12 ms·

The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

126 points by uladzislau 13y ago

booop 13y ago
Is it really that bad? I had contributed to some articles a few years ago and didn't encounter a 'crushing bureaucracy', but a very welcoming community.
- mjn 13y ago
  It's big enough that you can have pretty different experiences in different kinds of articles. I mostly write history stuff, and my experiences there are pretty good. People seem to appreciate new articles on stuff like a Greek archaeological site, a 19th-century politician, etc., or expansions to existing articles, as long as the information has references. [Actually that's my own theory for part of the decline: around 2007 it became much more necessary to include citations for your additions, which raises the barrier to entry.] In history articles, things mostly get contentious around subjects that seem inherently contentious for non-Wikipedia-related reasons. The archives of the talk page for "Armenian Genocide" are rather extensive and not always cordial, because people have very different ideas about what should go in it, some of them strongly held. But it's at least converged on a decent article imo. When there aren't the same passions around the historical disputes, I've found the environment pretty supportive. I worked on a biography of an ancient Roman politician where there was quite a bit of inconsistency between what different classicists had written about him, but the discussion was just trying to figure out how we should deal with that in the article, and where the mainstream historical consensus lay (if anywhere), not hugely partisan or anything.
gremlinsinc 13y ago
Is it me, or could we use a new wikipedia-- maybe even use git to push changes, and track changes a gitopedia if you will.
- 0x006A 13y ago
  How would that address the issues of contributions and quality of articles? Would using git not reduce the group of potential contributors?
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    How about, instead of git, a git-like (or really, modern version control like) model, rather than the linear, non-branching model that makes "pending" changes and "suggested" changes impossible to accurately convey. While the underlying tech may be git, and that certainly makes it easy and largely natural to the tech crowd, it's also an open tool for others to build proper editors/apps on top of.
- gohrt 13y ago
  Because "wiki" was a buzzword in 2000s, and "git" is a buzzword of the 2010? Is a million forks the missing feature of the wikipedia experience?
  - sp332 13y ago
    Yeah! Although I'm not sure git is the right model. I'd like something where people can have "channels" that are their own contributions, then various levels of aggregation and curation so that I can subscribe to a few massive, "mainstream" channels plus a few smaller special-interest wikis.
- DanBC 13y ago
  If I had the money I'd fork WP. I'd take the 100,000 most important articles and get those vetted, corrected, written nicely, with better (and more consistent) open source graphics, and with multiple good quality cites. It'd go on the line, and people would be able to suggest edits and that page would ask them to provide a citation. This version would be suitable for children to use. The ledes would be re-written to give an ELI5 intro to the topic for people with little to no knowledge of it. There'd be torrent downloads of it, so people could run it locally offline.
chris_mahan 13y ago
I did 3000 edits, starting in 2002, but I essentially stopped in 2008, because of the infighting and the self-appointed regulators.
owenmarshall 13y ago
Interesting read, and it reminds me of a really annoying experience I once had with one of the StackExchange sites. There was a question about Emacs, and the answer was a chunk of elisp that was wrong - one of the closing parens was in the wrong place, so it caused an error. OK, easy fix! But I don't have enough karma to edit answers on StackExchange and have them submit cleanly, so I submitted an 'edit suggestion' or whatever they're called. Unfortunately edit suggestions can't be submitted unless they have at least five characters of difference - seems like a fair rule to prevent tiny changes but five characters of difference can be a world of difference in elisp. So I pad out the edit suggestion with a comment that added some value, only to have the suggestion rejected by a user who freely admitted to having "no emacs experience" because he "didn't think it looked valuable". -- It also reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor of mathematics that taught one of my classes. He said he started and stopped editing Wikipedia the same day - when one of his changes to a graph theory article was reverted by someone who was "a computer repair technician" because of some Wiki-rule. It's very possible that he did break the rule and his edit should've been undone, but at the same time he's the editor that Wikipedia desperately needs to attract. -- Sites like this have Harrison Bergeron's Handicapper General ensuring that all contributions are seen as "equal", so it's not at all surprising that the article identifies one of the more comprehensive Wikipedia articles as "List of Pokemon". Wikipedia needs to figure out how to say that the guy who wrote a paper with Erdös gets more leeway on mathematical articles than a guy who repairs computers all day.
- brianpgordon 13y ago
  I bet that your professor tried to write content from his own knowledge rather than strictly from published sources. The problem is that anyone can claim to be a math professor with expertise on graph theory. For this reason, everyone - even experts - need to cite sources in order to add content to Wikipedia.
  - hyperpape 13y ago
    Over my years of editing Wikipedia off and on, I've come to think this is mostly a bad excuse. The issue is that very few articles meet Wikipedia's real standards for citations. Yet new content provided by experts is often challenged for lacking citations, perhaps because of a sort of status quo bias. What needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system and subject matter experts who have valuable information to add. Worse, the demand for citations is often just absurd. There's a big difference between "this is a controversial claim that might need citations" and "no one has yet bothered to look in a basic textbook for citations." There are real reasons why experts can't just come in and say "do it my way" but the response has to be geared towards saying "how do we take advantage of your knowledge without forcing you to learn arcane policies?" Update: As for identifying experts, that's not altogether obvious. But if an article is an absolute mess, there should be a low bar for cleanup. If the article is in decent shape, then presumably someone is running around with a bit of subject matter knowledge, and can coordinate. Think about any area you know something about: how quickly can you distinguish someone who generally is on target from someone who doesn't have a clue?
brianpgordon 13y ago
Well all of the low-hanging fruit is taken. A contributor has to resort to increasingly obscure topics in order to have editorial control of an article. Otherwise they're editing a page where each paragraph has an active editor who likes it exactly as it is.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  This. Wikipedia has reached a point where most of what people are interested in writing about has been written about, or has been staked out by more active participants, leaving the bulk of remaining work either obscure or maintenance, neither of which is motivatingly interesting to most people. Hence a recurring theme: the great failing of FOSS products (free as in beer) is precisely that a non-trivial amount of work which needs doing doesn't get done because there is no incentive to do it: it is hard, boring, unappreciated, and/or expensive to the point that the only way to get it done is to pay someone to do it. Unless Wikipedia pays somebody to round things out and constantly polish content, it will suffer stagnation.
rhizome 13y ago
What a coincidence that a story about the decline of WP comes out right after they delete a bunch of PR agency accounts!
- mathattack 13y ago
  In the spirit of Wikipedia, can you provide a citation? :-)
  - admax88q 13y ago
    A citation showing what? That Wikipedia deleted PR accounts recently? Or that this article was posted after that happened? Both those events are easily searchable. Hacker News comments are not a fucking encyclopaedia.
  - nraynaud 13y ago
    I hope here we have the right to original thinking.
- fluxon 13y ago
