11 ms·

How Wikipedia's reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline

144 points by sehugg 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- Mithaldu 12y ago
  What article was that? I'd love to go and dig to see what kind of bot would go so hilariously wrong.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - jackcarter 12y ago
      Check your browser extensions. You might have one installed that invisibly changes 'disruption' to 'bullshitting.'
      - Domenic_S 12y ago
        This is classic if true...
        Natsu 12y ago
        Classic? I think you mean clbuttic :) (ass -> butt)
      - phaemon 12y ago
        Hehe, I think you've nailed it. What was the username of the person? (they've deleted their comments, rather than just admitting they screwed up).
      - 6chars 12y ago
        This could be the culprit: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disrupt-to-bullshit/mahaemfhlcjficbbkbpmkbhhenfnikcf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disrupt-to-bullshi...
    - Domenic_S 12y ago
      I'm not seeing it. I see you change "disruption" to "shifting" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=623181742&oldid=623041975 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... and then Monkbot changed it back to "disruption", not ClueBotNG. Cluebot actually reverted someone else's vandalism and restored your version (your spellcheck'd version) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=625593375&oldid=625593366 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... Maybe the problem is that the changelog is too hard for casuals to parse?
    - deathanatos 12y ago
      Are you (or am I?) reading the changelog right? Your edits (while harmless, in my opinion) don't match up with your edit messages. The bot you name isn't the one that reverted you (but Cluebot does get involved later). The bot reverted two anonymous edits, so I can't truly tell if they're yours, but you yell at the bot, so I presume so. Edit 1: anonymous IPv6 addr removes the word "also"; article makes sense with and without it. No edit message. Edit 2: anonymous IPv4 addr changes the word "disruption" to "shifting"; article makes grammatical sense either way, unclear to me which is better. Message is "Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been." This is the change that the message doesn't seem to match up with the content, specifically, this diff[2]. Edit 3: "Monkbot" reverts the previous two edits. Perhaps a tad strange, but the edits were strange and from IP addrs. Edit 4: You log in, and yell at the bot[3], "Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been. Thank you for undoing my last edit you stupid bot, I'm trying to removed page defacements NOT ADD THEM." However, this edit again doesn't match the message, and (again) changes the word "disruption" to (this time) "shiftingting" (an honest typo which you correct immediately), and also changes the minus sign on a temperature to a hypen. Edit 5: Your spell correction. Edit 6: Someone experimenting (anon IPv4) adds "hello". Edit 7: Same IP changes "hello" to "booooooooty" Edit 8: Clue Bot NG reverts _to_ your edit, undoing the previous two edits (but leaves your changes) — definitely the correct action. [1]: I'm starting from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=prev&oldid=623041975 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=prev&oldid=623181742 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=next&oldid=623197577 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ...
    - Zikes 12y ago
      I have a hard time parsing those logs, but from what I can tell you kept trying to change "disruption" to "shifting". I even went to a year-old version of the article (you said the typo had been there since 2009) and did a search on the page for "shi" and couldn't find it, but "disruption" was still there. I suspect you had some sort of toy browser extension that swapped words, a la Cloud to Butt [1]. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
    - xxxyy 12y ago
      Can you point to the specific edit you made that has been reverted by the bot? I can see [1] that your first edit to the article "Thermohaline circulation" was a one-word edit and was introducing a non-existent word 'shiftingting', thus being incorrect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Valarauca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Valarauc...
    - Animats 12y ago
      Ah. Part of the problem is that you haven't registered for a Wikipedia account. ClueBot NG, which is a machine learning system, uses information from your track record as an editor as one of its inputs. Editing anonymously, you have no reputation.
      - DanBC 12y ago
        The person had registered an account.
        Animats 12y ago
        Not at first. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... All the actions by ClueBot NG in that article in the last year applied to edits from unregistered users. The edit by [173.14.38.69]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=623181742&oldid=623041975 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been.) changed "disruption" to "shifting", an edit inconsistent with the edit comment. The word "bullshitting" did not appear. That was reverted by human user "Vsmith" (a user with over 100,000 edits), not a 'bot. Then, this edit by user "Valarauca": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=623873692&oldid=623197577 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been. Thank you for undoing my last edit you stupid bot, I'm trying to removed page defacements NOT ADD THEM.) changed an em dash to an en dash, and "disrupting" to "shiftingting". That botch is fixed in the next edit by user "Valarauca": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=623873812&oldid=623873692 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Spellling correction on previous change.) "Shifting" then stayed in the article. The Wikipedia processes and 'bots handled this just fine. The cause of the problem was a non-useful edit comment on an edit of marginal quality.
        DanBC 12y ago
        The person who started this thread, posting to HN, was always using a logged in account on Wikipedia.
  - VLM 12y ago
    Are the comments being deleted here on HN a meta joke about deletionist misbehavior on wikipedia? Depending on the answer maybe a meta joke would be to revert any changes I make to this post. One interesting way to summarize the problem is wikipedia provides tools designed to make it easier to destroy than to create and then rewards destruction. No great surprise what results.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure they were just deleted because the poster is terminally embarrassed at discovering that his edits were reverted because he was inadvertently vandalizing them due to a browser plugin, rather than fixing problems like he thought he was.
- Diederich 12y ago
  Very strange. I've never had any trivial typo fix edits reverted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Diederich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Diederic...
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Me neither. I guess it's random, or bots monitor only specific articles?
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      I would have to guess latter? Monitoring all of Wikipedia would be a huge task, and most people (and therefore bot operators) only care about certain articles.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    I have, more than once, by children using Twinkle. I left a polite message on the talk page of one, and they apologised (which was nice, I didn't expect them to) and they re-reverted the edit. I left a polite message on the talk page of another; and was templated with a vandalism warning. I left polite messages on the Twinkle page and they removed twinkle from that user and spent some time making sure I was welcome etc. Wikipedians seem to be aware of the dangers of rapid Twinkle or roll-back use, especially by people racking up some score to use to gain adminship, and they seem to have made changes to reduce the fallout.
NickKitchen 12y ago
The need is too great to have the service that wikipedia provides, if people are becoming less willing to keep it accurate then that is interesting. If people are consistently finding inaccurate or uninformative articles then they will search for their information somewhere else I found this page where you can listen to the 'sound of wikipedia', basically a different guitar string is plucked at a different pitch when certain changes are made to wikipedia articles. It is pretty cool in the sense that it shows a lot of changes are being made, however you are able to see and hear the amount of changes made by bots, which is surprisingly few http://listen.hatnote.com/#fr,en http://listen.hatnote.com/#fr,en
