13 ms·

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 a

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?
  - mathattack 13y ago
    I think the challenge is how do you identify experts? Does a Professor have to earn it over time? Are some professorships worth more than others?
    - fluxon 13y ago
      The set of experts I'd like to invite to Talk page discussions would be published, widely cited authors, including professors, engineers, scientists, and non-degreed practitioners with a good reputation in their field. Publications can be academic, professional, and/or popular, IMHO. Peer review, of course, helps. Longevity helps. Professors who have published, and been cited, would certainly become seen to be established in their field.
      - nerfhammer 13y ago
        http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page
  - cldr 13y ago
    I was thinking about this the other day and I came to think that Wikipedia's rule about citations is this: Wikipedia does not want to be a source of information. It wants to be a collection/aggregation of other sources of information, and those other sources have to be accessible to others for all time (i.e. not a human being but a book written by a human being). What I mean to say is that Wikipedia's system is one that does not/will not give article editors credit for original content; it treats them as just collectors and explainers of original content. When the explainers start writing stuff that has no source, they then disappear and leave Wikipedia holding the content which is now unverifiable. And that's just not how Jimmy wanted it to work I guess. When I look at it that way, the policy doesn't seem that ridiculous. It may be inconvenient, but that's like saying a stack data structure is inconvenient because you can't remove things from the bottom. It's just the way it is; it has advantages and disadvantages.
    - 13y ago
- owenmarshall 13y ago
  I bet he was too. But personally I don't care, and in my opinion neither should Wikipedia. In my opinion it'd be better to risk a little inaccuracy if it meant attracting experts to edit articles. But as cldr notes above, it's possible that's not the goal of Wikipedia - which is completely fair, but makes me wish some hybrid of NuPedia and Wikipedia existed.
- ISL 13y ago
  Physicist here: I stopped making contributions to Wikipedia after a few edits and reversions, I stopped too. Furthermore, the danger that something I'd put a lot of time into could be replaced meant that it's not worth sinking a lot of time into it. The citation policy makes a ton of pragmatic sense, and I understand why it's there. It's an unfriendly way to meet the Wikipedia community. (an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation) In addition, I'm not aware of any way to be compensated, even by citation, for putting time and care into Wikipedia. As academics, we give a lot away for free (want to know some of our most-clever trade secrets? Just read our papers, where we detail everything we do so you can replicate it), but our compensation ultimately comes from what we can show others as our contribution to society. To anyone considering me for a job, promotion, or tenure, a well-written introductory article on precision tests of gravitation isn't worth a hundredth of one precision test of gravity published in Physical Review Letters. For a single contributor, Wikipedia is ephemeral, but the academic literature is effectively permanent.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    (an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation) You mean, "hey, I wrote it, you go look it up if you don't believe me?" Down that path lies madness. And Fox News. Academics aren't supposed to have "trade secrets" by definition, because that impedes the teacher and researcher's motivation. Historically, anyway, by my understanding.
    - owenmarshall 13y ago
      I don't think that's what is meant by "go looking for the citation." I read it more as "by being an expert in this subject I know this is true; by being an expert in this subject I also probably don't have time to find the journal that has the article in question, cite it per Wikipedia's rules, and put it in the article." Frankly that sounds like a great task for editors that aren't subject experts. Maybe the expert can say "this is missing knowledge, this is where I think a citation should be or what to look for" and the non-expert can do that.
Aldo_MX 13y ago
I gave up StackExchange since day 1, I found no difference between being registered or not, any useful action is blocked because I'm a new user, and I would rather stay away than spend time figuring out my way through a hostile site like that.
- aaronem 13y ago
  If you care, or for others who haven't yet approached Stack Exchange sites [1] in the wrong way and found themselves put off as a result, the way to start building reputation is by answering questions, not just accurately but as extensively and generally as you can manage, with bonus points for considering edge and corner cases. Play to your strengths in terms of domain knowledge, especially in relatively obscure domains of which you have extensive knowledge, and don't get discouraged if you are not immediately lauded; SE pages tend to rank very highly in Google searches for topics to which they have relevance, which means that if your answers are sufficiently valuable, they will be found and upvoted over time; in terms of reputation, which SE makes the essential currency of being able to do things such as edit questions and answers directly, this 'long tail' effect is considerably more valuable in the long term than getting your answers accepted. (That green check mark is worth 25 reputation points, once per answer; each upvote is worth ten, as often as someone with an account finds your answer of use. Answering the specific question in a quick and narrow fashion is more likely to get you the check mark; answering extensively and in detail, as I describe here, will certainly get you upvotes over time, unless no one but you and the asker cares about the subject anyway. Which buys you more rep? You do the math.) Is it necessarily worth playing the Stack Exchange game? Certainly not, especially as the sites have grown to an extent which strains the moderators' ability to manage them -- Super User, I'm looking at you in particular, and the flood of undifferentiated garbage questions which has increasingly occupied your front page since I created my account a year ago, and Stack Overflow, you're hardly better, thanks to the endless zombie hordes of idiot PHP hacks who ask the same stupid question twenty times rather than try a single Google search which would certainly turn up the obvious, simple answer. Worse, in fact, as the original developer admits [2], the Stack Exchange model is explicitly designed to be addictive, and he and Spolsky nailed it; if you're not in favor of time sinks, Stack Exchange is probably not for you. But if you're a domain expert who finds interesting questions appealing, or even better someone who finds that the best way of gaining knowledge of a given domain is to work out how to answer other people's questions about it, you might do well to try out a Stack Exchange site. [1] Except for English Language and Usage, than which you will never find a more wretched hive of snark and pedantry; unless you're a tenured professor of pointless linguistics, your time will be better spent on almost any other activity, be it Wikipedia editing or toenail bonsai. [2] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.ht...
