8 ms·

Can Wikipedia Survive?

53 points by dctoedt 11y ago

philipn 11y ago
The press really loves to write pieces about how Wikipedia is in a constant state of disrepair. If you were to go off what's written about Wikipedia in the press, you'd think it was filled with child pornography and that the project was a horrible, miserable failure. That said, "One board member, María Sefidari, warned that 'some communities have become so change-resistant and innovation-averse” that they risk staying “stuck in 2006 while the rest of the Internet is thinking about 2020 and the next three billion users.'" ..is probably the best quote from this article. Wikipedia has a new set of growing pains now that it's a fully-established project. It will never be done, but a lack of increase of new contributors, month-on-month, isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world for Wikipedia. A focus on long-term maintenance (which includes not pissing off long-term editors, as the article mentions) and mobile growth seems smart.
- thanksgiving 11y ago
  The English Wikipedia has a lot of contributors but smaller siblings such as new.wikipedia do not have this luxury. To be fair though, the problem isn't unique to Wikipedia as few people read and write in the language. https://new.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B6%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B7:RecentChanges&days=30&from=&limit=500 https://new.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=special:RecentChanges&days=30&from=&limit=500 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=special:RecentCha...
  - prodigal_erik 11y ago
    Off topic, I get why ne.wikipedia.org is in Nepali, but why does new.wikipedia.org have different content in the same language?
    - pooper 11y ago
      new is nepal bhasa or NEWari which is the language of the Nepal valley (also commonly known as Kathmandu valley).
      - prodigal_erik 11y ago
        Ah, different language, same script. TIL.
        thanksgiving 11y ago
        There is Ranjana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_alphabet and Devnagari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari From what I understand, language and alphabets are related but not the same. For example, you can write in Japanese with roman alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese Thus, it is possible to write in Newari (also known as Nepal Bhasa which literally translates to Nepal Language) in devnagari as well as ranjana. I cannot read or write in Ranjana. I can read or write Devnagari.
- prawn 11y ago
  If I were to go off only what I read on HN, I'd think Wikipedia was weak, completely flawed and inaccurate. In my experience, it's excellent - informative and free. But then I read it through a lens knowing that it's created by volunteers and may suffer graffiti, and I'm surprised more on HN don't do the same rather than cut it down. The media are just happy to cut down any tall poppy with public recognition because it incites interest.
sehugg 11y ago
I've found editing Wikipedia (as a casual user) to be more daunting than it was five or so years ago, much in part due to figuring out the citation system. Also, uploading images (even those you own) was a headache that took a while to navigate. I don't think though that people will all transition to mobile and forget how to edit markup on keyboards, as the article suggests ... at least not anytime soon.
- Strilanc 11y ago
  I agree with both those criticisms. The citation templates are hard to find (I had to google them), bury their example usages, and you can't even find out if you did it wrong until the bot that rewrites the particular citation template you used comes by and fails. When I was uploading images I think I managed to get all the way to the last step of five before realizing I was supposed to be using wikimedia instead. The actual user experience for citing should be "just give me the link". Then wikipedia should do the rest. Is it an arxiv link? That's a very common site; scrap the data. Is it a docid link? Ditto. Is it some random pdf? Do your best to parse out the title and authors. Actually, even the URL might be overkill. A random bag of words about the paper (its title, or author and year, or just half-remembered fragments) could be more than enough. A naive search of google scholar with that bag of words, augmented with context from the surrounding article, could potentially have an excellent hit rate.
  - hopscotch 11y ago
    Crossref is a non-google site, sponsored by the publishers, that, in my opinion, is friendlier for automation. Anecdotally, I get better results from them, too.
  - lwf 11y ago
    > The actual user experience for citing should be "just give me the link". Then wikipedia should do the rest. You're absolutely right. And Wikipedia's Visual Editor[1] does just that: http://i.imgur.com/0yM2koH.png http://i.imgur.com/0yM2koH.png http://i.imgur.com/opVTplc.png http://i.imgur.com/opVTplc.png It isn't perfect, but it's constantly being improved. It was at one point rolled out as the default editing experience on the English Wikipedia[2], but was made opt-in after feedback from the community[3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor#History https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor#History [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC
Sir_Substance 11y ago
I'm hypothesizing here, so I'm willing for someone with actual data to tell me otherwise, but I don't believe that the traditional desktop users have gone anywhere. The massive increase in mobile traffic is coming from people who formerly didn't use the internet except when they had to. Mothers, cricketers, grandfathers, plumbers. All those people who you could never see hunched in front of a keyboard are now discovering the internet via their fancy status-symbol phones. Which is cool and all, but importantly it means wikipedias editors, and desktop users in general, aren't reducing. There's as many of them as there ever were, and their growth rate probably hasn't slowed either. I imagine the venn diagram of "people inclined to edit an online encyclopedia" and "people who will find a mobile phone claustrophobic" is probably pretty much a perfect circle.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  I agree that the number of mobile users isn't a factor in declining editor numbers, but the absolute number of editors is in serious decline. It's already evident that many lightly trafficked pages are not being updated. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...