- avivo 12y ago
  That link is great! Watching the page gives you a much more visceral sense of how wikipedia actually works, and ~all the things in the world that people might care about. Click "about" to read the key. (e.g. purple blobs are bots) It is also especially fascinating to watch during a time with realtime news you care about. I've seen edits to Rosetta and Philae while just watching briefly!
- Springtime 12y ago
  This is beautiful.
reitanqild 12y ago
And, sooner or later someone might get access to stackexchange logs (they aren't open, are they?) and say the same.
- bunderbunder 12y ago
  https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
Animats 12y ago
This claim keeps coming up. Reality is that Wikipedia is mostly done. All the important article were done years ago. Now it's just maintenance. Look at incoming new articles - spam, minor politicians and sports figures, etc. Paper encyclopedias followed the same pattern. Creating Encyclopedia Britannica was a huge job. Annual maintenance was done by a small staff.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  (As a reader of Wikipedia) I frequently see opportunities to improve quality, clarity and readability. Maintenance doesn't quite capture that.
  - ketralnis 12y ago
    > improve quality, clarity and readability That sounds exactly like maintenance to me, as distinct from documenting new things from scratch
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      I was mostly responding to the tone I saw in All the important article were done years ago. An unnecessarily complicated and difficult to read article isn't really done.
  - jseliger 12y ago
    (As a reader of Wikipedia) I frequently see opportunities to improve quality, clarity and readability. Agreed. But I stopped contributing ages ago, because all of my contributions were almost immediately reversed. It's pretty obvious that most pages are monitored by people with a stake in the content of those pages, and they are much more energetic in pitching their story than I am in trying to make some small improvements.
- TillE 12y ago
  Not even close. If you're interested in a particular area of history and you've read a few books on the subject, you'll know that Wikipedia is missing reams of useful information. Maybe Wikipedia is ok for current stuff and the 20th century, but it barely scratches the surface for most of medieval Europe, for example. There's absolutely no need to be constrained to the terse articles and limited scope of a traditional encyclopedia in this respect. In fact, Britannica has substantially more information on certain topics.
nanoscopic 12y ago
I used to contribute to wikipedia. I stopped after a number of articles I created were deleted by "notability nazis". There is a strong favoritism of what people think is notable over what actually is. The rules are not followed and many things that should be removed aren't while things that should stay are removed. I am not interested in participating in a system where my hard work is discarded regardless of excuses.
- ghaff 12y ago
  Even if I understand why the rule/criterion exists, notability is a particularly problematic Wikipedia rule. Just about everything is notable if you get local enough (whether in terms of location, field, community, etc.) And the proofs of notability, such as they are, end up being (ironically) rather rooted in things like publication in dead tree periodicals or books even if that makes actual verification difficult. So you end up with notability being rather arbitrarily decided by admins who see nothing wrong with long articles on obscure pieces of geek fandom while being unconvinced about the notability of people like influential executives at major companies, journalists, and the like.
  - t0mbstone 12y ago
    Why even have notability be a requirement? Why can't the wikipedia just hold everything about everything?
    - ghaff 12y ago
      The "deletionist" argument is essentially that, absent a notability requirement, Wikipedia would become this dumping ground for articles whose facts would be difficult to verify and which interested so few people that maintaining any sort of quality would be difficult. I'm much more on the inclusionist side but but I also appreciate the concerns if it were taken to an extreme. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
      - 12y ago
owenmarshall 12y ago
Wikipedia has so many rules and restrictions around editing an article that the only people who can invest enough time to learn them are people whose time is otherwise worthless. I once saw a great example when a notable athlete was traded from one team to another... I think it was a famous basketball player, but can't remember who. On a whim I checked the article history page and saw the same pattern: a new user to Wikipedia would make the edit, and it was quickly reverted by one established editor. When I looked at the talk page, the WP editor made it clear that it was Official Wikipedia Policy that even though both clubs had announced the trade, and news was being carried on multiple outlets, the trade wasn't official enough until the NBA released a daily transfer list with his name on it. All five new editors were threatened with WP:3RR and WP:yaddayadda instead of encouraged. But hey, when the list was officially released twenty-five minutes later the editor who got the page locked got to make the edit. Great job guys! Way to add value to the project! This same behavior happens on every site where authority is meted out based on activity, not ability. I once tried to correct an elisp entry on a Stack Overflow answer: my edit was autorejected because it had less than five characters difference. So I added a fairly pointless comment to get past the automatic rejection, only to have someone reject it because the comment wasn't sufficiently useful (go figure). I was finally able to get someone to make a correction by going into the Stack Overflow chat and trying to explain things... except the user, who freely admitted to never using emacs before, messed up and made things worse. Whatever. My give-a-fucks were all out. It's probably still wrong!
- flexie 12y ago
  I experienced the same thing. Nothing is as demotivating as seeing an edit you spent hours researching and writing deleted for some obscure reason and then rewritten a few days later by the very same guys who deleted your entry.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    Citizendum experienced this early on, which is why it's a ghost town now.
- serve_yay 12y ago
TheCoreh 12y ago
I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. There's no restriction to doing so, is there? To avoid having super high server costs, it could even be a "soft-fork", where only the pages which are edited are stored locally, all other content is fetched from the original. If these restrictions are really affecting the quality of the articles in Wikipedia, we'll see the quality of the articles on the fork grow, at which point they can be merged back by Wikipedia.
- muuh-gnu 12y ago
  > I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. Wikipedia _was_ forked, several times. The reason you dont seem to know about them are: 1. The added utility was not sufficient to make an impact strong enough to pull people away from wikipedia. 2. The added no utility to the fork at all or made things bad at Wikipedia even worse. Wikipedia is like democracy, it is the worst free encyclopedia we have, except all the others.
  - mxfh 12y ago
    Forking is not enough, the whole thing has to get out of it's wiki format and be transitioned into some kind of purpose built system, the wiki approach was great for growing fast but is hell to maintain or understand when used for content and administration in parallel. The best thing I could think of would be a streamlined kind of git with repositories for every article and an easy to understand ticketing system and maybe the possibility to have concurrent versions of articles one branch for the deletionist and notability enforcing kind and another inclusive one.
    - sparkzilla 12y ago
      See my comment above. We have solved most of the problems for crowdsourced news-based pages and biographies at Newslines. We cut out almost all Wikipedia's problems by focusing on newsworthiness as the standard of inclusion; letting users create posts based on news events, not long-form articles; and using a standard post approval process.
  - 12y ago
kmfrk 12y ago
Hell is other Wikipedia editors. Truly.
JasonFruit 12y ago
