; all the ODP employees left for other projects within Netscape & AOL soon after ODP was acquired. And that's why it went downhill.