  Although I don't see PR interests having any effect on the creation and publishing of these studies, those interests could certainly have an effect on the widespread link proliferation and blogging about them. After this spike in coverage tapers off, we could certainly do a study of how this particular story proliferated.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    The study was published six months ago, and at any rate is first mentioned halfway through the article. I don't think it's beyond the pale to suggest that a little birdy whispered in Mr. Simonite's ear, especially since the article doesn't read like it took very long to put together.
kevgnulldev 13y ago
Related (albeit a bit dusty): http://www.advogato.org/article/1069.html http://www.advogato.org/article/1069.html
cLeEOGPw 13y ago
I think the western male tech-centric demographic partly boils down to the fact that you just need to spend much time at the computer, spend much energy for writing and editing and have to be passionate about it and the topic you write about has to be provable/widely accepted (no personal stories, opinions, etc.). The combination of these things is exactly as it is, maybe except for the western part. I don't understand why easterners aren't participating more actively.
- mjn 13y ago
  > I don't understand why easterners aren't participating more actively. Quite a few are, though it's highly variable between countries, and many contribute in languages other than English. The Japanese-language Wikipedia has about 4000 active editors in a typical month [1], and I believe the vast majority of them are Japanese, though I'm having trouble finding solid stats on that (if any exist). [1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryJA.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryJA.htm
smoyer 13y ago
Well ... there was always a limited amount of information in printed encyclopedia's, and since printing included incremental costs, the editors were careful to make sure each article had enough value to be included. Is it possible that all the important articles have been written and are, at this point, well vetted? Perhaps there aren't enough topics left for all the people that would be writing articles? Or perhaps the ones that are left are boring, so volunteer writers won't address them?
- justincormack 13y ago
  Thats not true at all, but the interests of the editors do not cover everything. Also you need reference books for most stuff, online sources are not that great. eg loads of historical subjects are not covered at all well.
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    Another issue with online sources is the impermanence of URLs. Unlike the original concept, things change over time. Domain names are bought and sold or allowed to expire, site maintainers stop (other work or health), maintainers change and decide on a new schema. Even if there were a valid URL for every citation today (that is, every book, magazine, newspaper, etc was made available online), in a year half of them could be 404'd or simply contain different content.
    - fluxon 13y ago
      There's a bit of a movement to encourage going back to Real Books(tm) for sourcing. But lots of wikipedians know about and lament linkrot, site death, and robots.txt hijacking (which can "disappear" an entire dead site from the Wayback Machine behind a domain squatter's temp page). So we soldier on with archive.org, WebCite, archive.is (new, and under indictment for bot spamming at the moment), and several other archivers to save our citations. Still, properly filled out references (author, title, publication, date, page) will always be verifiable even if its link rots, and one must take a trip to the library.
lwf 13y ago
The "Wikipedia's Bureaucracy" chart is sort of frustrating. It used to be that being in the "Administrator" group was basically the only granularity we had to differentiate users. People complained that they only wanted to work on some things, like vandalism patrolling, or file maintenance, or creating accounts on behalf of other users. So we unbundled, so that people could get the rights they wanted to do a particular task. And in other cases, like with Checkuser, the Bureaucrat group, and Oversight, the advanced privileges are in fact dangerous and therefore are appropriately restricted. Actual governance is pretty simple: the only things that are truly binding are community consensus (as determined by a sufficiently public discussion, closed at its end by one or more administrators) and decisions of the Arbitration Committee, which conducts its business on public Wikipedia pages. Administrators have some leeway in terms of blocking and closing discussions, but everything is subject to review. NB: I'm part of the system, granted. I'm an administrator, Oversighter, and CheckUser. But these roles exist for good reasons, and I think the unbundling helps increase participation, by letting people help out without requiring full community trust in all matters.
- jaysonelliot 13y ago
  As a part of the system, I hope you'll work with the rest of the Wikipedia High Priests to address the problem that so many people have pointed out for years. The ability to contribute to Wikipedia is based more on one's expertise navigating the insular secret-handshake culture of Wikipedia than upon actual expertise or knowledge. Naturally, Wikipedia needs safeguards to protect against the vandalism, manipulation, and inaccurate information that would flood the site if left unchecked. But in doing so, it's grown into a secret club where only the people with time to learn its byzantine customs and rules participate. Some effort should be made to contribute, but the majority of one's time should be spent on subject matter expertise, gathering quality citations, and good, clear writing—not on learning the intricacies of entering said content. I expect there's a certain badge of honor that comes from being a part of the system. Once you've put hundreds of hours into learning a system and joining a community, outsiders and newcomers are viewed with suspicion at best. Why let some latecomer barge in and just start writing when everyone already in the community had to work harder to get there? But it's that "community consensus" you talk about that makes Wikipedia the closed culture it is today. As long as a small, demographically homogeneous group holds the keys to participation, Wikipedia will suffer. It's like the Catholic church, centuries ago, when the liturgy was in Latin, and only the initiated could have access to the scriptures—everyone else had to rely on their interpretations. Wikipedia needs its Martin Luther.
muaddirac 13y ago
An ex of mine edited a wiki article and added false information to it. I think that sort of thing is very harmful, so I removed it. A day later the edit was reverted. I tried a few months later. It, too, was reverted. I had someone else try. It was reverted. I tried once more, probably two years later (after the "fact" had time to propagate throughout the internet), and it too was reverted. The reason it was reverted every time? Apparently I didn't sufficiently explain the edit. It didn't require explanation: it was an uncited, demonstrably false fact. It asserted the existence and publication of a book (in recent history) that was never published. It is impossible to find a copy of it. It does not exist. I didn't know how to explain it any better than that. A few months ago, I saw that someone finally noticed it was fake and removed it for good.
- r00fus 13y ago
  > Apparently I didn't sufficiently explain the edit. It didn't require explanation: it was an uncited, demonstrably false fact. So did you provide the explanation? Was the expectation of an explanation sufficiently made obvious? So given the reversion wars (mostly on politically sensitive topics and companies that want to whitewash their images), I can understand the reversion of the removal.
- fluxon 13y ago
  Thank you for the effort. Good edit summaries are really helpful to other editors - that fact is not well explained as you're trying to save an edit. It's a frequently thankless job. Now (thanks to concerted effort by the Wikilove project) thanking an editor for a specific edit is now easy and tidy with a single click of "thank" in the edit history. They're notified by an upcount in their red notification box - no messy Talk page spam. My point is that little things are gradually improving. Most people needing live help editing Wikipedia can access IRC easily using this freenode webchat link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikipedia-en-help http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikipedia-en-help . You really don't have to wonder about why edits are reverted - you can ask in real time. This help channel is intended for new editors, but edit warring is certainly a topic well asked about.
  - 13y ago
Contero 13y ago