I've contributed a bit to Wikipedia, including a couple recent new articles, and I have never experienced this. Maybe I'm so extraordinarily skilled that nobody would inflict ham-handed moderation on me, but I don't think that's the case. Probably it's just that I'm not so glaringly awful that I should be discouraged from contributing again. I think the drop in new-contributor retention is an intended effect, an example of the system succeeding.
WalterBright 12y ago
One possible solution is for Wikipedia to have two versions - one with a very conservative editorial policy, and a second with a very loose, liberal one. Occasionally material that has proven it's worth in the second gets merged into the first.
- didibus 12y ago
  That's actually a good idea.
tokenadult 12y ago
I've seen a lot of complaints about Wikipedia here on Hacker News over the years. Yet I also see a lot of comments and even submissions of new stories that come straight from Wikipedia. This love-hate relationship suggests that Wikipedia has plenty of strengths along with its weaknesses. May I ask a question of everyone here? Suppose an Elon Musk or another philanthropist established an Online Encyclopedia X Prize, setting up a financial incentive to try to build something better than Wikipedia. If there were a prize for a new-and-improved free, online encyclopedia, what criteria should be used for awarding the prize? What could a new project do to show it is building a good encyclopedia, and that it deserves a cash prize to keep its growth going as it wins user acceptance? What specific goals would show that the project passed a reasonable "finish line" in a race to build a viable competitor to Wikipedia? I am a Wikipedian. My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia's administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias) will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the article topics. A new effort to build a free, online encyclopedia with lots of user input (which I would enthusiastically support) would have to figure out how to deal with this problem. In respectful disagreement with some comments posted earlier in this thread, I think that most Wikipedia articles on many subjects are terrible, actively misleading and very poorly sourced. I am trying my best to fix articles on the topics for which I have the most reliable sources. (I have an office full of reference books for writing projects I do for my paid work.) It has been a long, slow slog since 2010 for me to improve the sourcing and make more neutral in point of view some of the most-read articles about the psychology of human intelligence, for example. Many Wikipedians don't read books, but only look up information on Google University, and think that anything that isn't found in an online source is not a verifiable fact. That makes the editing process very slow.
- jbob2000 12y ago
  It should not involve humans in its aggregation and moderation. Needs to be intelligent enough to gather information and categorize it without the biases of a human being.
CurtMonash 12y ago
After my experience in DMOZ, I have carefully NOT joined Wikipedia as an editor. However, I make minor spelling, grammatical and/or stylistic changes when I notice the need. I also correct obvious factual errors. I usually don't introduced NEW facts, but I delete false existing ones if I notice them. And hey -- if I'm not perfect by the standards of "No Original Research" or even "Neutral Point of View", I don't have a role that allows me to be punished. I just move things in the right direction (by Wikipedia's standards as I understand them) as far as I can be bothered to, then go on with my life.
- jholman 12y ago
  If you are making changes when you notice the need (and thank you for that work!), then you ARE an editor of Wikipedia. That's what that word means.
  - CurtMonash 12y ago
    True enough. But I'm not a member of the organization. :)
vacri 12y ago
The title of the article is based on the faulty premise that fewer editors means a decline. Edit: the first sentence of the abstract indicates that they don't mean a literal decline in pure numbers :)
polemic 12y ago
Well here's another useful correlation: the first iphone launched mid 2007, the peak of the active editors graph. Perhaps the rise of mobile is the true cause here.
- Torgo 12y ago
  Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and smartphones are all in full effect by that point. 2007 has got to be Eternal September for the Web.
sparkzilla 12y ago
As someone building a direct competitor to Wikipedia for crowdsourced biographies and news-based pages [1], I have come to the conclusion that the wiki software while responsible for the site's success, is also the cause of its inevitable decline. The software causes almost every problem that people complain about, mainly because it lets real or imagined experts have too much power over the page. It's simply easier for an editor to reject new information, than to go through the pain of adding it. In one case, I struggled for weeks to try to get a simple sentence into the site, only to be harassed by the site's administrators, when I challenged a particularly ambiguous rule. Entrenched editors such as William Connolley [2] on Global Warming, act as guardians for whole sections of the site, and do not allow any dissenting opinion, censoring and minimizing views that do not suit their agenda. So much of this is simply unnecessary in a better designed system. As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information, which makes it increasingly difficult to add new information. Many of those rules, such as those for notability, conflict of interest, and reliable sources are ambiguous and arbitrarily applied, giving even more power to editors and admins, instead of content creators. This means that the site has become rigid and nobody wants to maintain it. The quality of pages is declining rapidly. It is also very easy to harass other people on the system, so much so that women and minorities are virtually excluded. We have taken a different approach with great results. By avoiding the page-based metaphor and giving better tools to our editors have created a system that makes it easy to add information without being harassed. We also pay our writers and editors, and are implementing a revenue share system so they can actually get some benefit from their work. So far our writers have added 25,000 posts without a single edit war, and zero harassment. 80% of them are women. [1] http://newslines.org http://newslines.org [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley
- tokenadult 12y ago
  How come the Getting Started page link from the Newslines front page[1] returns a 404 error? A different link that has the link text "Click here to get started"[2] from a different page does work. Why aren't the link targets consistent? [1] http://newslines.org/getting-started/ http://newslines.org/getting-started/ [2] http://newslines.org/newslines-rewards/ http://newslines.org/newslines-rewards/
tsuyoshi 12y ago
Here is my anecdote: I wanted to know more about my representative to the state legislature. First I went to Wikipedia. It had a stub page, with only basic biographic information. Checking elsewhere, I found that the FBI and IRS raided his office, home, and business some time ago. His chief of staff, his business partner, and and a former staffer that became a judge were all convicted of fraud and/or tax evasion. Other than this, his political career was a whole lot of nothing. So, having done this research, I put it into the relevant Wikipedia article, with appropriate references to news articles and legal documents, carefully noting that he himself was never charged with anything. Reading between the lines, I realize that the authorities tried to get his subordinates to roll over on him, but failed - but that kind of subjectivity doesn't belong in an encyclopedia article. Anyway, less than a minute later, the change was reverted because of "vandalism". Whoever reverted it had either not even glanced at the change, or was a supporter of this politician, protecting his page from negative information. Probably the former, but who knows? This was the last, and worst, example of me wasting my time trying to contribute to Wikipedia. I have had every single change I have ever made to Wikipedia reverted (going back years). Sometimes I have done it anonymously, sometimes I have logged in; it doesn't make any difference in my experience. What seems to matter is if you're willing to put in the time to master Wikipedia's bureaucratic procedure, which I am not. I just don't bother anymore. So to me, this article makes perfect sense. But I have to admit that I still read Wikipedia all the time. It is without question, the most useful web site there is. It's not as comprehensive as I would like, and for subjective information it's actually quite bad, but I think that in general it seems to be getting better over time, on both counts. So I don't know if you can say it's declining. By the way, despite him either being a crook, or merely employing crooks on his staff, I voted for him anyway, just last week. I really don't have a vendetta against this guy.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  Got link to article/your version? It's easy enough to restore your edit, and/or raise it on the talk page. WP has lots of ways to deal with people protecting pages from 'negative' info, although they do unfortunately require a fair bit of bureaucracy and patience.
