8 ms·

The Decline of Wikipedia (2013)

48 points by Sideloader 11y ago

aerodog 11y ago
So where are we today?
- hga 11y ago
  Looks like here is a place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
- bane 11y ago
  WP and the Wikimedia foundation continue to ignore their internal problems and instead focus on gathering data that shows what everybody already knows, then trying to "solve" it with irrelevant projects that don't even begin to nip at the edges of the issue. We're years in on the issue and WP keeps asking like they don't have any idea what's wrong, even though likely millions of words have been bled on the topic. The only people who don't seem to understand it is WP themselves and the only conclusion one can reach is that they're doing it on purpose.
  - shalmanese 11y ago
    The Wikimedia foundation is well aware of the problem and considers it their top priority. However, it's not clear exactly what a solution would be. The "irrelevant projects" are their best attempt at fixing the issues. Complicating the fact is that the relationship between the Wikimedia foundation and Wikipedia is not like that of a conventional private company to a product they've built. The WMF intentionally delegates large parts of the governance of Wikipedia to the community and cannot autocratically come in and force change without community buy in. This is a philosophical position that was established a long time ago and one which the WMF supports, even if it makes the process of change harder.
    - bane 11y ago
      > However, it's not clear exactly what a solution would be. The issue or course is that they don't publicly acknowledge the issue. They'll produce hundreds of pages of reports on the issue and end it with a "what could the problem be?" with shoulders shrugged. Acknowledging the problem is the first step towards finding the solution. Here's me almost 1500 days ago (4 YEARS!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598491 Here's the recent thing that was going on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 Here's an article on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272466 And another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638 This discussion goes back to 2011 at least, and WP just can't seem to admit that there's a problem.
      - shalmanese 11y ago
        All I can say is that I offered to do some informal product consulting with the WMF a few years ago and I walked into the building thinking I knew what the issues were and what obvious steps were required to fix them and I walked out being as equally confused and frustrated as the people there.
spdegabrielle 11y ago
Gamergate. It's absolutely the right place to look if you want to know how to 'jump the shark'.
- mwfunk 11y ago
  Gamergate jumped the shark when it first became a thing, it didn't need any Wikipedia-related drama to do it. :)
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Curse, a popular games media network which has taken no part in the controversy. I've remained neutral to Gamergate as much as possible, but kept myself informed. One of its core problems is that it kept the name "gamergate" for a lot of similar-but-unrelated issues which makes it encompass a lot more than is humanly digestable by anyone looking it up for the first time. People get kind of crazy when they hear that "women are being attacked", and never really want to hear the full story. The following blog post is one of the most descriptive of the actual issues and comes from someone who was on the side "against" gamergate. I recommend it: http://geekswithwives.com/experiencing-gamergate-from-all-sides/ http://geekswithwives.com/experiencing-gamergate-from-all-si... Edit: As an aside... while I'm neutral, as a gamer and someone who has worked on the sides of the games industry for the past decade, I can't help but feel targeted whenever someone blames "gamergate, and by definition gamers" for whatever B.S. they endured from some random twitter troll under a hashtag anyone can use at any time they feel like.
- hkon 11y ago
  Please elaborate a bit. I am unfamiliar with both terms
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    Definition of Gamergate: depends on who you ask, it's a heavily politicized movement. Best to research this yourself from a variety of sources and come to your own conclusion. Definition of jumping the shark: A late episode of the TV program Happy Days involved a major character jumping over a shark on a pair of water skis. He had done previous stunts involving jumping over things on a motorcycle. Basically the writers ran out of ideas and resorted to things like this to keep viewers interested (not altogether successfully). So now we have the term "jumping the shark" to indicate a decline in quality. edited to change jet ski to water skis
DanBC 11y ago
> The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, [EDIT to prevent tedious distracting subthreads] operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage. > When asked to identify Wikipedia’s real problem, Moran cites the bureaucratic culture that has formed around the rules and guidelines on contributing, which have become labyrinthine over the years. The page explaining a policy called Neutral Point of View, one of “five pillars” fundamental to Wikipedia, is almost 5,000 words long. “That is the real barrier: policy creep,” he says. I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&prefix=Wikipedia+talk%3AManual+of+Style%2F&fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre... > Their version reads: “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.” They should probably have "and has the stamina to out-last the people incorrectly reverting good edits for spurious reasons" in there somewhere.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere ... Management wisdom of the crowds.