What I think wikipedia needs more than anything is a new way to propose an edit without actually committing it, and to be able to solicit feedback or have others fix it for you before having it finally approved and submitted. It needs to be something where an inexperienced editor can make a good edit proposal without having to be completely versed in wikipedia's editing policies. Talk pages are a horrendous way to implement this. Making an edit proposal should be extremely new-user friendly. I think a proposal and dialog format would do a much better job at absorbing new content than what happens currently, which seems to be a revert if you run afoul of any editing policy.
- bane 13y ago
  This is a fabulous idea. More experienced WPedians could then offer advice as to what would make the change acceptable (must be cited to an actual policy) and the person doing the edit could keep working until they fulfilled the requirements, automatically completing a valid edit. There would be no possibility for immediate revert and any edit made this way would have to persist for some time.
- swalling 13y ago
  Yes, this is an idea we definitely want to try at Wikimedia. Right now, some of our most popular articles in English are perpetually semi-protected, meaning anonymous or brand new contributors can't edit. That means millions of pageviews are on articles that don't even have an edit button visible. :( Some Wikipedias, like German, Polish, Russian and others already use a system called "Flagged Revisions", which is an obtuse name for software that instead of protecting a page, delays edits and makes them subject to approval from someone experienced. Unfortunately the workflow for this software is clunky and it doesn't seem to be helping German and other Wikipedias stay vibrant. I'd really like to A/B test a very easy "suggest an edit" as an alternative. I think it could work, because Wikipedians are already pretty good at staying on top of the request queue, if you manage to make a request on the Talk page. One thing we'd need to be careful of is not garnering suggestions by cannibalizing the people who would otherwise have just edited.
  - Contero 13y ago
ilamont 13y ago
The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Wikipedia two months after their first try. ... One idea being tested offers newcomers suggestions about what to work on, steering them toward easy tasks such as copyediting articles that need it. The hope is this will give people time to gain confidence before they break a rule and experience the tough side of Wikipedia. People want to create content, not fix other people's grammatical mistakes. Here's another idea: Instead of figuring out new processes, badges, sandboxes, help zones, and polite ways of saying "your contribution doesn't meet notability requirements and needs at least n media citations. Please refer to Policy X before resubmitting", why not attack the hydra head on? Determine how to eliminate bureaucracy. Don't keep adding to it.
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  Unfortunately, bureaucracy is the only way we know to synthesize a kind of homogeneous, approximately unbiased store of knowledge like Wikipedia wants to present. Stack Overflow's gamification seems to work well--or at least better compared to Wikipedia's--so it makes sense they would try it. I bet few people can write in an unbiased way about topics they're passionate about and have achieved a great depth of knowledge in. Are you going to get a higher quality encyclopedia by taking raw, highly biased, unsourced, "bad" content and coaxing it into shape through a very contributor-affirming hand-holding process, or by simply turning away the "bad" content and the people who created it? I don't think anybody knows which method works better, but it's clear that Wikipedia's method falls into the second camp and its shortcomings are only becoming more obvious as time goes on.
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  I used to try fixing grammatical and typographical mistakes, and most of my changes got reverted. This was perhaps 4 years back. It was frustrating seeing ok/good content written by what seemed to be a non-native english speaker that could have been good/great content if it were cleaned up, but instead was left to rot.
vlasev 13y ago
Look at the Wikipedia article on the Russian Armed Forces[1]. Look at the budget of 907 billion dollars (44% GDP) for 2013. That's ridiculous isn't it? I tried changing it to the proper 90.7 billion (4.4% of GDP) but it reverted back. I tried again and same thing happened. I rest my case. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces
- mike_esspe 13y ago
  It seems to be some evil bot or human, coming from different IPv6 addresses and changing the magnitude order. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polish_Armed_Forces&diff=prev&oldid=571919702 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polish_Armed_Forc... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_Forces&diff=prev&oldid=572125521 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_For... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_Forces&diff=prev&oldid=535157346 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_For...
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  I think you won. I see 90.7.
  - vlasev 13y ago
    A small but important victory
rcthompson 13y ago
Whenever I hear warnings about the pace of change slowing down on Wikipedia, I have to wonder to what extent this is explained simply by (parts of) Wikipedia being "finished", in the sense that it is now only updating to keep up with current events as they happen, and not working on filling in gaps on subjects that are relatively static. For example, the articles on most well-known laws of physics are effectively "done", and, barring a major breakthrough in physics, aren't going to change much. This doesn't mean that they are somehow "dead". So what fraction of articles on Wikipedia are "finished", and does this explain the apparent decline of Wikipedia in terms of contributors/contributions? I don't know if there's an easy way to answer this.
- hyperpape 13y ago
  I don't know how it differs by field, but in the field I know best (philosophy), it's pretty hit or miss. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism. That's a pretty fundamental topic, and it has cleanup tags that are four years old.
  - bane 13y ago
    It doesn't help that when you try and fix obviously broken stuff, or even provide desperately needed citations, the majority of the time you'll get insta-reverted and flagged as a vandal.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Wikipedia represents a tiny fraction of the content that could conceivably exist there. I think most people who have used wikipedia extensively have found some part of it that was extremely light on details on a topic that was not particularly niche.
stephp 13y ago
I wonder if this is more a matter of would-be participants being turned off or of a higher volume of readers giving individuals the sense that the site doesn't need them. (Probably an equal amount of both.) I can't remember if there's a formal psychological term for the latter, but it's like how a person in trouble is better off being seen by one person than many (the many assume someone else is helping). While I don't mean to sound ungrateful to the Wikipedia team and community for providing such a great resource, I've personally been turned off by all the calls for donations because they won't implement a few measly ads. It just seems kind of stubborn to me-- shifting the problem onto each individual user when money could be generated so painlessly. Even a little ironic considering the calls for donations get in the way of the user experience more than regular ads would.
peter303 13y ago
the topicsin my field are pretty well fleshed out. and accurate
fragsworth 13y ago
I'm not worried - if this becomes a problem, it's easy enough for them to promote editing just like they promote donations.
ag80 13y ago
Is anyone surprised that an organization which created user classes called "Bureaucrat" and "Oversight" has become difficult to manage? To the extent that reform is possible, they'll have to figure out a way to attract new, inexperienced editors who either don't care about or don't know the organizational structure and technical requirements (will all due respect to the software engineer quoted, wikitext is significantly more complex than # or @ symbols, and is most definitely not user friendly). Maintaining a complicated language of policies and procedures is not an effective way to do this. It's all too easily used as a weapon by those who understand it best.
PaulHoule 13y ago
I'd don't know why, but I haven't seen a single visual editor for wiki markup or HTML that actually works. I was really impressed with MailChimp, for instance, until I got to the visual HTML editor where I could never figure out how to not get my whole message screaming in <h1> #fail
ffrryuu 13y ago
Well, they keep on reverting everything...
vacri 13y ago