ggchappell 12y ago
This page just cries out for a date. When was it written? I can't tell. The latest reference is 2012, but that leaves a 2-year period. I tried the PDF. No date there, either. Try the citations. Finally: 2013. But that's 'way too much work to answer an obvious question. So, everyone -- including Mr. Halftaker -- when you publish anything, put a date on it!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
bane 12y ago
Fixing WP is simple. Edits should go through a formal draft->pink->red review cycle. Right now they go through a edit->immediate rejection cycle. By policy anybody should be able to submit draft edits, and these edits should hang around in a review queue for a large-ish group of reviewers to look them over and thumb-up, thumb-down them in a "pink" review. Any acceptance or rejection should require 3 or 4 thumbs up or down. If a thumbdown is given, the reviewer must state what's wrong with the edit (bad spelling/grammar/poor citation, whatever). If the edit is ultimately rejected, the person who submitted it now has 3 or 4 pieces of feedback, hopefully one of them useful. Now they can fix the edit, resubmit and now it goes to the red review. If the edit passes it goes to the red review. Red review is the same, but if it passes it becomes "published" and the change is made. Red reviewers should be the top editors of WP. Because the pink review should filter out most of the crap, they'll hopefully be dealing with higher level stuff and their rejection rates should be lower. Only in cases where the edit somehow was really bad, should they reject it. Now here's the other thing. If a red review results in a rejection, the submitter has to start over, but the editors that passed it in the pink review are penalized in some way. Perhaps a Karma system (e.g. to become a red reviewer, you must have pink reviewed correctly 500 edits or something, to become a pink reviewer you must have 200 edits succeed). Red reviewers with too high of a rejection/pass ratio may lose their editing powers as well in case some power-mad editor starts bulk deletionist policies. This way people can both submit edits and be engaged as editors (so they can both see the crap that editors have to deal with and participate in improving WP at the meta-level). Problem editors can also be flagged by contributors, an editor with some number of flags (say 10) by different submitters should be reviewed. After each review, the number of flags that will cause the next review should increase (maybe double or something). This will keep high quality editors in place and not waste time reviewing editor's work.
- niels_olson 12y ago
  The new-page patrol seems like a reasonable place to add something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed
- jpatokal 12y ago
  You've pretty much described "Flagged revisions" (1), which has been in testing since 2008 or thereabouts and has been adopted by a bunch of non-English Wikipedias, most notably German. Despite years of debate about the pros and cons, it has not been adopted on the English WP, although a very watered down version called "Pending changes" has been live since Dec 2012 (2). (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PC2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PC2012
lnanek2 12y ago
> algorithmic tools used to reject contributions Kind of reminds me of Twitter banning all my games that let users tweet scores using their APIs as being too much like a full Twitter client. It's pretty obvious Twitter just aimed a bot at everyone and didn't actually look at who they were banning.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
a3_nm 12y ago
I agree with the submission: I think there is potentially a problem of test edits, or unsourced edits, being reverted automatically or in an unpleasant manner, and that newcomers can easily be discouraged from contributing. I think part of it is a problem with the culture, and part of it is a necessary evil: when articles achieve higher quality overall, there is bound to be less adding and more discussing about what to add, so more changes will not make their way to the article. (This is the case for any document, you start with a lot of writing and then there is a lot of painful editing, I don't see why it would be different here.) Also, the more you try to structure and source the articles, and the harder the syntax is going to be, compared to the time where you could just write anything and add it to the article. Yet, for all of this, I have never been able to understand why, whenever a discussion about Wikipedia comes up on HN, so many people complain about getting all their changes reverted. I have edited Wikipedia for years and I think at most 3 cases did I see something reverted for no good reason. Maybe this is because I edit in less controversial areas (computer science), or because most of my edits are just typographic fixes, or because I also edit on different Wikipedias (especially the French one), or because I'm vaguely familiar with some of the customs or policies? It would be really nice if people complaining about bad reverts could provide links to the diff of their edits, the reverts, and the subsequent discussion if any. One nice thing about Wikipedia is that the history is always public, so if something valuable has been reverted for bad reasons, it can be seen, and added back; if someone seems to be discouraging new users from contributing, anyone can see it and let them know; and if there was a misunderstanding, maybe we can see that the two sides were of good faith. It's a bit frustrating to see everyone complain but never have links to objective facts where you can see what went wrong and try to understand why.
pm24601 12y ago
My brief story to add to the general theme is: * I knew personally that a regionally important corporate lobbying group was funding a ballot measure. (For the moment assume I am correct: this was not a 'secret': everyone in local politics knew this. It just wasn't 'official') * I edited the organizations wikipedia page to state that the group was promoting the ballot measure. The edit was reverted. Was I going to spend time trying to track down obscure articles on local newspaper websites to prove this to wikipedia? No. It just wasn't worth it. I have come to the conclusion that the really interesting information is still in peoples heads. I rarely find wikipedia turning up in my searches any more - in particular anything "controversial" or anything where there is moneyed interests involved who are interested in suppressing the other side. I actually don't see a solution for Wikipedia. It is trying for some sort of 'objective' encyclopedia. This is well and good for questions like what is an atom in the 21st century. However, lets pretend that it is a 1901. "What is an atom?" was controversial and the back and forth that would have been interesting to know as a 1901 reader would be edited out of the 1901 version of Wikipedia. Quite simply for me: * something is interesting if it is "controversial" (global warming, health care, etc.) * I am not interested in an "objective" sanitized view. I have a bias and I am not interested in hearing about the "controversy about global warming". Therefore I am biased toward sites predisposed to my perspective. * Others have different preferred bias. * Trying to come to a group decision where both sides are convinced that their side is correct is impossible ( in particular if one side is paid to not change their mind ) * If something is really important (i.e. job critical) I want to go to a source expert that I trust irregardless of what the 'crowd' thinks. I know what the standards I am applying to determine who I regard as the expert. * rarely search for important things and find the wikipedia article interesting Therefore: * Wikipedia as a common community encyclopedia only works for the uninteresting 'factoids' that are not important * I filter out wikipedia when looking at the google results when I am looking for something I really care about getting correct.