- brador 11y ago
  > estimated to be 90 percent male Why did you include this? It seems out of place, unless you're saying it's the heavy skew of males that's causing the beurocracy?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    It's a quote from the article. Why are you fixated on that sentence fragment from a much larger quote?
unavoidable 11y ago
Wikipedia gets a worse rap than it really deserves. If you ignore most of the pedantic self-important editors/trolls on WP, it's actually a great experience to contribute. I write a lot of articles on Canadian/British law and history, and the WPProjects are very supportive and generally polite. Otherwise, I don't really need to interact with anybody. I simply enjoy contributing to the organization of human knowledge. Nearly a decade and thousands of edits (on various accounts for reasons of anonymity) later, I have yet to have a real negative experience that has affected me in one way or another.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  Quite possibly because the topics you contribute to are very non controversial.
  - unavoidable 11y ago
    But Wikipedia as an encyclopedic repository is never going to be a good venue for controversial topics. That's not the purpose of an encyclopedia. It's a terrible forum for a debate, and that's the way it will always be. This isn't something wrong with Wikipedia in particular, other than the fact that it is one of the largest and most visited sites on the Internet.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      An encyclopedia with any remote claim to being thorough will inevitably have to cover some controversial topics though.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        A normal encyclopedia is curated by a relatively small amount of people who are able to reach a consensus on a controversial topic, as opposed to random strangers on the Internet with an opinion being able to edit things.
  - DanBC 11y ago
mlinksva 11y ago
Elections for the Wikimedia Foundation community board seats begins tomorrow; candidate statements and Q&A make good next level/updated reading. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Board_elections/2015/Candidates https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Board_elections/2015/Questions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio... Voting requires 300 edits on a Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project ever and 20 in last six months.
pierrec 11y ago
Wikipedia's administration is far from perfect, but you have to give them one thing: the amount of vandalism they've had to deal with is of historical proportions. It's not as impactful as physical mass vandalism, such as what occurred in the world's great revolutions, but that makes the job of dealing with it all the more unrewarding and annoying. I can imagine it would wear me down. It would be interesting to attempt a formal quantification of vandalism received by different projects susceptible to it. I'd be willing to bet that Wikipedia has been more targeted than anything else out there, and by a wide margin. It's good to point out the flaws in the WP's inner workings, but you have to take a step back and realize the task of keeping the whole thing working is quite difficult (I might even have said "impossible" but somehow they're doing it.)
- Animats 11y ago
  "Wikipedia's administration is far from perfect, but you have to give them one thing: the amount of vandalism they've had to deal with is of historical proportions." Simple vandalism is more or less under control. Areas of high controversy (abortion, Israel/Palestine issues) are a huge headache, and much of Wikipedia's bureaucracy spends time dealing with those issues. In between those extremes are attempts to use Wikipedia as a promotional medium. Wikipedia doesn't allow advertising. A lot of people don't get that. I sometimes take on tasks from the Wikipedia conflict of interest noticeboard. This is usually someone trying to promote their band/DJ/company/product, or themself. Most of those are routine, but sometimes it gets out of hand. There are at least three wealthy convicted criminals who have PR people trying to erase, or at least gloss over, their history on Wikipedia. There's a company with a sketchy financial product that set up a massive effort to delete their regulatory and legal problems from Wikipedia. There are several companies which don't like prominent mentions of their product recalls. There are many consumer product companies who try to push their marketing pitch onto Wikipedia, and don't like that their pitch is turned into a cold discussion of their history, mergers, finances, and problems. Without the Wikipedia bureaucracy to push back against that tide of paid promotion, Wikipedia would look like the happy news world of ads and PR Newswire.
  - aerique 11y ago
bra-ket 11y ago
I found that the best way to contribute to wikipedia is from multiple IPs without logging in. Otherwise some troll could delete the entire history of your edits with some wacky explanation.

