6 ms·

Number of Wikipedia editors steadily declining

34 points by sabon 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago
There are a number of valid reasons for this, and a number of not-so-valid ones: The valid reasons mostly center on the fact that 'mining history' at some point comes to a halt, there are only so many relevant subjects from the past that warrant inclusion. At some point it gets harder to find stuff that you can include on pages about historical events, objects and people. This will lead to a reduction of work and like any company that would work on a job that has 'an end' (the documentation of history would be that job) that when the job is done the people end up without work. The other reasons are less nice and do not stem from accomplishment but from the power that a relatively small group of experienced users wields. Wikipedia is full of politics and infighting. The atmosphere, especially for new people joining up is full of venom. New editors have their content (their work!) deleted, often without cause, get bombarded with messages with lots of wikipedia specific jargon and feel in general seriously intimidated. Of course this nicely serves the purpose of those that have hijacked wikipedia from being a public project to one that they use as their personal fiefdom. There are 'factions' amongst the editors that seem to be aware of this problem and there are those that seem to be it's main creators. I hope that in the long run the first group will get the upper hand but judging by the various wars on 'talk' pages it might be that it is the former group that is now giving up and leaving. I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum.
- pierrefar 17y ago
  "I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum." That won't matter much. Google loves the wikipedia.org domain so much, that any new site will need seriously hard work to get it even moving. In short, it won't have the traffic necessary to compete.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    You're placing the horse behind the cart. Google indexes websites, websites do not exist to be indexed by google. If another website will take wikipedias place in terms of quality and wikipedia will degrade then wikipedia will find that people will start linking to that other site. In time this will lead google to increase the ranking for these pages. Remember that google indexes PAGES not DOMAINS. So for every page that the new wikipedia contains that the old one does not the forked one gets right of way. It's not like wikipedia started off with millions of pages and lots of backlinks. The new project would be a fork in the open source sense, a new name with a fresh start and a chance to show how it can be done better. Its ability to lure people away from the 'old' wikipedia is what makes it go, the editors will determine its success, not google. And the chances of that success are simply a factor of how much time they put in collectively to make it different and better than the original.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      There is, however, a network effect. I know I often link to Wikipedia because it's the first relevant link found in a search that contains a concise description of a concept that I don't want to define inline in my blog post / comment / etc. This would perpetuate Wikipedia even if it were completely unmanned and read-only.
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        Absolutely, they have a head-start. But given the fact that the future is literally infinite and wikipedia has only been around for a relatively short portion of that I think it is inevitable that at some point they'll be replaced by something better. If half the editors decide tomorrow to reboot then I don't doubt that given enough time they'll out-perform the infighters and the politicians. They'll have to be on guard against repeating the same mistakes from day 1 though to make it work.
        barrkel 17y ago
        Alas, I think the editors are the infighters and politicians.
- chaosprophet 17y ago
  Well let's hope the forking happens sooner than later. I still can't believe I was told stating that a cat was an animal would require citation.
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    > I still can't believe I was told stating that a cat was an animal would require citation. [citation needed]
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - chaosprophet 17y ago
      I've had my wikipedia account purged and renamed so I can't provide the exact talk page link. However I did happen to talk to another editor who actually had the exact same thing said to him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Grimjaw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Grimjaw Apparently he has since quit Wikipedia too. My guess is we were both arguing with the same mod. And the cat being an animal argument was a metaphorical argument we were having while discussing an edit.