144 points by sehugg 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Mithaldu 12y ago
What article was that? I'd love to go and dig to see what kind of bot would go so hilariously wrong.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - jackcarter 12y ago
    Check your browser extensions. You might have one installed that invisibly changes 'disruption' to 'bullshitting.'
    - Domenic_S 12y ago
      This is classic if true...
      - Natsu 12y ago
        Classic? I think you mean clbuttic :) (ass -> butt)
    - phaemon 12y ago
      Hehe, I think you've nailed it. What was the username of the person? (they've deleted their comments, rather than just admitting they screwed up).
    - 6chars 12y ago
      This could be the culprit: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disrupt-to-bullshit/mahaemfhlcjficbbkbpmkbhhenfnikcf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disrupt-to-bullshi...
  - Domenic_S 12y ago
    I'm not seeing it. I see you change "disruption" to "shifting" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=623181742&oldid=623041975 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... and then Monkbot changed it back to "disruption", not ClueBotNG. Cluebot actually reverted someone else's vandalism and restored your version (your spellcheck'd version) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=625593375&oldid=625593366 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... Maybe the problem is that the changelog is too hard for casuals to parse?
  - deathanatos 12y ago
    Are you (or am I?) reading the changelog right? Your edits (while harmless, in my opinion) don't match up with your edit messages. The bot you name isn't the one that reverted you (but Cluebot does get involved later). The bot reverted two anonymous edits, so I can't truly tell if they're yours, but you yell at the bot, so I presume so. Edit 1: anonymous IPv6 addr removes the word "also"; article makes sense with and without it. No edit message. Edit 2: anonymous IPv4 addr changes the word "disruption" to "shifting"; article makes grammatical sense either way, unclear to me which is better. Message is "Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been." This is the change that the message doesn't seem to match up with the content, specifically, this diff[2]. Edit 3: "Monkbot" reverts the previous two edits. Perhaps a tad strange, but the edits were strange and from IP addrs. Edit 4: You log in, and yell at the bot[3], "Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been. Thank you for undoing my last edit you stupid bot, I'm trying to removed page defacements NOT ADD THEM." However, this edit again doesn't match the message, and (again) changes the word "disruption" to (this time) "shiftingting" (an honest typo which you correct immediately), and also changes the minus sign on a temperature to a hypen. Edit 5: Your spell correction. Edit 6: Someone experimenting (anon IPv4) adds "hello". Edit 7: Same IP changes "hello" to "booooooooty" Edit 8: Clue Bot NG reverts _to_ your edit, undoing the previous two edits (but leaves your changes) — definitely the correct action. [1]: I'm starting from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=prev&oldid=623041975 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=prev&oldid=623181742 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=next&oldid=623197577 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ...
  - Zikes 12y ago
    I have a hard time parsing those logs, but from what I can tell you kept trying to change "disruption" to "shifting". I even went to a year-old version of the article (you said the typo had been there since 2009) and did a search on the page for "shi" and couldn't find it, but "disruption" was still there. I suspect you had some sort of toy browser extension that swapped words, a la Cloud to Butt [1]. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
  - xxxyy 12y ago
    Can you point to the specific edit you made that has been reverted by the bot? I can see [1] that your first edit to the article "Thermohaline circulation" was a one-word edit and was introducing a non-existent word 'shiftingting', thus being incorrect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Valarauca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Valarauc...
  - Animats 12y ago
    Ah. Part of the problem is that you haven't registered for a Wikipedia account. ClueBot NG, which is a machine learning system, uses information from your track record as an editor as one of its inputs. Editing anonymously, you have no reputation.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      The person had registered an account.
      - Animats 12y ago
        Not at first. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... All the actions by ClueBot NG in that article in the last year applied to edits from unregistered users. The edit by [173.14.38.69]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=623181742&oldid=623041975 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been.) changed "disruption" to "shifting", an edit inconsistent with the edit comment. The word "bullshitting" did not appear. That was reverted by human user "Vsmith" (a user with over 100,000 edits), not a 'bot. Then, this edit by user "Valarauca": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=623873692&oldid=623197577 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been. Thank you for undoing my last edit you stupid bot, I'm trying to removed page defacements NOT ADD THEM.) changed an em dash to an en dash, and "disrupting" to "shiftingting". That botch is fixed in the next edit by user "Valarauca": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circulation&diff=623873812&oldid=623873692 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Spellling correction on previous change.) "Shifting" then stayed in the article. The Wikipedia processes and 'bots handled this just fine. The cause of the problem was a non-useful edit comment on an edit of marginal quality.
        DanBC 12y ago
        The person who started this thread, posting to HN, was always using a logged in account on Wikipedia.
- VLM 12y ago
  Are the comments being deleted here on HN a meta joke about deletionist misbehavior on wikipedia? Depending on the answer maybe a meta joke would be to revert any changes I make to this post. One interesting way to summarize the problem is wikipedia provides tools designed to make it easier to destroy than to create and then rewards destruction. No great surprise what results.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure they were just deleted because the poster is terminally embarrassed at discovering that his edits were reverted because he was inadvertently vandalizing them due to a browser plugin, rather than fixing problems like he thought he was.
Diederich 12y ago
Very strange. I've never had any trivial typo fix edits reverted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Diederich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Diederic...
- shmerl 12y ago
  Me neither. I guess it's random, or bots monitor only specific articles?
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    I would have to guess latter? Monitoring all of Wikipedia would be a huge task, and most people (and therefore bot operators) only care about certain articles.
- DanBC 12y ago
  I have, more than once, by children using Twinkle. I left a polite message on the talk page of one, and they apologised (which was nice, I didn't expect them to) and they re-reverted the edit. I left a polite message on the talk page of another; and was templated with a vandalism warning. I left polite messages on the Twinkle page and they removed twinkle from that user and spent some time making sure I was welcome etc. Wikipedians seem to be aware of the dangers of rapid Twinkle or roll-back use, especially by people racking up some score to use to gain adminship, and they seem to have made changes to reduce the fallout.

