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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

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.
- meepmorp 12y ago
  This would presumably use automatic systems developed by humans, who'd also judge the ability of the systems to gather and organize accurate and relevant information according to human standards. Doesn't that just push the biases into a less obvious domain?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  That's a scary thought. Without the biases of human beings, articles might start to say very strange and unwelcome things.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  Yeah, no ... did you ever see CPedia? Cuil tried building an automated encyclopedia. It out-surrealed any Markov bot you ever met.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sparkzilla 12y ago
They already have a prize: The Wikimedia Foundation raises $50 million in donations each year. They have 200 or so engineering staff. Surely they should be able to fix it themselves.
- neilk 12y ago
  1) Having a large staff is the opposite of radical change. 2) As a former WMF staffer - let me tell you they are well aware of the issues mentioned by Halfaker. They've been commissioning and releasing studies like this since 2009. They all had the same conclusion, that 2007 was the point where the community shifted, from collaboration to make cool stuff, to defense against vandalism. It's not clear what the WMF can do to change this, without engaging in a "takeover" of the community or completely changing the model of how the wiki works. The former would alienate everybody, even the editors who want change. The latter is technically infeasible; even if they wrote new tools from scratch, Wikipedia interacts with everyone else's tools and plugins. Even if you change the id of a div you'll probably have a thousand people screaming at you the next day. The WMF can propose that people be nicer, or write tools that are more welcoming to new users, but all that means is that you get to have your edit rejected with a prettier icon. The main problem is in the edit cycle itself, not the tool that's used. Many editors think that Wikipedia is basically done, and repelling new users is actually a good thing. They aren't bad people -- they just think that encyclopedia quality is far more important than growing the community. So when they see something that seems wrong to them, they revert. Reversion, for Wikipedians, is really how they open the discussion. You're expected to keep going if you think your edit is good. But because we have a linear edit history, with only one live copy of the article, it feels like a slap in the face to the new user. Things that would pass muster for weeks or months, in the past, are reverted instantly. Often times the criticisms of the new edit are justified, but the standards are ludicrously high now. You'd better be ready to cite everything rigorously and be familiar with a zillion policies. Not all of them are like this, but enough to make a gauntlet for new users. And those new users just go somewhere else.
  - niels_olson 12y ago
    I think one thing that people could do, as they could all over the internet, is be encouraged to spend more time in the new section. One wonders if perhaps users who have been slapped by an immediate revert should be encouraged to take up the new-page patrol. As an aside, the first and only time I came across a bug in Mediawiki, back when I was pulling the nightly trunk, it turned out to be induced by a change of semantics in the minor version of PHP I had (which was well ahead of what Wikipedia was using at the time). Tim Starling not only weighed in, but took PHP to task. That semantic change in PHP was promptly reverted! If you see him, say hi. He'll never remember me.

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.

meepmorp 12y ago
This would presumably use automatic systems developed by humans, who'd also judge the ability of the systems to gather and organize accurate and relevant information according to human standards. Doesn't that just push the biases into a less obvious domain?
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
That's a scary thought. Without the biases of human beings, articles might start to say very strange and unwelcome things.
davidgerard 12y ago
Yeah, no ... did you ever see CPedia? Cuil tried building an automated encyclopedia. It out-surrealed any Markov bot you ever met.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sparkzilla 12y ago

They already have a prize: The Wikimedia Foundation raises $50 million in donations each year. They have 200 or so engineering staff. Surely they should be able to fix it themselves.

neilk 12y ago
1) Having a large staff is the opposite of radical change. 2) As a former WMF staffer - let me tell you they are well aware of the issues mentioned by Halfaker. They've been commissioning and releasing studies like this since 2009. They all had the same conclusion, that 2007 was the point where the community shifted, from collaboration to make cool stuff, to defense against vandalism. It's not clear what the WMF can do to change this, without engaging in a "takeover" of the community or completely changing the model of how the wiki works. The former would alienate everybody, even the editors who want change. The latter is technically infeasible; even if they wrote new tools from scratch, Wikipedia interacts with everyone else's tools and plugins. Even if you change the id of a div you'll probably have a thousand people screaming at you the next day. The WMF can propose that people be nicer, or write tools that are more welcoming to new users, but all that means is that you get to have your edit rejected with a prettier icon. The main problem is in the edit cycle itself, not the tool that's used. Many editors think that Wikipedia is basically done, and repelling new users is actually a good thing. They aren't bad people -- they just think that encyclopedia quality is far more important than growing the community. So when they see something that seems wrong to them, they revert. Reversion, for Wikipedians, is really how they open the discussion. You're expected to keep going if you think your edit is good. But because we have a linear edit history, with only one live copy of the article, it feels like a slap in the face to the new user. Things that would pass muster for weeks or months, in the past, are reverted instantly. Often times the criticisms of the new edit are justified, but the standards are ludicrously high now. You'd better be ready to cite everything rigorously and be familiar with a zillion policies. Not all of them are like this, but enough to make a gauntlet for new users. And those new users just go somewhere else.
- niels_olson 12y ago
  I think one thing that people could do, as they could all over the internet, is be encouraged to spend more time in the new section. One wonders if perhaps users who have been slapped by an immediate revert should be encouraged to take up the new-page patrol. As an aside, the first and only time I came across a bug in Mediawiki, back when I was pulling the nightly trunk, it turned out to be induced by a change of semantics in the minor version of PHP I had (which was well ahead of what Wikipedia was using at the time). Tim Starling not only weighed in, but took PHP to task. That semantic change in PHP was promptly reverted! If you see him, say hi. He'll never remember me.