  - gaius 17y ago
    Bing would probably underwrite a fork in return for exclusivity.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    It's hard to believe this actually happened, and if it did, you should be able to provide a link to the conversation. I'm guessing "Special:Contributions/chaosprophet" is you (after looking at the "chaosprophet" on Twitter and the associated blog), and I don't see any argument about cats being fungi.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- tptacek 17y ago
  What powers, specifically, do you think the WP elite are wielding against the newcomers?
- duskwuff 17y ago
  > At some point it gets harder to find stuff that you can include on pages about historical events, objects and people. That, and the standards have risen. It used to be that there were plenty of unwritten articles, so throwing together articles from common knowledge and anecdote was "good enough". Nowadays, there's a lot more focus on high-quality referenced work -- and, while that's a lot more useful in the long run, it's also a lot harder to write. And the majority new users simply aren't up to the task. High-quality writing is hard, and crowdsourcing doesn't make it any easier.
sdfx 17y ago
While it is probably true that a more hostile environment is to blame for a big portion of the decline, the maturity of the articles might also be a factor. Maybe the articles people care most about are sufficiently well written. Many people can't add much valuable information to a lot of the topics and so they don't feel the need to participate. Without this first quick win, there is little incentive to keep editing.
- Silhouette 17y ago
  In my experience, it is more likely to be the immaturity of the articles that is putting people off. I have contributed a few edits to Wikipedia over the years. Why not, if I can usefully fill in a blank and it costs me mere seconds to help? More recently, though, I've been finding subjects where the entire article was so hopelessly wrong that I wouldn't know where to begin fixing it, other than deleting it completely and starting over. I looked for an appropriate marker in one case that would at least suggest that the article as a whole did not represent a neutral point of view or was completely unsupported by any factual evidence, but after a few minutes trying to navigate Wikipedia's absurdly overcomplicated self-documentation and finding nothing but reasons I wasn't allowed to fix anything or contribute, I gave up and found something else to do with my time. I wonder whether the neutral point of view principle isn't a significant part of the problem. Many of the pages I find most misleading are deadlocked, because no-one can agree on what a neutral point of view is. Under those circumstances, perhaps it would be more helpful to do what civilised discussion has done since forever: present two articles (or sections in an article) that, by construction and intent, take opposing viewpoints. Let the reader see both sides of the debate, making the best case they can and with the best sources they can find to support their point of view, and let the reader decide. As long as it is very clear when there is a single article trying to present a subject neutrally and when the adversarial system is in use, I don't see why this would cause a problem, and it would break a lot of the deadlocks I've seen and get constructive editing going again.
  - CWuestefeld 17y ago
    I wonder whether the neutral point of view principle isn't a significant part of the problem. I've long contended, in discussion about the media, that it's absolutely impossible to have a completely neutral presentation. Since this is true, it seems better to me to stop pretending to be neutral, and instead to acknowledge the ways in which there may be bias.
dsplittgerber 17y ago
What will editors do after they leave? There is an enormous amount of available time and attention span that could be spent on other valuable projects for mankind.
- sdfx 17y ago
  Thought about that too. I think http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is similar enough in at least one respect: You describe the part of the world that you understand and know best. But maybe contributors concentrate their effords on their own pet project or spend their time on twitter.
  - DrJokepu 17y ago
    I wonder if history will repeat itself and lesser geographic locations (like narrow alleys or something) will get deleted from openstreetmap because they're not deemed important enough by the ruling elite.
- rabidgnat 17y ago