There seems to be a formula to hatchet-job articles about Wikipedia these days. Point to pokemon and porn stars instead of the history and science, say it's not quality (despite beating Britannica for accuracy), say there's a dearth of new articles (despite the natural slow-down due to low-hanging fruit being exhausted), and suggest that having to back up the things you say is stifling bureaucracy, and that the community should just somehow psychically know who is an expert and who isn't.
tokenadult 13y ago
It was calming to read the thoughtful comments here after reading the interesting article submitted to open this thread. And I need some calming today, because I spent a lot of what was meant to be my "free" time yesterday evening in a rollicking dispute on my Wikipedia user talk page about one tiny edit I did the day before. Indeed, the experience of being a Wikipedia editor is usually not even fun, not to mention not rewarding. The submitted article notes that "in July 2012, some editors started a page called WikiProject Editor Retention with the idea of creating a place to brainstorm ideas about helping newcomers and fostering a friendlier atmosphere. Today the most vibrant parts of that project’s discussion page have gripes about 'bullying done by administrators,' debates over whether 'Wikipedia has become a bloody madhouse,' and disputes featuring accusations such as 'You registered an account today just to have a go at me?'" Yep, I visited that WikiProject Editor Retention a while ago to see if I could pick up some tips there on how to encourage conscientious editors to stay involved in Wikipedia, but all I found was that kind of dispute and back-biting. It happens that my main area of professional research is connected to topics that are among the ten most edit-warred topics on Wikipedia.[1] So from the beginning of my involvement on Wikipedia in 2010, I've seen lots of reverts and lots of article talk pages that go on and on and on and on to waste time about petty disputes. Because I used to a professional periodical editor, and later an academic journal editorial assistant when pursuing my postgraduate degree, I have a sense of what a collaborative editing looks like, and I try to suggest to Wikipedians[2] how we can all collaboratively built an even better free, online encyclopedia. It's slow and pains-taking work to edit articles on controversial topics. I have found it helpful to compile source lists,[3] because Wikipedia always needs new sources, and then post links to the appropriate source lists to the talk pages of articles. Sometimes I see sources taken up by other editors months after I post such a link, gradually improving the quality of some articles. And of course I continually add new sources to my source lists whenever I learn about them from seeing them used in Wikipedia. I go to my alma mater's academic library frequently to circulate reference books about the topics I research (mostly for work, but also for Wikipedia), and I devote a lot of time to verifying sources. About two hours of "free" time today were devoted to transcription typing of quotations from reference books into Wikipedia-format citations, which I hope to use in the next few months to update articles. To answer some questions that came up in comments posted before this comment, Wikipedia does have a too-radical culture of not taking experts seriously, but indeed that is partly because it is hard to verify who is an expert. Wikipedia got badly burned once by a young guy who claimed to be an older guy with academic credentials and actual expertise on certain topics, and that phony not only pushed around a lot of other editors while editing articles, but even got a job at the Wikimedia Foundation without his background being checked out beforehand.[4] So now Wikipedia is once burned, twice shy about anyone who claims to be an expert. Come with sources, and everyone will join in the scrum of deciding whether or not you are an expert. One person in this discussion thread claims to be an expert (and I believe him) and he wonders how much of a detailed reference he has to give for a widely known fact. There are a BUNCH of the 4,359,600 articles now on English Wikipedia that cite no sources, or at best only cite the name of a book or article without any page reference. So if you are really sure that a standard reference book in your field backs up a fact you've just inserted in the article, you can add a reference like <ref>Smith Handbook of Physics</ref> and let other editors sort out what edition of the handbook, and what page of the handbook, backs you up. I see that iterative process of improving references happen all the time, sometimes over years. We have frequent discussions of the defects of Wikipedia here on Hacker News. I still wonder if there is space for a new effort to build a nonprofit, free, online encyclopedia for the whole world. Is the current Wikipedia just the AltaVista that will be replaced by a yet unknown Google? I think a more healthy and professional editing environment could still let another effort to build an online encyclopedia take off and surpass Wikipedia, if only it had enough seed funding. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23354613 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23354613 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Editing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Editing [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji#Source_Lists_to_Share_with_Other_Wikipedians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji#Source_L... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy
gwern 13y ago
I've been arguing something similar since 2009: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism
sytelus 13y ago
I've burned enough midnight oil trying to add content in Wikipedia just to discover it frequently gets deleted next day. The worst part is that even if it doesn't, it always feels like that it's a question of when rather than if it would get deleted. And I'm not talking about silly content. For instance I tried to add content on properties of different grades of gortex material and someone deemed it not useful on the page about gortex! Lot of restrictions, if you think about it, are silly. Why can't I create a wikipedia page about my mom or my high school teacher? Why can't I add interesting details on techniques to solve high school math problem or even add exercises like textbooks? However "non-useful" it is, it's still information and it's all electronic. Why wikipedia should restrict itself to articles of types that only traditional paper-based encyclopedia would potentially allow (well, mostly)? Would it be so hard to design it so we can add ~infinite amount of information on any given topic while allowing users to dive in from 10ft to 100,000 ft level? My dream would be to have wikipedia or an active website like that which catalogs almost every imaginable information available to any human at any point in time. May be they can add "draft" mode for content that is not fully baked yet. Or pages that are only visible if you opt-in. There has to be better way than enforcing silly bureaucracy.
- e12e 13y ago
  I'm not a "wikipedian" -- but I do think the focus on sibling-projects, allowing wikipedia to be an encyclopaedia, is good. Contribute to wikibooks if you want to write text books (on math or some other subject) -- I don't think it makes sense for wikipedia to host all content everyone ever wants to create. That's what the Internet is for. It shouldn't be the goal of wikipedia to be the wiki to end all wikis. More wikis with different focus would be more manageable, I think. Both wrt quality control and translation. Text in a wikipedia is much like source code for a program -- it will be read many times more than it is written -- and after a certain point, it should largely stop changing, unless bugs are found. "Bugs" in the case of text are the obvious: grammar/spelling, somewhat subtle: use of language, wording (contrast eg: articles written in "simple English" wikipedia vs "normal" English) -- and external change: Hiroshima has lots of beautiful wooden houses > Hiroshima is one of two cities to have ever been bombed with a nuclear weapon (For a rather grotesque example).
r0h1n 13y ago
I know it isn't a direct comparison, but could this be the modern, Internet-equivalent of "tragedy of the commons"? Instead of degradation through overuse (as with real-world resources, but meaningless in the context of Internet resources), we have degradation without meaningful contribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Paul_S 13y ago
I think it's pretty clear why this is. I used to contribute a lot and then my content was repeatedly cut because of streamlining and simplification or the whole page got scrapped because it's not notable. When I read a wikipedia article I often check the history to see if there wasn't a time when the page was actually more complete before the article has been streamlined to the lowest common denominator. Fuck that.