48 points by Sideloader 11y ago

aerodog 11y ago

So where are we today?

hga 11y ago
Looks like here is a place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
bane 11y ago
WP and the Wikimedia foundation continue to ignore their internal problems and instead focus on gathering data that shows what everybody already knows, then trying to "solve" it with irrelevant projects that don't even begin to nip at the edges of the issue. We're years in on the issue and WP keeps asking like they don't have any idea what's wrong, even though likely millions of words have been bled on the topic. The only people who don't seem to understand it is WP themselves and the only conclusion one can reach is that they're doing it on purpose.
- shalmanese 11y ago
  The Wikimedia foundation is well aware of the problem and considers it their top priority. However, it's not clear exactly what a solution would be. The "irrelevant projects" are their best attempt at fixing the issues. Complicating the fact is that the relationship between the Wikimedia foundation and Wikipedia is not like that of a conventional private company to a product they've built. The WMF intentionally delegates large parts of the governance of Wikipedia to the community and cannot autocratically come in and force change without community buy in. This is a philosophical position that was established a long time ago and one which the WMF supports, even if it makes the process of change harder.
  - bane 11y ago
    > However, it's not clear exactly what a solution would be. The issue or course is that they don't publicly acknowledge the issue. They'll produce hundreds of pages of reports on the issue and end it with a "what could the problem be?" with shoulders shrugged. Acknowledging the problem is the first step towards finding the solution. Here's me almost 1500 days ago (4 YEARS!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598491 Here's the recent thing that was going on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 Here's an article on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272466 And another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638 This discussion goes back to 2011 at least, and WP just can't seem to admit that there's a problem.
    - shalmanese 11y ago
      All I can say is that I offered to do some informal product consulting with the WMF a few years ago and I walked into the building thinking I knew what the issues were and what obvious steps were required to fix them and I walked out being as equally confused and frustrated as the people there.

spdegabrielle 11y ago

Gamergate. It's absolutely the right place to look if you want to know how to 'jump the shark'.

mwfunk 11y ago
Gamergate jumped the shark when it first became a thing, it didn't need any Wikipedia-related drama to do it. :)
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Curse, a popular games media network which has taken no part in the controversy. I've remained neutral to Gamergate as much as possible, but kept myself informed. One of its core problems is that it kept the name "gamergate" for a lot of similar-but-unrelated issues which makes it encompass a lot more than is humanly digestable by anyone looking it up for the first time. People get kind of crazy when they hear that "women are being attacked", and never really want to hear the full story. The following blog post is one of the most descriptive of the actual issues and comes from someone who was on the side "against" gamergate. I recommend it: http://geekswithwives.com/experiencing-gamergate-from-all-sides/ http://geekswithwives.com/experiencing-gamergate-from-all-si... Edit: As an aside... while I'm neutral, as a gamer and someone who has worked on the sides of the games industry for the past decade, I can't help but feel targeted whenever someone blames "gamergate, and by definition gamers" for whatever B.S. they endured from some random twitter troll under a hashtag anyone can use at any time they feel like.
hkon 11y ago
Please elaborate a bit. I am unfamiliar with both terms
- joshuapants 11y ago
  Definition of Gamergate: depends on who you ask, it's a heavily politicized movement. Best to research this yourself from a variety of sources and come to your own conclusion. Definition of jumping the shark: A late episode of the TV program Happy Days involved a major character jumping over a shark on a pair of water skis. He had done previous stunts involving jumping over things on a motorcycle. Basically the writers ran out of ideas and resorted to things like this to keep viewers interested (not altogether successfully). So now we have the term "jumping the shark" to indicate a decline in quality. edited to change jet ski to water skis

DanBC 11y ago

> The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, [EDIT to prevent tedious distracting subthreads] operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage. > When asked to identify Wikipedia’s real problem, Moran cites the bureaucratic culture that has formed around the rules and guidelines on contributing, which have become labyrinthine over the years. The page explaining a policy called Neutral Point of View, one of “five pillars” fundamental to Wikipedia, is almost 5,000 words long. “That is the real barrier: policy creep,” he says. I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&prefix=Wikipedia+talk%3AManual+of+Style%2F&fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre... > Their version reads: “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.” They should probably have "and has the stamina to out-last the people incorrectly reverting good edits for spurious reasons" in there somewhere.