  Hopefully they'll help clean up Wiktionary. I downloaded the English dataset the other day and it's a mess. IIRC, less than 1/3 of the words are properly tagged as English words, and a significant fraction of the words aren't even rendered in the English character set. The good news is that the editorial standards are extremely consistent, so it's easy to extract information. They also allow batch updates, so if I find an easy way to correct vast swaths of this data, I could send a batch update file once
mjs 17y ago
"The foundation also invested $890,000 in a new design for the site ..." Yow! I'm sure that's wrong/misleading in some way, but what does this figure actually include?
- rufo 17y ago
  I'm guessing some of that is wrapped up in here - they seem to be doing much more than just a simple redesign: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page EDIT: Just noticed you can actually turn on their improvements by clicking the "Try Beta" link in the upper-right corner of the page. Seems really nice, actually.
  - mjs 17y ago
    Well, that page says "The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is realized by a grant from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation." So I'm not entirely sure if this explains it. (Nearly a million dollars seems a lot of money for a redesign + usability study, as well.)
w1ntermute 17y ago
I was only able to see the first paragraph of the article. If anyone else has this problem, you can see the full article by accessing it via Google: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=news_result&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAcQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB125893981183759969.html%3Fmod%3Drss_Todays_Most_Popular&ei=VEgNS-GDApDhnAen-5TJAw&usg=AFQjCNG-Fx4utnuk5DEi021kMY9oQXwsLA&sig2=sFqhNK_3vJJ5MiW8ryVSbg http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=news_re...
- gvb 17y ago
  That is part of the Rupert Murdoch controversy: many (all?) of the News Corp. properties are behind a paywall, but the paywall has a hole in it the size of Google. ;-) Google pays them (but not enough to stop them from complaining) and indexes their sites. They intentionally allow users coming from a Google search to enter their fiefdom, but throw up a paywall for direct links. http://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+paywall+google+hole http://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+paywall+google... They have a serious conundrum: they want to be indexed by Google so that they can attract visitors, but they want to be paid by subscriptions (paywall), which is more lucrative than advertisements (assuming they can convert visitors into subscribers). Even if they closed the "referred by Google" hole, they would still have to allow the googlebot unfettered access in order to index their site. This would make the hole slightly more obscure, but it would not close it.
olegk 17y ago
No surprise here. I tried editing 3 or 4 articles, and every single time my additions were reverted, even if they were valid. There are too many power-tripping people on wikipedia.
- tptacek 17y ago
  The nice thing about WP is that there's no place to hide on it. Give us an example of an article where this happened, and the rough time it occurred, and let's find it and talk about it. Maybe there's a good reason you got RV'd, or maybe there's a great example of something pathological about WP editing that we can add to the discussion.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
I simply can't take any Wikipedia criticism seriously. The mainstream media isn't going to publish anything about Wikipedia unless it's got a hook. "Online Encyclopedia Still Surprisingly Useful" just isn't catchy enough. For non-mainstream criticism, it generally seems to be, well lets say, "kooks". I actually seek out new criticism in the hope that it may be enlightening. Most recently I saw a blog comment from someone who wrote a column in the Guardian newspaper about Wikipedia's problems and how it is a cult. I literally just remembered this, and Google'd for it and found this: "I'm on Wikipedia, get me out of here" : an article complaining about his own Wikipedia article. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/sep/28/wikipedia.web20 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/sep/28/wikipedia.w... Which has a link to all his articles (which seem overwhelmingly to be Wikipedia criticism): http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/sethfinkelstein http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/sethfinkelstein And a couple of results down a story about his conflict of interest in this particular story: "Seth Finkelstein, The Guardian and Wikipedia" http://blog.shankbone.org/2009/04/20/seth-finkelstein-the-guardian-and-wikipedia/ http://blog.shankbone.org/2009/04/20/seth-finkelstein-the-gu... You really couldn't make it up. I'd love to read some actual thoughful criticisms but just can't seem to find them. Links are appreciated if you're aware of any.