- lnanek2 11y ago
  As a Facebook stock owner, yes the desktop numbers are going down in general. They took a huge hit when traffic started moving to mobile and they weren't showing ads there yet, then a corresponding rise when they moved the ads to where the people are going. You can find it in their reports. Wikipedia is no doubt the same.
  - apta 11y ago
    What is the relevance of you being a FB stock owner to the rest of your comment?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
hartror 11y ago
> In 2005, during Wikipedia’s peak years, there were months when more than 60 editors were made administrator — a position with special privileges in editing the English-language edition. For the past year, it has sometimes struggled to promote even one per month. Or has Wikipedia reached a point of maturity where the group of contributors is largely stable and the core content written and refined?
- pbreit 11y ago
  Yeah, normally once an encyclopedia has been produced there is only a fraction of ongoing work.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Administrator used to be no big deal. Users got a small number of extra tools to help them do the work. Now adminship is a big deal. Getting adminship is hard and has caused some editors to make sub-optimal choices. (See vandal patrol or the various admin-wannabe schemes.)
sparkzilla 11y ago
It's not the keyboards that are the problem. Wikipedia will not survive because the site has a huge amount of software issues, the most notable being the wiki-software itself, which is almost 15 years old and simply not suited to the demands of the modern web. The software is the cause of almost every problem the site has (including bias, harassment, censorship, Gender Gap, lack of media support, hideous textbook like formatting and more) but the cult-like status attached to it ensures it cannot be meaningfully updated. Decline is inevitable. For more on these issues see this blog post [1] Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. While it was dealing with "encyclopedic" topics it was fine, but now that the encyclopedia part is pretty much done, editors are building up pages that are actually news archives, a task the wiki software does not handle well. As for the author's claims that that Wikipedia has no substantial competition -- it's coming. My site, Newslines, aims to take away all Wikipedia's news and biography pages, replacing Wikipedia's article-based writing system with a news event-driven approach that results in far less bias, and pages that readers can sort and filter. We even have video! You can see a couple of pages we are working on here [2][3]. So far our writers, who receive revenue share for their efforts, have added over 30,000 posts on 8000 different topics. [1] http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ [2] http://newslines.org/dylann-roof/?order=ASC http://newslines.org/dylann-roof/?order=ASC [3] http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC
- zachrose 11y ago
  ... which is almost 15 years old and simply not suited to the demands of the modern web. What are the demands of the modern web?
  - setpatchaddress 11y ago
    Insatiable lust for cat/kitten videos, probably.
  - sparkzilla 11y ago
    How about video and document embedding for a start. Wikipedia has almost zero embedding, which is kind of useful when you want to see more about news events (video and document embedding directly in the page), or even see an actor's performance, or a trailer, or a music clip. Wikipedia looks and acts like a textbook on the web, instead of a purpose-designed site that includes all relevant media about a topic. People have just got so used to it that they can't imagine doing things another way.
robbrown451 11y ago
I think the lack of participation now has more to do with Wikipedia becoming mature, where it doesn't really need a lot more added, except actual new information. There was a long period where most anyone with the inclination could find something to add. It's a lot harder now. Contributions are much more scrutinized now, and there are much more stringent requirements for citations. Which is good...that means that it is being refined, rather than just bulked up. But that takes less people. Even if the organization were to go away (which doesn't seem at all likely), all the work that has gone into it is there for eternity. Others can build upon it.
- degenerate 11y ago
  Bingo. I'd edit wikipedia if it was needed, but it's just not needed. And you would too, and you over there, and that guy too. We're all standing by, but there's people doing it already. It has nothing to do with phones. There's a term for what this article is doing, but I forget the expression... it's trying to make a story out of nothing.