NickKitchen 12y ago

The need is too great to have the service that wikipedia provides, if people are becoming less willing to keep it accurate then that is interesting. If people are consistently finding inaccurate or uninformative articles then they will search for their information somewhere else I found this page where you can listen to the 'sound of wikipedia', basically a different guitar string is plucked at a different pitch when certain changes are made to wikipedia articles. It is pretty cool in the sense that it shows a lot of changes are being made, however you are able to see and hear the amount of changes made by bots, which is surprisingly few http://listen.hatnote.com/#fr,en http://listen.hatnote.com/#fr,en

avivo 12y ago
That link is great! Watching the page gives you a much more visceral sense of how wikipedia actually works, and ~all the things in the world that people might care about. Click "about" to read the key. (e.g. purple blobs are bots) It is also especially fascinating to watch during a time with realtime news you care about. I've seen edits to Rosetta and Philae while just watching briefly!
Springtime 12y ago
This is beautiful.

reitanqild 12y ago

And, sooner or later someone might get access to stackexchange logs (they aren't open, are they?) and say the same.

bunderbunder 12y ago
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

Animats 12y ago

This claim keeps coming up. Reality is that Wikipedia is mostly done. All the important article were done years ago. Now it's just maintenance. Look at incoming new articles - spam, minor politicians and sports figures, etc. Paper encyclopedias followed the same pattern. Creating Encyclopedia Britannica was a huge job. Annual maintenance was done by a small staff.

maxerickson 12y ago
(As a reader of Wikipedia) I frequently see opportunities to improve quality, clarity and readability. Maintenance doesn't quite capture that.
- ketralnis 12y ago
  > improve quality, clarity and readability That sounds exactly like maintenance to me, as distinct from documenting new things from scratch
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    I was mostly responding to the tone I saw in All the important article were done years ago. An unnecessarily complicated and difficult to read article isn't really done.
- jseliger 12y ago
  (As a reader of Wikipedia) I frequently see opportunities to improve quality, clarity and readability. Agreed. But I stopped contributing ages ago, because all of my contributions were almost immediately reversed. It's pretty obvious that most pages are monitored by people with a stake in the content of those pages, and they are much more energetic in pitching their story than I am in trying to make some small improvements.
TillE 12y ago
Not even close. If you're interested in a particular area of history and you've read a few books on the subject, you'll know that Wikipedia is missing reams of useful information. Maybe Wikipedia is ok for current stuff and the 20th century, but it barely scratches the surface for most of medieval Europe, for example. There's absolutely no need to be constrained to the terse articles and limited scope of a traditional encyclopedia in this respect. In fact, Britannica has substantially more information on certain topics.

nanoscopic 12y ago

I used to contribute to wikipedia. I stopped after a number of articles I created were deleted by "notability nazis". There is a strong favoritism of what people think is notable over what actually is. The rules are not followed and many things that should be removed aren't while things that should stay are removed. I am not interested in participating in a system where my hard work is discarded regardless of excuses.

ghaff 12y ago
Even if I understand why the rule/criterion exists, notability is a particularly problematic Wikipedia rule. Just about everything is notable if you get local enough (whether in terms of location, field, community, etc.) And the proofs of notability, such as they are, end up being (ironically) rather rooted in things like publication in dead tree periodicals or books even if that makes actual verification difficult. So you end up with notability being rather arbitrarily decided by admins who see nothing wrong with long articles on obscure pieces of geek fandom while being unconvinced about the notability of people like influential executives at major companies, journalists, and the like.
- t0mbstone 12y ago
  Why even have notability be a requirement? Why can't the wikipedia just hold everything about everything?
  - ghaff 12y ago
    The "deletionist" argument is essentially that, absent a notability requirement, Wikipedia would become this dumping ground for articles whose facts would be difficult to verify and which interested so few people that maintaining any sort of quality would be difficult. I'm much more on the inclusionist side but but I also appreciate the concerns if it were taken to an extreme. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
    - 12y ago

owenmarshall 12y ago

Wikipedia has so many rules and restrictions around editing an article that the only people who can invest enough time to learn them are people whose time is otherwise worthless. I once saw a great example when a notable athlete was traded from one team to another... I think it was a famous basketball player, but can't remember who. On a whim I checked the article history page and saw the same pattern: a new user to Wikipedia would make the edit, and it was quickly reverted by one established editor. When I looked at the talk page, the WP editor made it clear that it was Official Wikipedia Policy that even though both clubs had announced the trade, and news was being carried on multiple outlets, the trade wasn't official enough until the NBA released a daily transfer list with his name on it. All five new editors were threatened with WP:3RR and WP:yaddayadda instead of encouraged. But hey, when the list was officially released twenty-five minutes later the editor who got the page locked got to make the edit. Great job guys! Way to add value to the project! This same behavior happens on every site where authority is meted out based on activity, not ability. I once tried to correct an elisp entry on a Stack Overflow answer: my edit was autorejected because it had less than five characters difference. So I added a fairly pointless comment to get past the automatic rejection, only to have someone reject it because the comment wasn't sufficiently useful (go figure). I was finally able to get someone to make a correction by going into the Stack Overflow chat and trying to explain things... except the user, who freely admitted to never using emacs before, messed up and made things worse. Whatever. My give-a-fucks were all out. It's probably still wrong!

flexie 12y ago
I experienced the same thing. Nothing is as demotivating as seeing an edit you spent hours researching and writing deleted for some obscure reason and then rewritten a few days later by the very same guys who deleted your entry.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  Citizendum experienced this early on, which is why it's a ghost town now.
serve_yay 12y ago

TheCoreh 12y ago

I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. There's no restriction to doing so, is there? To avoid having super high server costs, it could even be a "soft-fork", where only the pages which are edited are stored locally, all other content is fetched from the original. If these restrictions are really affecting the quality of the articles in Wikipedia, we'll see the quality of the articles on the fork grow, at which point they can be merged back by Wikipedia.

muuh-gnu 12y ago
> I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. Wikipedia _was_ forked, several times. The reason you dont seem to know about them are: 1. The added utility was not sufficient to make an impact strong enough to pull people away from wikipedia. 2. The added no utility to the fork at all or made things bad at Wikipedia even worse. Wikipedia is like democracy, it is the worst free encyclopedia we have, except all the others.
- mxfh 12y ago
  Forking is not enough, the whole thing has to get out of it's wiki format and be transitioned into some kind of purpose built system, the wiki approach was great for growing fast but is hell to maintain or understand when used for content and administration in parallel. The best thing I could think of would be a streamlined kind of git with repositories for every article and an easy to understand ticketing system and maybe the possibility to have concurrent versions of articles one branch for the deletionist and notability enforcing kind and another inclusive one.
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    See my comment above. We have solved most of the problems for crowdsourced news-based pages and biographies at Newslines. We cut out almost all Wikipedia's problems by focusing on newsworthiness as the standard of inclusion; letting users create posts based on news events, not long-form articles; and using a standard post approval process.
- 12y ago

kmfrk 12y ago

Hell is other Wikipedia editors. Truly.