34 points by sabon 17y ago

There are a number of valid reasons for this, and a number of not-so-valid ones: The valid reasons mostly center on the fact that 'mining history' at some point comes to a halt, there are only so many relevant subjects from the past that warrant inclusion. At some point it gets harder to find stuff that you can include on pages about historical events, objects and people. This will lead to a reduction of work and like any company that would work on a job that has 'an end' (the documentation of history would be that job) that when the job is done the people end up without work. The other reasons are less nice and do not stem from accomplishment but from the power that a relatively small group of experienced users wields. Wikipedia is full of politics and infighting. The atmosphere, especially for new people joining up is full of venom. New editors have their content (their work!) deleted, often without cause, get bombarded with messages with lots of wikipedia specific jargon and feel in general seriously intimidated. Of course this nicely serves the purpose of those that have hijacked wikipedia from being a public project to one that they use as their personal fiefdom. There are 'factions' amongst the editors that seem to be aware of this problem and there are those that seem to be it's main creators. I hope that in the long run the first group will get the upper hand but judging by the various wars on 'talk' pages it might be that it is the former group that is now giving up and leaving. I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum.

pierrefar 17y ago
"I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum." That won't matter much. Google loves the wikipedia.org domain so much, that any new site will need seriously hard work to get it even moving. In short, it won't have the traffic necessary to compete.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  You're placing the horse behind the cart. Google indexes websites, websites do not exist to be indexed by google. If another website will take wikipedias place in terms of quality and wikipedia will degrade then wikipedia will find that people will start linking to that other site. In time this will lead google to increase the ranking for these pages. Remember that google indexes PAGES not DOMAINS. So for every page that the new wikipedia contains that the old one does not the forked one gets right of way. It's not like wikipedia started off with millions of pages and lots of backlinks. The new project would be a fork in the open source sense, a new name with a fresh start and a chance to show how it can be done better. Its ability to lure people away from the 'old' wikipedia is what makes it go, the editors will determine its success, not google. And the chances of that success are simply a factor of how much time they put in collectively to make it different and better than the original.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    There is, however, a network effect. I know I often link to Wikipedia because it's the first relevant link found in a search that contains a concise description of a concept that I don't want to define inline in my blog post / comment / etc. This would perpetuate Wikipedia even if it were completely unmanned and read-only.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Absolutely, they have a head-start. But given the fact that the future is literally infinite and wikipedia has only been around for a relatively short portion of that I think it is inevitable that at some point they'll be replaced by something better. If half the editors decide tomorrow to reboot then I don't doubt that given enough time they'll out-perform the infighters and the politicians. They'll have to be on guard against repeating the same mistakes from day 1 though to make it work.
      - barrkel 17y ago
        Alas, I think the editors are the infighters and politicians.
chaosprophet 17y ago
Well let's hope the forking happens sooner than later. I still can't believe I was told stating that a cat was an animal would require citation.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  > I still can't believe I was told stating that a cat was an animal would require citation. [citation needed]
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - chaosprophet 17y ago
    I've had my wikipedia account purged and renamed so I can't provide the exact talk page link. However I did happen to talk to another editor who actually had the exact same thing said to him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Grimjaw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Grimjaw Apparently he has since quit Wikipedia too. My guess is we were both arguing with the same mod. And the cat being an animal argument was a metaphorical argument we were having while discussing an edit.
- gaius 17y ago
  Bing would probably underwrite a fork in return for exclusivity.
- tptacek 17y ago
  It's hard to believe this actually happened, and if it did, you should be able to provide a link to the conversation. I'm guessing "Special:Contributions/chaosprophet" is you (after looking at the "chaosprophet" on Twitter and the associated blog), and I don't see any argument about cats being fungi.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
tptacek 17y ago
What powers, specifically, do you think the WP elite are wielding against the newcomers?
duskwuff 17y ago
> At some point it gets harder to find stuff that you can include on pages about historical events, objects and people. That, and the standards have risen. It used to be that there were plenty of unwritten articles, so throwing together articles from common knowledge and anecdote was "good enough". Nowadays, there's a lot more focus on high-quality referenced work -- and, while that's a lot more useful in the long run, it's also a lot harder to write. And the majority new users simply aren't up to the task. High-quality writing is hard, and crowdsourcing doesn't make it any easier.

sdfx 17y ago

While it is probably true that a more hostile environment is to blame for a big portion of the decline, the maturity of the articles might also be a factor. Maybe the articles people care most about are sufficiently well written. Many people can't add much valuable information to a lot of the topics and so they don't feel the need to participate. Without this first quick win, there is little incentive to keep editing.

Silhouette 17y ago
In my experience, it is more likely to be the immaturity of the articles that is putting people off. I have contributed a few edits to Wikipedia over the years. Why not, if I can usefully fill in a blank and it costs me mere seconds to help? More recently, though, I've been finding subjects where the entire article was so hopelessly wrong that I wouldn't know where to begin fixing it, other than deleting it completely and starting over. I looked for an appropriate marker in one case that would at least suggest that the article as a whole did not represent a neutral point of view or was completely unsupported by any factual evidence, but after a few minutes trying to navigate Wikipedia's absurdly overcomplicated self-documentation and finding nothing but reasons I wasn't allowed to fix anything or contribute, I gave up and found something else to do with my time. I wonder whether the neutral point of view principle isn't a significant part of the problem. Many of the pages I find most misleading are deadlocked, because no-one can agree on what a neutral point of view is. Under those circumstances, perhaps it would be more helpful to do what civilised discussion has done since forever: present two articles (or sections in an article) that, by construction and intent, take opposing viewpoints. Let the reader see both sides of the debate, making the best case they can and with the best sources they can find to support their point of view, and let the reader decide. As long as it is very clear when there is a single article trying to present a subject neutrally and when the adversarial system is in use, I don't see why this would cause a problem, and it would break a lot of the deadlocks I've seen and get constructive editing going again.
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  I wonder whether the neutral point of view principle isn't a significant part of the problem. I've long contended, in discussion about the media, that it's absolutely impossible to have a completely neutral presentation. Since this is true, it seems better to me to stop pretending to be neutral, and instead to acknowledge the ways in which there may be bias.

dsplittgerber 17y ago

What will editors do after they leave? There is an enormous amount of available time and attention span that could be spent on other valuable projects for mankind.