126 points by uladzislau 13y ago

booop 13y ago

Is it really that bad? I had contributed to some articles a few years ago and didn't encounter a 'crushing bureaucracy', but a very welcoming community.

mjn 13y ago
It's big enough that you can have pretty different experiences in different kinds of articles. I mostly write history stuff, and my experiences there are pretty good. People seem to appreciate new articles on stuff like a Greek archaeological site, a 19th-century politician, etc., or expansions to existing articles, as long as the information has references. [Actually that's my own theory for part of the decline: around 2007 it became much more necessary to include citations for your additions, which raises the barrier to entry.] In history articles, things mostly get contentious around subjects that seem inherently contentious for non-Wikipedia-related reasons. The archives of the talk page for "Armenian Genocide" are rather extensive and not always cordial, because people have very different ideas about what should go in it, some of them strongly held. But it's at least converged on a decent article imo. When there aren't the same passions around the historical disputes, I've found the environment pretty supportive. I worked on a biography of an ancient Roman politician where there was quite a bit of inconsistency between what different classicists had written about him, but the discussion was just trying to figure out how we should deal with that in the article, and where the mainstream historical consensus lay (if anywhere), not hugely partisan or anything.

gremlinsinc 13y ago

Is it me, or could we use a new wikipedia-- maybe even use git to push changes, and track changes a gitopedia if you will.

0x006A 13y ago
How would that address the issues of contributions and quality of articles? Would using git not reduce the group of potential contributors?
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  How about, instead of git, a git-like (or really, modern version control like) model, rather than the linear, non-branching model that makes "pending" changes and "suggested" changes impossible to accurately convey. While the underlying tech may be git, and that certainly makes it easy and largely natural to the tech crowd, it's also an open tool for others to build proper editors/apps on top of.
gohrt 13y ago
Because "wiki" was a buzzword in 2000s, and "git" is a buzzword of the 2010? Is a million forks the missing feature of the wikipedia experience?
- sp332 13y ago
  Yeah! Although I'm not sure git is the right model. I'd like something where people can have "channels" that are their own contributions, then various levels of aggregation and curation so that I can subscribe to a few massive, "mainstream" channels plus a few smaller special-interest wikis.
DanBC 13y ago
If I had the money I'd fork WP. I'd take the 100,000 most important articles and get those vetted, corrected, written nicely, with better (and more consistent) open source graphics, and with multiple good quality cites. It'd go on the line, and people would be able to suggest edits and that page would ask them to provide a citation. This version would be suitable for children to use. The ledes would be re-written to give an ELI5 intro to the topic for people with little to no knowledge of it. There'd be torrent downloads of it, so people could run it locally offline.

chris_mahan 13y ago

I did 3000 edits, starting in 2002, but I essentially stopped in 2008, because of the infighting and the self-appointed regulators.

owenmarshall 13y ago

Interesting read, and it reminds me of a really annoying experience I once had with one of the StackExchange sites. There was a question about Emacs, and the answer was a chunk of elisp that was wrong - one of the closing parens was in the wrong place, so it caused an error. OK, easy fix! But I don't have enough karma to edit answers on StackExchange and have them submit cleanly, so I submitted an 'edit suggestion' or whatever they're called. Unfortunately edit suggestions can't be submitted unless they have at least five characters of difference - seems like a fair rule to prevent tiny changes but five characters of difference can be a world of difference in elisp. So I pad out the edit suggestion with a comment that added some value, only to have the suggestion rejected by a user who freely admitted to having "no emacs experience" because he "didn't think it looked valuable". -- It also reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor of mathematics that taught one of my classes. He said he started and stopped editing Wikipedia the same day - when one of his changes to a graph theory article was reverted by someone who was "a computer repair technician" because of some Wiki-rule. It's very possible that he did break the rule and his edit should've been undone, but at the same time he's the editor that Wikipedia desperately needs to attract. -- Sites like this have Harrison Bergeron's Handicapper General ensuring that all contributions are seen as "equal", so it's not at all surprising that the article identifies one of the more comprehensive Wikipedia articles as "List of Pokemon". Wikipedia needs to figure out how to say that the guy who wrote a paper with Erdös gets more leeway on mathematical articles than a guy who repairs computers all day.

brianpgordon 13y ago
I bet that your professor tried to write content from his own knowledge rather than strictly from published sources. The problem is that anyone can claim to be a math professor with expertise on graph theory. For this reason, everyone - even experts - need to cite sources in order to add content to Wikipedia.
- hyperpape 13y ago
  Over my years of editing Wikipedia off and on, I've come to think this is mostly a bad excuse. The issue is that very few articles meet Wikipedia's real standards for citations. Yet new content provided by experts is often challenged for lacking citations, perhaps because of a sort of status quo bias. What needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system and subject matter experts who have valuable information to add. Worse, the demand for citations is often just absurd. There's a big difference between "this is a controversial claim that might need citations" and "no one has yet bothered to look in a basic textbook for citations." There are real reasons why experts can't just come in and say "do it my way" but the response has to be geared towards saying "how do we take advantage of your knowledge without forcing you to learn arcane policies?" Update: As for identifying experts, that's not altogether obvious. But if an article is an absolute mess, there should be a low bar for cleanup. If the article is in decent shape, then presumably someone is running around with a bit of subject matter knowledge, and can coordinate. Think about any area you know something about: how quickly can you distinguish someone who generally is on target from someone who doesn't have a clue?

brianpgordon 13y ago

Well all of the low-hanging fruit is taken. A contributor has to resort to increasingly obscure topics in order to have editorial control of an article. Otherwise they're editing a page where each paragraph has an active editor who likes it exactly as it is.

ctdonath 13y ago
This. Wikipedia has reached a point where most of what people are interested in writing about has been written about, or has been staked out by more active participants, leaving the bulk of remaining work either obscure or maintenance, neither of which is motivatingly interesting to most people. Hence a recurring theme: the great failing of FOSS products (free as in beer) is precisely that a non-trivial amount of work which needs doing doesn't get done because there is no incentive to do it: it is hard, boring, unappreciated, and/or expensive to the point that the only way to get it done is to pay someone to do it. Unless Wikipedia pays somebody to round things out and constantly polish content, it will suffer stagnation.

rhizome 13y ago

What a coincidence that a story about the decline of WP comes out right after they delete a bunch of PR agency accounts!

mathattack 13y ago
In the spirit of Wikipedia, can you provide a citation? :-)
- admax88q 13y ago
  A citation showing what? That Wikipedia deleted PR accounts recently? Or that this article was posted after that happened? Both those events are easily searchable. Hacker News comments are not a fucking encyclopaedia.
- nraynaud 13y ago
  I hope here we have the right to original thinking.
fluxon 13y ago
Although I don't see PR interests having any effect on the creation and publishing of these studies, those interests could certainly have an effect on the widespread link proliferation and blogging about them. After this spike in coverage tapers off, we could certainly do a study of how this particular story proliferated.
- rhizome 13y ago
  The study was published six months ago, and at any rate is first mentioned halfway through the article. I don't think it's beyond the pale to suggest that a little birdy whispered in Mr. Simonite's ear, especially since the article doesn't read like it took very long to put together.