bane 13y ago
It's said that the best way to be a primary source for wikipedia is to write a webpage that posits the change you want to make to a WP article, then cite that page when you make the change.
- thenomad 13y ago
  Interesting. As a world expert on some topics (Machinima filmmaking) for which the primary source of some relevant information resides largely in my head, I was wondering if this was the best way to approach Wikipedia edits. Thanks for the info: I may actually make some contributions soon!
  - fluxon 13y ago
    If what you know has been published in a way which meets enwp.org/WP:Reliable_sources then it can be used in articles. Unpublished material can't be used, because it can't be independently verified by anyone - see enwp.org/WP:V Self-published material might be usable under certain circumstances, if you're already an established expert in your field (per independent reviews, or citations by others) - see enwp.org/WP:SPS
- nitrogen 13y ago
  I thought Wikipedia wanted secondary sources (i.e. newspapers, journals, textbooks, biographies) that have reported on primary sources (individual papers, original research). I also thought it was frowned upon to cite your own research. Have these positions changed?
  - fluxon 13y ago
    You are correct. WP still does want secondary sources, exactly as you state: http://enwp.org/WP:V http://enwp.org/WP:V and WP:IRS Independent reliable sources, and does not want WP:OR. IMHO it's ok to discuss one's own work on an article Talk page, in the light of a future improvement to the article, as in, "I've just finished this, it's in peer review now, it's slated for publication on (future date), and it's relevant to update/correct (section). I'll come back and notify y'all if it receives commentary by others elsewhere."
wslh 13y ago
I think Wikipedia must evolve like old search engines evolved to using a pagerank. Obviously I don't know how to solve this issue but at first editors must be evaluated by the audience and their scores accessible. All the other Wikipedia processes are bureaucratic .
aaronem 13y ago
Sorry to hear you had that trouble on Stack Overflow -- I assume it was SO, anyway; most of the Emacs questions tend to live there. I doubt you care at this point, but for others who might, it's generally a better alternative for a new user to comment with the correction, than to try to edit; comments are globally visible no matter who makes them, and a comment pointing out an error like that one is very likely to result in its being edited into the answer by someone who does have the reputation score necessary to do so. Even if it doesn't, someone who tries to use code from the answer, and finds it does not work, will be able to read the commentary and find out why not and how to fix it. As for the edit reject reason -- well, all I can say is that idiots get everywhere, Stack Exchange sites not excepted. For whatever it's worth to anyone, I've found that sort of obstreperous idiocy much less common on most SE sites (again, English Language & Usage excepted!) than in, for example, Wikipedia.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Comments are only available at 50 reputation points (or some number requiring a large number of previous reputation building actions), which a new user wouldn't have.
  - aaronem 13y ago
    Are they? It's been long enough since I started that I'd forgotten. Still, 50 points is 5 upvotes, which is not difficult to attain quite quickly -- I earned >400 rep in my first two days with an account on Super User, and while that's not typical and took some effort on my part to achieve, a mere 50 points shouldn't be all that hard to manage by comparison.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
This is by far wikipedia's biggest weakness. The people with the power at too disconnect from what matters. Even worse, they have a false sense of their own importance. And wikipedia's reference guidelines are silly at best. Wikipedia wasn't designed to scale to what it is now, and a lot of the erroneous assumptions baked into the design are causing growth of the site to become more and more unsustainable.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  I think you could insert any large system (Facebook, bigcorps, governments, etc.) in the place of Wikipedia in your comment and it would be accurate. What can be done about it?
znowi 13y ago
This brilliant professor of yours should not have a problem following a few simple rules that a repair technician can and everyone else abides to. > he's the editor that Wikipedia desperately needs to attract If those editors require special care and exemption from the rules on the account of their fancy credentials, they're certainly not the type for Wikipedia. One of those examples is ISL the physicist here in the comments. He complains that his contribution got edited by someone else. And that he doesn't get compensated for his hard work on the wiki. I'm sure he's a smart fella, but this attitude is not compatible with the Wikipedia model.
- ddebernardy 13y ago
  And your mindset is precisely why Wikipedia has been turning new editors off for years now. Congrats! You've summarized and illustrated the entire article in three short paragraphs.
  - nullc 13y ago
    I'm not sure what you'd have him say. McDonalds is surely turning aways scads of customers by not providing their food for free. Certainly there are many things Wikipedia could do to be more welcoming. But not permitting editing by others and/or paying people to edit are not within the Wikipedia model any more than McDonalds giving away all their food would be. There is nothing wrong with being polite but firm about what something is and what it isn't.
    - ddebernardy 13y ago
      In my view, a large part of the problem is that many of the rules or the way they're enforced borders on the idiotic. Take [citation needed] as a case in point. It's aggressively and mindlessly waved all over the place, irrespective of pre-existing content in wikipedia itself and obvious factual information. Say you contribute one or two sentence summary of related pages -- complete with links. Or worse, a sentence or two that expands on an existing statement by merely highlighting the obvious assumptions or implications. Such edits have good odds of being greeted with the dreadful [citation needed] or reversed outright by some random rules zealot. Adding insult to injury, the latter seem perfectly content with sources such as The Onion and slimy news sites. The thing that really matters is that it must be written somewhere else. It's then up to random editors to decide whether that somewhere else is credible or not. Admittedly, would-be editors can jump back in to defend their edit, appeal, etc. and even expand on it with the requested citation. But this seldom occurs, because it leaves such a sour taste in their mouth that they grunt in bemusement, scoff the whole thing as hogwash, and move on with their life.