sdfx 17y ago
Thought about that too. I think http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is similar enough in at least one respect: You describe the part of the world that you understand and know best. But maybe contributors concentrate their effords on their own pet project or spend their time on twitter.
- DrJokepu 17y ago
  I wonder if history will repeat itself and lesser geographic locations (like narrow alleys or something) will get deleted from openstreetmap because they're not deemed important enough by the ruling elite.
rabidgnat 17y ago
Hopefully they'll help clean up Wiktionary. I downloaded the English dataset the other day and it's a mess. IIRC, less than 1/3 of the words are properly tagged as English words, and a significant fraction of the words aren't even rendered in the English character set. The good news is that the editorial standards are extremely consistent, so it's easy to extract information. They also allow batch updates, so if I find an easy way to correct vast swaths of this data, I could send a batch update file once

mjs 17y ago

"The foundation also invested $890,000 in a new design for the site ..." Yow! I'm sure that's wrong/misleading in some way, but what does this figure actually include?

rufo 17y ago
I'm guessing some of that is wrapped up in here - they seem to be doing much more than just a simple redesign: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page EDIT: Just noticed you can actually turn on their improvements by clicking the "Try Beta" link in the upper-right corner of the page. Seems really nice, actually.
- mjs 17y ago
  Well, that page says "The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is realized by a grant from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation." So I'm not entirely sure if this explains it. (Nearly a million dollars seems a lot of money for a redesign + usability study, as well.)

w1ntermute 17y ago

I was only able to see the first paragraph of the article. If anyone else has this problem, you can see the full article by accessing it via Google: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=news_result&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAcQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB125893981183759969.html%3Fmod%3Drss_Todays_Most_Popular&ei=VEgNS-GDApDhnAen-5TJAw&usg=AFQjCNG-Fx4utnuk5DEi021kMY9oQXwsLA&sig2=sFqhNK_3vJJ5MiW8ryVSbg http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&oi=news_re...

gvb 17y ago
That is part of the Rupert Murdoch controversy: many (all?) of the News Corp. properties are behind a paywall, but the paywall has a hole in it the size of Google. ;-) Google pays them (but not enough to stop them from complaining) and indexes their sites. They intentionally allow users coming from a Google search to enter their fiefdom, but throw up a paywall for direct links. http://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+paywall+google+hole http://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+paywall+google... They have a serious conundrum: they want to be indexed by Google so that they can attract visitors, but they want to be paid by subscriptions (paywall), which is more lucrative than advertisements (assuming they can convert visitors into subscribers). Even if they closed the "referred by Google" hole, they would still have to allow the googlebot unfettered access in order to index their site. This would make the hole slightly more obscure, but it would not close it.

olegk 17y ago

No surprise here. I tried editing 3 or 4 articles, and every single time my additions were reverted, even if they were valid. There are too many power-tripping people on wikipedia.

tptacek 17y ago
The nice thing about WP is that there's no place to hide on it. Give us an example of an article where this happened, and the rough time it occurred, and let's find it and talk about it. Maybe there's a good reason you got RV'd, or maybe there's a great example of something pathological about WP editing that we can add to the discussion.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

I simply can't take any Wikipedia criticism seriously. The mainstream media isn't going to publish anything about Wikipedia unless it's got a hook. "Online Encyclopedia Still Surprisingly Useful" just isn't catchy enough. For non-mainstream criticism, it generally seems to be, well lets say, "kooks". I actually seek out new criticism in the hope that it may be enlightening. Most recently I saw a blog comment from someone who wrote a column in the Guardian newspaper about Wikipedia's problems and how it is a cult. I literally just remembered this, and Google'd for it and found this: "I'm on Wikipedia, get me out of here" : an article complaining about his own Wikipedia article. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/sep/28/wikipedia.web20 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/sep/28/wikipedia.w... Which has a link to all his articles (which seem overwhelmingly to be Wikipedia criticism): http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/sethfinkelstein http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/sethfinkelstein And a couple of results down a story about his conflict of interest in this particular story: "Seth Finkelstein, The Guardian and Wikipedia" http://blog.shankbone.org/2009/04/20/seth-finkelstein-the-guardian-and-wikipedia/ http://blog.shankbone.org/2009/04/20/seth-finkelstein-the-gu... You really couldn't make it up. I'd love to read some actual thoughful criticisms but just can't seem to find them. Links are appreciated if you're aware of any.