JasonFruit 12y ago

I've contributed a bit to Wikipedia, including a couple recent new articles, and I have never experienced this. Maybe I'm so extraordinarily skilled that nobody would inflict ham-handed moderation on me, but I don't think that's the case. Probably it's just that I'm not so glaringly awful that I should be discouraged from contributing again. I think the drop in new-contributor retention is an intended effect, an example of the system succeeding.

WalterBright 12y ago

One possible solution is for Wikipedia to have two versions - one with a very conservative editorial policy, and a second with a very loose, liberal one. Occasionally material that has proven it's worth in the second gets merged into the first.

didibus 12y ago
That's actually a good idea.

tokenadult 12y ago

I've seen a lot of complaints about Wikipedia here on Hacker News over the years. Yet I also see a lot of comments and even submissions of new stories that come straight from Wikipedia. This love-hate relationship suggests that Wikipedia has plenty of strengths along with its weaknesses. May I ask a question of everyone here? Suppose an Elon Musk or another philanthropist established an Online Encyclopedia X Prize, setting up a financial incentive to try to build something better than Wikipedia. If there were a prize for a new-and-improved free, online encyclopedia, what criteria should be used for awarding the prize? What could a new project do to show it is building a good encyclopedia, and that it deserves a cash prize to keep its growth going as it wins user acceptance? What specific goals would show that the project passed a reasonable "finish line" in a race to build a viable competitor to Wikipedia? I am a Wikipedian. My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia's administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias) will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the article topics. A new effort to build a free, online encyclopedia with lots of user input (which I would enthusiastically support) would have to figure out how to deal with this problem. In respectful disagreement with some comments posted earlier in this thread, I think that most Wikipedia articles on many subjects are terrible, actively misleading and very poorly sourced. I am trying my best to fix articles on the topics for which I have the most reliable sources. (I have an office full of reference books for writing projects I do for my paid work.) It has been a long, slow slog since 2010 for me to improve the sourcing and make more neutral in point of view some of the most-read articles about the psychology of human intelligence, for example. Many Wikipedians don't read books, but only look up information on Google University, and think that anything that isn't found in an online source is not a verifiable fact. That makes the editing process very slow.

jbob2000 12y ago
It should not involve humans in its aggregation and moderation. Needs to be intelligent enough to gather information and categorize it without the biases of a human being.

CurtMonash 12y ago

After my experience in DMOZ, I have carefully NOT joined Wikipedia as an editor. However, I make minor spelling, grammatical and/or stylistic changes when I notice the need. I also correct obvious factual errors. I usually don't introduced NEW facts, but I delete false existing ones if I notice them. And hey -- if I'm not perfect by the standards of "No Original Research" or even "Neutral Point of View", I don't have a role that allows me to be punished. I just move things in the right direction (by Wikipedia's standards as I understand them) as far as I can be bothered to, then go on with my life.

jholman 12y ago
If you are making changes when you notice the need (and thank you for that work!), then you ARE an editor of Wikipedia. That's what that word means.
- CurtMonash 12y ago
  True enough. But I'm not a member of the organization. :)

vacri 12y ago

The title of the article is based on the faulty premise that fewer editors means a decline. Edit: the first sentence of the abstract indicates that they don't mean a literal decline in pure numbers :)

polemic 12y ago

Well here's another useful correlation: the first iphone launched mid 2007, the peak of the active editors graph. Perhaps the rise of mobile is the true cause here.

Torgo 12y ago
Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and smartphones are all in full effect by that point. 2007 has got to be Eternal September for the Web.

sparkzilla 12y ago

As someone building a direct competitor to Wikipedia for crowdsourced biographies and news-based pages [1], I have come to the conclusion that the wiki software while responsible for the site's success, is also the cause of its inevitable decline. The software causes almost every problem that people complain about, mainly because it lets real or imagined experts have too much power over the page. It's simply easier for an editor to reject new information, than to go through the pain of adding it. In one case, I struggled for weeks to try to get a simple sentence into the site, only to be harassed by the site's administrators, when I challenged a particularly ambiguous rule. Entrenched editors such as William Connolley [2] on Global Warming, act as guardians for whole sections of the site, and do not allow any dissenting opinion, censoring and minimizing views that do not suit their agenda. So much of this is simply unnecessary in a better designed system. As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information, which makes it increasingly difficult to add new information. Many of those rules, such as those for notability, conflict of interest, and reliable sources are ambiguous and arbitrarily applied, giving even more power to editors and admins, instead of content creators. This means that the site has become rigid and nobody wants to maintain it. The quality of pages is declining rapidly. It is also very easy to harass other people on the system, so much so that women and minorities are virtually excluded. We have taken a different approach with great results. By avoiding the page-based metaphor and giving better tools to our editors have created a system that makes it easy to add information without being harassed. We also pay our writers and editors, and are implementing a revenue share system so they can actually get some benefit from their work. So far our writers have added 25,000 posts without a single edit war, and zero harassment. 80% of them are women. [1] http://newslines.org http://newslines.org [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley

tokenadult 12y ago
How come the Getting Started page link from the Newslines front page[1] returns a 404 error? A different link that has the link text "Click here to get started"[2] from a different page does work. Why aren't the link targets consistent? [1] http://newslines.org/getting-started/ http://newslines.org/getting-started/ [2] http://newslines.org/newslines-rewards/ http://newslines.org/newslines-rewards/

tsuyoshi 12y ago

Here is my anecdote: I wanted to know more about my representative to the state legislature. First I went to Wikipedia. It had a stub page, with only basic biographic information. Checking elsewhere, I found that the FBI and IRS raided his office, home, and business some time ago. His chief of staff, his business partner, and and a former staffer that became a judge were all convicted of fraud and/or tax evasion. Other than this, his political career was a whole lot of nothing. So, having done this research, I put it into the relevant Wikipedia article, with appropriate references to news articles and legal documents, carefully noting that he himself was never charged with anything. Reading between the lines, I realize that the authorities tried to get his subordinates to roll over on him, but failed - but that kind of subjectivity doesn't belong in an encyclopedia article. Anyway, less than a minute later, the change was reverted because of "vandalism". Whoever reverted it had either not even glanced at the change, or was a supporter of this politician, protecting his page from negative information. Probably the former, but who knows? This was the last, and worst, example of me wasting my time trying to contribute to Wikipedia. I have had every single change I have ever made to Wikipedia reverted (going back years). Sometimes I have done it anonymously, sometimes I have logged in; it doesn't make any difference in my experience. What seems to matter is if you're willing to put in the time to master Wikipedia's bureaucratic procedure, which I am not. I just don't bother anymore. So to me, this article makes perfect sense. But I have to admit that I still read Wikipedia all the time. It is without question, the most useful web site there is. It's not as comprehensive as I would like, and for subjective information it's actually quite bad, but I think that in general it seems to be getting better over time, on both counts. So I don't know if you can say it's declining. By the way, despite him either being a crook, or merely employing crooks on his staff, I voted for him anyway, just last week. I really don't have a vendetta against this guy.

jpatokal 12y ago
Got link to article/your version? It's easy enough to restore your edit, and/or raise it on the talk page. WP has lots of ways to deal with people protecting pages from 'negative' info, although they do unfortunately require a fair bit of bureaucracy and patience.

ggchappell 12y ago

This page just cries out for a date. When was it written? I can't tell. The latest reference is 2012, but that leaves a 2-year period. I tried the PDF. No date there, either. Try the citations. Finally: 2013. But that's 'way too much work to answer an obvious question. So, everyone -- including Mr. Halftaker -- when you publish anything, put a date on it!