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?
- mathattack 13y ago
  I think the challenge is how do you identify experts? Does a Professor have to earn it over time? Are some professorships worth more than others?
  - fluxon 13y ago
    The set of experts I'd like to invite to Talk page discussions would be published, widely cited authors, including professors, engineers, scientists, and non-degreed practitioners with a good reputation in their field. Publications can be academic, professional, and/or popular, IMHO. Peer review, of course, helps. Longevity helps. Professors who have published, and been cited, would certainly become seen to be established in their field.
    - nerfhammer 13y ago
      http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page
- cldr 13y ago
  I was thinking about this the other day and I came to think that Wikipedia's rule about citations is this: Wikipedia does not want to be a source of information. It wants to be a collection/aggregation of other sources of information, and those other sources have to be accessible to others for all time (i.e. not a human being but a book written by a human being). What I mean to say is that Wikipedia's system is one that does not/will not give article editors credit for original content; it treats them as just collectors and explainers of original content. When the explainers start writing stuff that has no source, they then disappear and leave Wikipedia holding the content which is now unverifiable. And that's just not how Jimmy wanted it to work I guess. When I look at it that way, the policy doesn't seem that ridiculous. It may be inconvenient, but that's like saying a stack data structure is inconvenient because you can't remove things from the bottom. It's just the way it is; it has advantages and disadvantages.
  - 13y ago
owenmarshall 13y ago
I bet he was too. But personally I don't care, and in my opinion neither should Wikipedia. In my opinion it'd be better to risk a little inaccuracy if it meant attracting experts to edit articles. But as cldr notes above, it's possible that's not the goal of Wikipedia - which is completely fair, but makes me wish some hybrid of NuPedia and Wikipedia existed.
ISL 13y ago
Physicist here: I stopped making contributions to Wikipedia after a few edits and reversions, I stopped too. Furthermore, the danger that something I'd put a lot of time into could be replaced meant that it's not worth sinking a lot of time into it. The citation policy makes a ton of pragmatic sense, and I understand why it's there. It's an unfriendly way to meet the Wikipedia community. (an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation) In addition, I'm not aware of any way to be compensated, even by citation, for putting time and care into Wikipedia. As academics, we give a lot away for free (want to know some of our most-clever trade secrets? Just read our papers, where we detail everything we do so you can replicate it), but our compensation ultimately comes from what we can show others as our contribution to society. To anyone considering me for a job, promotion, or tenure, a well-written introductory article on precision tests of gravitation isn't worth a hundredth of one precision test of gravity published in Physical Review Letters. For a single contributor, Wikipedia is ephemeral, but the academic literature is effectively permanent.
- rhizome 13y ago
  (an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation) You mean, "hey, I wrote it, you go look it up if you don't believe me?" Down that path lies madness. And Fox News. Academics aren't supposed to have "trade secrets" by definition, because that impedes the teacher and researcher's motivation. Historically, anyway, by my understanding.
  - owenmarshall 13y ago
    I don't think that's what is meant by "go looking for the citation." I read it more as "by being an expert in this subject I know this is true; by being an expert in this subject I also probably don't have time to find the journal that has the article in question, cite it per Wikipedia's rules, and put it in the article." Frankly that sounds like a great task for editors that aren't subject experts. Maybe the expert can say "this is missing knowledge, this is where I think a citation should be or what to look for" and the non-expert can do that.