hackuser 11y ago
> The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere ... Management wisdom of the crowds.
brador 11y ago
> estimated to be 90 percent male Why did you include this? It seems out of place, unless you're saying it's the heavy skew of males that's causing the beurocracy?
- DanBC 11y ago
  It's a quote from the article. Why are you fixated on that sentence fragment from a much larger quote?

unavoidable 11y ago

Wikipedia gets a worse rap than it really deserves. If you ignore most of the pedantic self-important editors/trolls on WP, it's actually a great experience to contribute. I write a lot of articles on Canadian/British law and history, and the WPProjects are very supportive and generally polite. Otherwise, I don't really need to interact with anybody. I simply enjoy contributing to the organization of human knowledge. Nearly a decade and thousands of edits (on various accounts for reasons of anonymity) later, I have yet to have a real negative experience that has affected me in one way or another.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
Quite possibly because the topics you contribute to are very non controversial.
- unavoidable 11y ago
  But Wikipedia as an encyclopedic repository is never going to be a good venue for controversial topics. That's not the purpose of an encyclopedia. It's a terrible forum for a debate, and that's the way it will always be. This isn't something wrong with Wikipedia in particular, other than the fact that it is one of the largest and most visited sites on the Internet.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    An encyclopedia with any remote claim to being thorough will inevitably have to cover some controversial topics though.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      A normal encyclopedia is curated by a relatively small amount of people who are able to reach a consensus on a controversial topic, as opposed to random strangers on the Internet with an opinion being able to edit things.
- DanBC 11y ago

mlinksva 11y ago

Elections for the Wikimedia Foundation community board seats begins tomorrow; candidate statements and Q&A make good next level/updated reading. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Board_elections/2015/Candidates https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Board_elections/2015/Questions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio... Voting requires 300 edits on a Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project ever and 20 in last six months.

pierrec 11y ago

Wikipedia's administration is far from perfect, but you have to give them one thing: the amount of vandalism they've had to deal with is of historical proportions. It's not as impactful as physical mass vandalism, such as what occurred in the world's great revolutions, but that makes the job of dealing with it all the more unrewarding and annoying. I can imagine it would wear me down. It would be interesting to attempt a formal quantification of vandalism received by different projects susceptible to it. I'd be willing to bet that Wikipedia has been more targeted than anything else out there, and by a wide margin. It's good to point out the flaws in the WP's inner workings, but you have to take a step back and realize the task of keeping the whole thing working is quite difficult (I might even have said "impossible" but somehow they're doing it.)

Animats 11y ago
"Wikipedia's administration is far from perfect, but you have to give them one thing: the amount of vandalism they've had to deal with is of historical proportions." Simple vandalism is more or less under control. Areas of high controversy (abortion, Israel/Palestine issues) are a huge headache, and much of Wikipedia's bureaucracy spends time dealing with those issues. In between those extremes are attempts to use Wikipedia as a promotional medium. Wikipedia doesn't allow advertising. A lot of people don't get that. I sometimes take on tasks from the Wikipedia conflict of interest noticeboard. This is usually someone trying to promote their band/DJ/company/product, or themself. Most of those are routine, but sometimes it gets out of hand. There are at least three wealthy convicted criminals who have PR people trying to erase, or at least gloss over, their history on Wikipedia. There's a company with a sketchy financial product that set up a massive effort to delete their regulatory and legal problems from Wikipedia. There are several companies which don't like prominent mentions of their product recalls. There are many consumer product companies who try to push their marketing pitch onto Wikipedia, and don't like that their pitch is turned into a cold discussion of their history, mergers, finances, and problems. Without the Wikipedia bureaucracy to push back against that tide of paid promotion, Wikipedia would look like the happy news world of ads and PR Newswire.
- aerique 11y ago

bra-ket 11y ago

I found that the best way to contribute to wikipedia is from multiple IPs without logging in. Otherwise some troll could delete the entire history of your edits with some wacky explanation.