kevgnulldev 13y ago

Related (albeit a bit dusty): http://www.advogato.org/article/1069.html http://www.advogato.org/article/1069.html

cLeEOGPw 13y ago

I think the western male tech-centric demographic partly boils down to the fact that you just need to spend much time at the computer, spend much energy for writing and editing and have to be passionate about it and the topic you write about has to be provable/widely accepted (no personal stories, opinions, etc.). The combination of these things is exactly as it is, maybe except for the western part. I don't understand why easterners aren't participating more actively.

mjn 13y ago
> I don't understand why easterners aren't participating more actively. Quite a few are, though it's highly variable between countries, and many contribute in languages other than English. The Japanese-language Wikipedia has about 4000 active editors in a typical month [1], and I believe the vast majority of them are Japanese, though I'm having trouble finding solid stats on that (if any exist). [1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryJA.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryJA.htm

smoyer 13y ago

Well ... there was always a limited amount of information in printed encyclopedia's, and since printing included incremental costs, the editors were careful to make sure each article had enough value to be included. Is it possible that all the important articles have been written and are, at this point, well vetted? Perhaps there aren't enough topics left for all the people that would be writing articles? Or perhaps the ones that are left are boring, so volunteer writers won't address them?

justincormack 13y ago
Thats not true at all, but the interests of the editors do not cover everything. Also you need reference books for most stuff, online sources are not that great. eg loads of historical subjects are not covered at all well.
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  Another issue with online sources is the impermanence of URLs. Unlike the original concept, things change over time. Domain names are bought and sold or allowed to expire, site maintainers stop (other work or health), maintainers change and decide on a new schema. Even if there were a valid URL for every citation today (that is, every book, magazine, newspaper, etc was made available online), in a year half of them could be 404'd or simply contain different content.
  - fluxon 13y ago
    There's a bit of a movement to encourage going back to Real Books(tm) for sourcing. But lots of wikipedians know about and lament linkrot, site death, and robots.txt hijacking (which can "disappear" an entire dead site from the Wayback Machine behind a domain squatter's temp page). So we soldier on with archive.org, WebCite, archive.is (new, and under indictment for bot spamming at the moment), and several other archivers to save our citations. Still, properly filled out references (author, title, publication, date, page) will always be verifiable even if its link rots, and one must take a trip to the library.

lwf 13y ago

The "Wikipedia's Bureaucracy" chart is sort of frustrating. It used to be that being in the "Administrator" group was basically the only granularity we had to differentiate users. People complained that they only wanted to work on some things, like vandalism patrolling, or file maintenance, or creating accounts on behalf of other users. So we unbundled, so that people could get the rights they wanted to do a particular task. And in other cases, like with Checkuser, the Bureaucrat group, and Oversight, the advanced privileges are in fact dangerous and therefore are appropriately restricted. Actual governance is pretty simple: the only things that are truly binding are community consensus (as determined by a sufficiently public discussion, closed at its end by one or more administrators) and decisions of the Arbitration Committee, which conducts its business on public Wikipedia pages. Administrators have some leeway in terms of blocking and closing discussions, but everything is subject to review. NB: I'm part of the system, granted. I'm an administrator, Oversighter, and CheckUser. But these roles exist for good reasons, and I think the unbundling helps increase participation, by letting people help out without requiring full community trust in all matters.

jaysonelliot 13y ago
As a part of the system, I hope you'll work with the rest of the Wikipedia High Priests to address the problem that so many people have pointed out for years. The ability to contribute to Wikipedia is based more on one's expertise navigating the insular secret-handshake culture of Wikipedia than upon actual expertise or knowledge. Naturally, Wikipedia needs safeguards to protect against the vandalism, manipulation, and inaccurate information that would flood the site if left unchecked. But in doing so, it's grown into a secret club where only the people with time to learn its byzantine customs and rules participate. Some effort should be made to contribute, but the majority of one's time should be spent on subject matter expertise, gathering quality citations, and good, clear writing—not on learning the intricacies of entering said content. I expect there's a certain badge of honor that comes from being a part of the system. Once you've put hundreds of hours into learning a system and joining a community, outsiders and newcomers are viewed with suspicion at best. Why let some latecomer barge in and just start writing when everyone already in the community had to work harder to get there? But it's that "community consensus" you talk about that makes Wikipedia the closed culture it is today. As long as a small, demographically homogeneous group holds the keys to participation, Wikipedia will suffer. It's like the Catholic church, centuries ago, when the liturgy was in Latin, and only the initiated could have access to the scriptures—everyone else had to rely on their interpretations. Wikipedia needs its Martin Luther.

muaddirac 13y ago

An ex of mine edited a wiki article and added false information to it. I think that sort of thing is very harmful, so I removed it. A day later the edit was reverted. I tried a few months later. It, too, was reverted. I had someone else try. It was reverted. I tried once more, probably two years later (after the "fact" had time to propagate throughout the internet), and it too was reverted. The reason it was reverted every time? Apparently I didn't sufficiently explain the edit. It didn't require explanation: it was an uncited, demonstrably false fact. It asserted the existence and publication of a book (in recent history) that was never published. It is impossible to find a copy of it. It does not exist. I didn't know how to explain it any better than that. A few months ago, I saw that someone finally noticed it was fake and removed it for good.

r00fus 13y ago
> Apparently I didn't sufficiently explain the edit. It didn't require explanation: it was an uncited, demonstrably false fact. So did you provide the explanation? Was the expectation of an explanation sufficiently made obvious? So given the reversion wars (mostly on politically sensitive topics and companies that want to whitewash their images), I can understand the reversion of the removal.
fluxon 13y ago
Thank you for the effort. Good edit summaries are really helpful to other editors - that fact is not well explained as you're trying to save an edit. It's a frequently thankless job. Now (thanks to concerted effort by the Wikilove project) thanking an editor for a specific edit is now easy and tidy with a single click of "thank" in the edit history. They're notified by an upcount in their red notification box - no messy Talk page spam. My point is that little things are gradually improving. Most people needing live help editing Wikipedia can access IRC easily using this freenode webchat link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikipedia-en-help http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikipedia-en-help . You really don't have to wonder about why edits are reverted - you can ask in real time. This help channel is intended for new editors, but edit warring is certainly a topic well asked about.
- 13y ago