Aldo_MX 13y ago

I gave up StackExchange since day 1, I found no difference between being registered or not, any useful action is blocked because I'm a new user, and I would rather stay away than spend time figuring out my way through a hostile site like that.

aaronem 13y ago
If you care, or for others who haven't yet approached Stack Exchange sites [1] in the wrong way and found themselves put off as a result, the way to start building reputation is by answering questions, not just accurately but as extensively and generally as you can manage, with bonus points for considering edge and corner cases. Play to your strengths in terms of domain knowledge, especially in relatively obscure domains of which you have extensive knowledge, and don't get discouraged if you are not immediately lauded; SE pages tend to rank very highly in Google searches for topics to which they have relevance, which means that if your answers are sufficiently valuable, they will be found and upvoted over time; in terms of reputation, which SE makes the essential currency of being able to do things such as edit questions and answers directly, this 'long tail' effect is considerably more valuable in the long term than getting your answers accepted. (That green check mark is worth 25 reputation points, once per answer; each upvote is worth ten, as often as someone with an account finds your answer of use. Answering the specific question in a quick and narrow fashion is more likely to get you the check mark; answering extensively and in detail, as I describe here, will certainly get you upvotes over time, unless no one but you and the asker cares about the subject anyway. Which buys you more rep? You do the math.) Is it necessarily worth playing the Stack Exchange game? Certainly not, especially as the sites have grown to an extent which strains the moderators' ability to manage them -- Super User, I'm looking at you in particular, and the flood of undifferentiated garbage questions which has increasingly occupied your front page since I created my account a year ago, and Stack Overflow, you're hardly better, thanks to the endless zombie hordes of idiot PHP hacks who ask the same stupid question twenty times rather than try a single Google search which would certainly turn up the obvious, simple answer. Worse, in fact, as the original developer admits [2], the Stack Exchange model is explicitly designed to be addictive, and he and Spolsky nailed it; if you're not in favor of time sinks, Stack Exchange is probably not for you. But if you're a domain expert who finds interesting questions appealing, or even better someone who finds that the best way of gaining knowledge of a given domain is to work out how to answer other people's questions about it, you might do well to try out a Stack Exchange site. [1] Except for English Language and Usage, than which you will never find a more wretched hive of snark and pedantry; unless you're a tenured professor of pointless linguistics, your time will be better spent on almost any other activity, be it Wikipedia editing or toenail bonsai. [2] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.ht...

bane 13y ago

It's said that the best way to be a primary source for wikipedia is to write a webpage that posits the change you want to make to a WP article, then cite that page when you make the change.

thenomad 13y ago
Interesting. As a world expert on some topics (Machinima filmmaking) for which the primary source of some relevant information resides largely in my head, I was wondering if this was the best way to approach Wikipedia edits. Thanks for the info: I may actually make some contributions soon!
- fluxon 13y ago
  If what you know has been published in a way which meets enwp.org/WP:Reliable_sources then it can be used in articles. Unpublished material can't be used, because it can't be independently verified by anyone - see enwp.org/WP:V Self-published material might be usable under certain circumstances, if you're already an established expert in your field (per independent reviews, or citations by others) - see enwp.org/WP:SPS
nitrogen 13y ago
I thought Wikipedia wanted secondary sources (i.e. newspapers, journals, textbooks, biographies) that have reported on primary sources (individual papers, original research). I also thought it was frowned upon to cite your own research. Have these positions changed?
- fluxon 13y ago
  You are correct. WP still does want secondary sources, exactly as you state: http://enwp.org/WP:V http://enwp.org/WP:V and WP:IRS Independent reliable sources, and does not want WP:OR. IMHO it's ok to discuss one's own work on an article Talk page, in the light of a future improvement to the article, as in, "I've just finished this, it's in peer review now, it's slated for publication on (future date), and it's relevant to update/correct (section). I'll come back and notify y'all if it receives commentary by others elsewhere."