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

bane 12y ago

Fixing WP is simple. Edits should go through a formal draft->pink->red review cycle. Right now they go through a edit->immediate rejection cycle. By policy anybody should be able to submit draft edits, and these edits should hang around in a review queue for a large-ish group of reviewers to look them over and thumb-up, thumb-down them in a "pink" review. Any acceptance or rejection should require 3 or 4 thumbs up or down. If a thumbdown is given, the reviewer must state what's wrong with the edit (bad spelling/grammar/poor citation, whatever). If the edit is ultimately rejected, the person who submitted it now has 3 or 4 pieces of feedback, hopefully one of them useful. Now they can fix the edit, resubmit and now it goes to the red review. If the edit passes it goes to the red review. Red review is the same, but if it passes it becomes "published" and the change is made. Red reviewers should be the top editors of WP. Because the pink review should filter out most of the crap, they'll hopefully be dealing with higher level stuff and their rejection rates should be lower. Only in cases where the edit somehow was really bad, should they reject it. Now here's the other thing. If a red review results in a rejection, the submitter has to start over, but the editors that passed it in the pink review are penalized in some way. Perhaps a Karma system (e.g. to become a red reviewer, you must have pink reviewed correctly 500 edits or something, to become a pink reviewer you must have 200 edits succeed). Red reviewers with too high of a rejection/pass ratio may lose their editing powers as well in case some power-mad editor starts bulk deletionist policies. This way people can both submit edits and be engaged as editors (so they can both see the crap that editors have to deal with and participate in improving WP at the meta-level). Problem editors can also be flagged by contributors, an editor with some number of flags (say 10) by different submitters should be reviewed. After each review, the number of flags that will cause the next review should increase (maybe double or something). This will keep high quality editors in place and not waste time reviewing editor's work.

niels_olson 12y ago
The new-page patrol seems like a reasonable place to add something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed
jpatokal 12y ago
You've pretty much described "Flagged revisions" (1), which has been in testing since 2008 or thereabouts and has been adopted by a bunch of non-English Wikipedias, most notably German. Despite years of debate about the pros and cons, it has not been adopted on the English WP, although a very watered down version called "Pending changes" has been live since Dec 2012 (2). (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PC2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PC2012

lnanek2 12y ago

> algorithmic tools used to reject contributions Kind of reminds me of Twitter banning all my games that let users tweet scores using their APIs as being too much like a full Twitter client. It's pretty obvious Twitter just aimed a bot at everyone and didn't actually look at who they were banning.

deleted 12y ago

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a3_nm 12y ago

I agree with the submission: I think there is potentially a problem of test edits, or unsourced edits, being reverted automatically or in an unpleasant manner, and that newcomers can easily be discouraged from contributing. I think part of it is a problem with the culture, and part of it is a necessary evil: when articles achieve higher quality overall, there is bound to be less adding and more discussing about what to add, so more changes will not make their way to the article. (This is the case for any document, you start with a lot of writing and then there is a lot of painful editing, I don't see why it would be different here.) Also, the more you try to structure and source the articles, and the harder the syntax is going to be, compared to the time where you could just write anything and add it to the article. Yet, for all of this, I have never been able to understand why, whenever a discussion about Wikipedia comes up on HN, so many people complain about getting all their changes reverted. I have edited Wikipedia for years and I think at most 3 cases did I see something reverted for no good reason. Maybe this is because I edit in less controversial areas (computer science), or because most of my edits are just typographic fixes, or because I also edit on different Wikipedias (especially the French one), or because I'm vaguely familiar with some of the customs or policies? It would be really nice if people complaining about bad reverts could provide links to the diff of their edits, the reverts, and the subsequent discussion if any. One nice thing about Wikipedia is that the history is always public, so if something valuable has been reverted for bad reasons, it can be seen, and added back; if someone seems to be discouraging new users from contributing, anyone can see it and let them know; and if there was a misunderstanding, maybe we can see that the two sides were of good faith. It's a bit frustrating to see everyone complain but never have links to objective facts where you can see what went wrong and try to understand why.

pm24601 12y ago

My brief story to add to the general theme is: * I knew personally that a regionally important corporate lobbying group was funding a ballot measure. (For the moment assume I am correct: this was not a 'secret': everyone in local politics knew this. It just wasn't 'official') * I edited the organizations wikipedia page to state that the group was promoting the ballot measure. The edit was reverted. Was I going to spend time trying to track down obscure articles on local newspaper websites to prove this to wikipedia? No. It just wasn't worth it. I have come to the conclusion that the really interesting information is still in peoples heads. I rarely find wikipedia turning up in my searches any more - in particular anything "controversial" or anything where there is moneyed interests involved who are interested in suppressing the other side. I actually don't see a solution for Wikipedia. It is trying for some sort of 'objective' encyclopedia. This is well and good for questions like what is an atom in the 21st century. However, lets pretend that it is a 1901. "What is an atom?" was controversial and the back and forth that would have been interesting to know as a 1901 reader would be edited out of the 1901 version of Wikipedia. Quite simply for me: * something is interesting if it is "controversial" (global warming, health care, etc.) * I am not interested in an "objective" sanitized view. I have a bias and I am not interested in hearing about the "controversy about global warming". Therefore I am biased toward sites predisposed to my perspective. * Others have different preferred bias. * Trying to come to a group decision where both sides are convinced that their side is correct is impossible ( in particular if one side is paid to not change their mind ) * If something is really important (i.e. job critical) I want to go to a source expert that I trust irregardless of what the 'crowd' thinks. I know what the standards I am applying to determine who I regard as the expert. * rarely search for important things and find the wikipedia article interesting Therefore: * Wikipedia as a common community encyclopedia only works for the uninteresting 'factoids' that are not important * I filter out wikipedia when looking at the google results when I am looking for something I really care about getting correct.