Contero 13y ago

What I think wikipedia needs more than anything is a new way to propose an edit without actually committing it, and to be able to solicit feedback or have others fix it for you before having it finally approved and submitted. It needs to be something where an inexperienced editor can make a good edit proposal without having to be completely versed in wikipedia's editing policies. Talk pages are a horrendous way to implement this. Making an edit proposal should be extremely new-user friendly. I think a proposal and dialog format would do a much better job at absorbing new content than what happens currently, which seems to be a revert if you run afoul of any editing policy.

bane 13y ago
This is a fabulous idea. More experienced WPedians could then offer advice as to what would make the change acceptable (must be cited to an actual policy) and the person doing the edit could keep working until they fulfilled the requirements, automatically completing a valid edit. There would be no possibility for immediate revert and any edit made this way would have to persist for some time.
swalling 13y ago
Yes, this is an idea we definitely want to try at Wikimedia. Right now, some of our most popular articles in English are perpetually semi-protected, meaning anonymous or brand new contributors can't edit. That means millions of pageviews are on articles that don't even have an edit button visible. :( Some Wikipedias, like German, Polish, Russian and others already use a system called "Flagged Revisions", which is an obtuse name for software that instead of protecting a page, delays edits and makes them subject to approval from someone experienced. Unfortunately the workflow for this software is clunky and it doesn't seem to be helping German and other Wikipedias stay vibrant. I'd really like to A/B test a very easy "suggest an edit" as an alternative. I think it could work, because Wikipedians are already pretty good at staying on top of the request queue, if you manage to make a request on the Talk page. One thing we'd need to be careful of is not garnering suggestions by cannibalizing the people who would otherwise have just edited.
- Contero 13y ago

ilamont 13y ago

The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Wikipedia two months after their first try. ... One idea being tested offers newcomers suggestions about what to work on, steering them toward easy tasks such as copyediting articles that need it. The hope is this will give people time to gain confidence before they break a rule and experience the tough side of Wikipedia. People want to create content, not fix other people's grammatical mistakes. Here's another idea: Instead of figuring out new processes, badges, sandboxes, help zones, and polite ways of saying "your contribution doesn't meet notability requirements and needs at least n media citations. Please refer to Policy X before resubmitting", why not attack the hydra head on? Determine how to eliminate bureaucracy. Don't keep adding to it.

fusiongyro 13y ago
Unfortunately, bureaucracy is the only way we know to synthesize a kind of homogeneous, approximately unbiased store of knowledge like Wikipedia wants to present. Stack Overflow's gamification seems to work well--or at least better compared to Wikipedia's--so it makes sense they would try it. I bet few people can write in an unbiased way about topics they're passionate about and have achieved a great depth of knowledge in. Are you going to get a higher quality encyclopedia by taking raw, highly biased, unsourced, "bad" content and coaxing it into shape through a very contributor-affirming hand-holding process, or by simply turning away the "bad" content and the people who created it? I don't think anybody knows which method works better, but it's clear that Wikipedia's method falls into the second camp and its shortcomings are only becoming more obvious as time goes on.
Jtsummers 13y ago
I used to try fixing grammatical and typographical mistakes, and most of my changes got reverted. This was perhaps 4 years back. It was frustrating seeing ok/good content written by what seemed to be a non-native english speaker that could have been good/great content if it were cleaned up, but instead was left to rot.

vlasev 13y ago

Look at the Wikipedia article on the Russian Armed Forces[1]. Look at the budget of 907 billion dollars (44% GDP) for 2013. That's ridiculous isn't it? I tried changing it to the proper 90.7 billion (4.4% of GDP) but it reverted back. I tried again and same thing happened. I rest my case. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces

mike_esspe 13y ago
It seems to be some evil bot or human, coming from different IPv6 addresses and changing the magnitude order. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polish_Armed_Forces&diff=prev&oldid=571919702 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polish_Armed_Forc... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_Forces&diff=prev&oldid=572125521 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_For... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_Forces&diff=prev&oldid=535157346 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_For...
jamesbritt 13y ago
I think you won. I see 90.7.
- vlasev 13y ago
  A small but important victory

rcthompson 13y ago

Whenever I hear warnings about the pace of change slowing down on Wikipedia, I have to wonder to what extent this is explained simply by (parts of) Wikipedia being "finished", in the sense that it is now only updating to keep up with current events as they happen, and not working on filling in gaps on subjects that are relatively static. For example, the articles on most well-known laws of physics are effectively "done", and, barring a major breakthrough in physics, aren't going to change much. This doesn't mean that they are somehow "dead". So what fraction of articles on Wikipedia are "finished", and does this explain the apparent decline of Wikipedia in terms of contributors/contributions? I don't know if there's an easy way to answer this.

hyperpape 13y ago
I don't know how it differs by field, but in the field I know best (philosophy), it's pretty hit or miss. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism. That's a pretty fundamental topic, and it has cleanup tags that are four years old.
- bane 13y ago
  It doesn't help that when you try and fix obviously broken stuff, or even provide desperately needed citations, the majority of the time you'll get insta-reverted and flagged as a vandal.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Wikipedia represents a tiny fraction of the content that could conceivably exist there. I think most people who have used wikipedia extensively have found some part of it that was extremely light on details on a topic that was not particularly niche.

stephp 13y ago

I wonder if this is more a matter of would-be participants being turned off or of a higher volume of readers giving individuals the sense that the site doesn't need them. (Probably an equal amount of both.) I can't remember if there's a formal psychological term for the latter, but it's like how a person in trouble is better off being seen by one person than many (the many assume someone else is helping). While I don't mean to sound ungrateful to the Wikipedia team and community for providing such a great resource, I've personally been turned off by all the calls for donations because they won't implement a few measly ads. It just seems kind of stubborn to me-- shifting the problem onto each individual user when money could be generated so painlessly. Even a little ironic considering the calls for donations get in the way of the user experience more than regular ads would.

peter303 13y ago

the topicsin my field are pretty well fleshed out. and accurate

fragsworth 13y ago

I'm not worried - if this becomes a problem, it's easy enough for them to promote editing just like they promote donations.

ag80 13y ago

Is anyone surprised that an organization which created user classes called "Bureaucrat" and "Oversight" has become difficult to manage? To the extent that reform is possible, they'll have to figure out a way to attract new, inexperienced editors who either don't care about or don't know the organizational structure and technical requirements (will all due respect to the software engineer quoted, wikitext is significantly more complex than # or @ symbols, and is most definitely not user friendly). Maintaining a complicated language of policies and procedures is not an effective way to do this. It's all too easily used as a weapon by those who understand it best.