wslh 13y ago

I think Wikipedia must evolve like old search engines evolved to using a pagerank. Obviously I don't know how to solve this issue but at first editors must be evaluated by the audience and their scores accessible. All the other Wikipedia processes are bureaucratic .

aaronem 13y ago

Sorry to hear you had that trouble on Stack Overflow -- I assume it was SO, anyway; most of the Emacs questions tend to live there. I doubt you care at this point, but for others who might, it's generally a better alternative for a new user to comment with the correction, than to try to edit; comments are globally visible no matter who makes them, and a comment pointing out an error like that one is very likely to result in its being edited into the answer by someone who does have the reputation score necessary to do so. Even if it doesn't, someone who tries to use code from the answer, and finds it does not work, will be able to read the commentary and find out why not and how to fix it. As for the edit reject reason -- well, all I can say is that idiots get everywhere, Stack Exchange sites not excepted. For whatever it's worth to anyone, I've found that sort of obstreperous idiocy much less common on most SE sites (again, English Language & Usage excepted!) than in, for example, Wikipedia.

nitrogen 13y ago
Comments are only available at 50 reputation points (or some number requiring a large number of previous reputation building actions), which a new user wouldn't have.
- aaronem 13y ago
  Are they? It's been long enough since I started that I'd forgotten. Still, 50 points is 5 upvotes, which is not difficult to attain quite quickly -- I earned >400 rep in my first two days with an account on Super User, and while that's not typical and took some effort on my part to achieve, a mere 50 points shouldn't be all that hard to manage by comparison.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

This is by far wikipedia's biggest weakness. The people with the power at too disconnect from what matters. Even worse, they have a false sense of their own importance. And wikipedia's reference guidelines are silly at best. Wikipedia wasn't designed to scale to what it is now, and a lot of the erroneous assumptions baked into the design are causing growth of the site to become more and more unsustainable.

nitrogen 13y ago
I think you could insert any large system (Facebook, bigcorps, governments, etc.) in the place of Wikipedia in your comment and it would be accurate. What can be done about it?

znowi 13y ago

This brilliant professor of yours should not have a problem following a few simple rules that a repair technician can and everyone else abides to. > he's the editor that Wikipedia desperately needs to attract If those editors require special care and exemption from the rules on the account of their fancy credentials, they're certainly not the type for Wikipedia. One of those examples is ISL the physicist here in the comments. He complains that his contribution got edited by someone else. And that he doesn't get compensated for his hard work on the wiki. I'm sure he's a smart fella, but this attitude is not compatible with the Wikipedia model.

ddebernardy 13y ago
And your mindset is precisely why Wikipedia has been turning new editors off for years now. Congrats! You've summarized and illustrated the entire article in three short paragraphs.
- nullc 13y ago
  I'm not sure what you'd have him say. McDonalds is surely turning aways scads of customers by not providing their food for free. Certainly there are many things Wikipedia could do to be more welcoming. But not permitting editing by others and/or paying people to edit are not within the Wikipedia model any more than McDonalds giving away all their food would be. There is nothing wrong with being polite but firm about what something is and what it isn't.
  - ddebernardy 13y ago
    In my view, a large part of the problem is that many of the rules or the way they're enforced borders on the idiotic. Take [citation needed] as a case in point. It's aggressively and mindlessly waved all over the place, irrespective of pre-existing content in wikipedia itself and obvious factual information. Say you contribute one or two sentence summary of related pages -- complete with links. Or worse, a sentence or two that expands on an existing statement by merely highlighting the obvious assumptions or implications. Such edits have good odds of being greeted with the dreadful [citation needed] or reversed outright by some random rules zealot. Adding insult to injury, the latter seem perfectly content with sources such as The Onion and slimy news sites. The thing that really matters is that it must be written somewhere else. It's then up to random editors to decide whether that somewhere else is credible or not. Admittedly, would-be editors can jump back in to defend their edit, appeal, etc. and even expand on it with the requested citation. But this seldom occurs, because it leaves such a sour taste in their mouth that they grunt in bemusement, scoff the whole thing as hogwash, and move on with their life.