PaulHoule 13y ago

I'd don't know why, but I haven't seen a single visual editor for wiki markup or HTML that actually works. I was really impressed with MailChimp, for instance, until I got to the visual HTML editor where I could never figure out how to not get my whole message screaming in <h1> #fail

ffrryuu 13y ago

Well, they keep on reverting everything...

vacri 13y ago

There seems to be a formula to hatchet-job articles about Wikipedia these days. Point to pokemon and porn stars instead of the history and science, say it's not quality (despite beating Britannica for accuracy), say there's a dearth of new articles (despite the natural slow-down due to low-hanging fruit being exhausted), and suggest that having to back up the things you say is stifling bureaucracy, and that the community should just somehow psychically know who is an expert and who isn't.

tokenadult 13y ago

It was calming to read the thoughtful comments here after reading the interesting article submitted to open this thread. And I need some calming today, because I spent a lot of what was meant to be my "free" time yesterday evening in a rollicking dispute on my Wikipedia user talk page about one tiny edit I did the day before. Indeed, the experience of being a Wikipedia editor is usually not even fun, not to mention not rewarding. The submitted article notes that "in July 2012, some editors started a page called WikiProject Editor Retention with the idea of creating a place to brainstorm ideas about helping newcomers and fostering a friendlier atmosphere. Today the most vibrant parts of that project’s discussion page have gripes about 'bullying done by administrators,' debates over whether 'Wikipedia has become a bloody madhouse,' and disputes featuring accusations such as 'You registered an account today just to have a go at me?'" Yep, I visited that WikiProject Editor Retention a while ago to see if I could pick up some tips there on how to encourage conscientious editors to stay involved in Wikipedia, but all I found was that kind of dispute and back-biting. It happens that my main area of professional research is connected to topics that are among the ten most edit-warred topics on Wikipedia.[1] So from the beginning of my involvement on Wikipedia in 2010, I've seen lots of reverts and lots of article talk pages that go on and on and on and on to waste time about petty disputes. Because I used to a professional periodical editor, and later an academic journal editorial assistant when pursuing my postgraduate degree, I have a sense of what a collaborative editing looks like, and I try to suggest to Wikipedians[2] how we can all collaboratively built an even better free, online encyclopedia. It's slow and pains-taking work to edit articles on controversial topics. I have found it helpful to compile source lists,[3] because Wikipedia always needs new sources, and then post links to the appropriate source lists to the talk pages of articles. Sometimes I see sources taken up by other editors months after I post such a link, gradually improving the quality of some articles. And of course I continually add new sources to my source lists whenever I learn about them from seeing them used in Wikipedia. I go to my alma mater's academic library frequently to circulate reference books about the topics I research (mostly for work, but also for Wikipedia), and I devote a lot of time to verifying sources. About two hours of "free" time today were devoted to transcription typing of quotations from reference books into Wikipedia-format citations, which I hope to use in the next few months to update articles. To answer some questions that came up in comments posted before this comment, Wikipedia does have a too-radical culture of not taking experts seriously, but indeed that is partly because it is hard to verify who is an expert. Wikipedia got badly burned once by a young guy who claimed to be an older guy with academic credentials and actual expertise on certain topics, and that phony not only pushed around a lot of other editors while editing articles, but even got a job at the Wikimedia Foundation without his background being checked out beforehand.[4] So now Wikipedia is once burned, twice shy about anyone who claims to be an expert. Come with sources, and everyone will join in the scrum of deciding whether or not you are an expert. One person in this discussion thread claims to be an expert (and I believe him) and he wonders how much of a detailed reference he has to give for a widely known fact. There are a BUNCH of the 4,359,600 articles now on English Wikipedia that cite no sources, or at best only cite the name of a book or article without any page reference. So if you are really sure that a standard reference book in your field backs up a fact you've just inserted in the article, you can add a reference like <ref>Smith Handbook of Physics</ref> and let other editors sort out what edition of the handbook, and what page of the handbook, backs you up. I see that iterative process of improving references happen all the time, sometimes over years. We have frequent discussions of the defects of Wikipedia here on Hacker News. I still wonder if there is space for a new effort to build a nonprofit, free, online encyclopedia for the whole world. Is the current Wikipedia just the AltaVista that will be replaced by a yet unknown Google? I think a more healthy and professional editing environment could still let another effort to build an online encyclopedia take off and surpass Wikipedia, if only it had enough seed funding. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23354613 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23354613 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Editing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Editing [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji#Source_Lists_to_Share_with_Other_Wikipedians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji#Source_L... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy

gwern 13y ago

I've been arguing something similar since 2009: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

sytelus 13y ago

I've burned enough midnight oil trying to add content in Wikipedia just to discover it frequently gets deleted next day. The worst part is that even if it doesn't, it always feels like that it's a question of when rather than if it would get deleted. And I'm not talking about silly content. For instance I tried to add content on properties of different grades of gortex material and someone deemed it not useful on the page about gortex! Lot of restrictions, if you think about it, are silly. Why can't I create a wikipedia page about my mom or my high school teacher? Why can't I add interesting details on techniques to solve high school math problem or even add exercises like textbooks? However "non-useful" it is, it's still information and it's all electronic. Why wikipedia should restrict itself to articles of types that only traditional paper-based encyclopedia would potentially allow (well, mostly)? Would it be so hard to design it so we can add ~infinite amount of information on any given topic while allowing users to dive in from 10ft to 100,000 ft level? My dream would be to have wikipedia or an active website like that which catalogs almost every imaginable information available to any human at any point in time. May be they can add "draft" mode for content that is not fully baked yet. Or pages that are only visible if you opt-in. There has to be better way than enforcing silly bureaucracy.

e12e 13y ago
I'm not a "wikipedian" -- but I do think the focus on sibling-projects, allowing wikipedia to be an encyclopaedia, is good. Contribute to wikibooks if you want to write text books (on math or some other subject) -- I don't think it makes sense for wikipedia to host all content everyone ever wants to create. That's what the Internet is for. It shouldn't be the goal of wikipedia to be the wiki to end all wikis. More wikis with different focus would be more manageable, I think. Both wrt quality control and translation. Text in a wikipedia is much like source code for a program -- it will be read many times more than it is written -- and after a certain point, it should largely stop changing, unless bugs are found. "Bugs" in the case of text are the obvious: grammar/spelling, somewhat subtle: use of language, wording (contrast eg: articles written in "simple English" wikipedia vs "normal" English) -- and external change: Hiroshima has lots of beautiful wooden houses > Hiroshima is one of two cities to have ever been bombed with a nuclear weapon (For a rather grotesque example).

r0h1n 13y ago

I know it isn't a direct comparison, but could this be the modern, Internet-equivalent of "tragedy of the commons"? Instead of degradation through overuse (as with real-world resources, but meaningless in the context of Internet resources), we have degradation without meaningful contribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Paul_S 13y ago

I think it's pretty clear why this is. I used to contribute a lot and then my content was repeatedly cut because of streamlining and simplification or the whole page got scrapped because it's not notable. When I read a wikipedia article I often check the history to see if there wasn't a time when the page was actually more complete before the article has been streamlined to the lowest common denominator. Fuck that.