tokenadult 11y ago
As a note at the end of the article points out, Andrew Lih, the author of the article kindly submitted here, is someone who literally wrote the book about Wikipedia, namely the book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.[1] His book is one of the books I read as I transitioned from being a reader of Wikipedia to being an editor of Wikipedia in 2010. I think the best point he made in the current article needs more emphasis in the article, and more discussion here on Hacker News. "The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes — the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in." Big time. The governance on Wikipedia is basically a mobocracy, and it is not producing good improvements to articles. Contrary to what several comments posted earlier in this thread (while I was examining my Wikipedia watchlist) say, I don't think much of Wikipedia is very good at all yet. There was the famous study that suggested that Wikipedia was no worse (based on a sampling of articles in the study) than the Encyclopedia Britannica at that time, and plainly a typical Wikipedia article is better than a typical single-author website on the same topic somewhere on the Internet, but Wikipedia is actually a LOT worse than the content of other reference books college-educated people can find by consulting an academic library. Wikipedia currently wins reader attention because of the extreme convenience of doing ill-formed Google searches on the Internet as a whole and then examining whatever Wikipedia articles show up highest in the search results. Yes, that is a contribution to the quality of freely available online information. But remarkably few of the 5,000 most viewed articles on Wikipedia each week[2] are even up to "B class" on Wikipedia's very generous quality rating scale, and "good article" or "featured article" quality articles on highly viewed topics are even rarer. I work at improving some of the high-page-view articles. Two of the 5,000 articles on the weekly top 5,000 list (they are there every week without fail) that are at "good article" quality level are articles that I helped improve. But the petty edit warring and endless wikilawyering about silly issues, often solely in the interest of pushing fringe points of view, has ruined a lot of Wikipedia's articles and has driven away many productive editors who are disgusted by all that interpersonal drama with unaccountable strangers. What I would like to see tried is a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize, with careful work done on prize criteria and funding for a substantial prize by a philanthropist, to see if there is a better way to organize a crowd-sourced project to build a free, online encyclopedia, both as to software base and as to organizational structure. I suspect that there are two or three models of a new encyclopedia that could force Wikipedia to change or be left in the dust. Elon Musk could really make himself famous by trying to fund a prize like this, but he is by far not the only Silicon Valley entrepreneur who could afford to fund a meaningful prize in this space. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Wikipedia-Revolution-Nobodies-Encyclopedia/dp/B002KAOS60 http://www.amazon.com/The-Wikipedia-Revolution-Nobodies-Ency... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pag...
hlfcoding 11y ago
Their iOS app[1] looks promising, but the reviews seem to indicate it's still not there yet. Back in 2004, I had friends who grew addicted to casual browsing of Wikipedia in the browser. I'm not sure if that activity translates well to mobile browsers, but that it's probably a variety of factors: lack of integration with the device OS, longer average latency, more user actions to navigate content (accordion interface). As far as editing, not having input accessories for the markup syntax makes editing on mobile painful. Luckily, these problems all seem surmountable. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-mobile/id324715238?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-mobile/id324715238...
wavefunction 11y ago
Wikipedia should integrate NLP querying so you can ask it questions and it can attempt/succeed at presenting relevant and useful information from its graph. edit voice search for mobile as well
bane 11y ago
So as an experiment, about a year ago, I helped created this page [1][2] (it had been around for a while, but had been deleted a few times). Some editor keeps deleting it or redirecting it to "cold chills" which it isn't. It's also not ASMR. I've never had any edit to WP last longer than 24 hours, so I was surprise some version of what I helped resurrect still around. It's been worked on, edited, and even had some warning flags placed on it. In general, it's an improvement over what I originally provided. Trouble is, I can't tell if this is because this is a weird and obscure topic area, or because what I provided (with links to research papers) was good enough for some bot not to automatically submit for deletion. Some of my original phrases have even survived which is pretty amazing. Contributing to WP is terrifying. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8190451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8190451
contingencies 11y ago
Personally, I just quit editing after 15 years (12 as an administrator) in protest at the deletion of good encyclopedic content. Frankly, I can see clearly why new editors don't want to become involved in Wikipedia - the community these days is positively toxic. I think, subconsciously, I was rather hoping someone would fix the problem and invite me back, but not only has the problem not been fixed but nobody seem to give a damn. There was a time when I even attended Wikimedia physical meetings with governments and academics and so forth. Well... no more: so long, and thanks for all the free edits. My solution? Remove all the bullshit policies, reduce things back to a core of spirit-of-the-word driven basics, and then have a random selection of a panel of community judges (extra/uninvolved eyeballs) for anything at all that people want to dispute. This would do far better than the mob rule of yore, while lowering cognitive overhead and friction for new editors.
foopants 11y ago
Good riddance. It is a hateful, bullying, propaganda pile.
- sova 11y ago
  Not all of it. Just the contentious stuff. If you want to learn about chlorophyll, for example, it's a great resource. The periodic table on Wiki is also really great. The rest that could be classified as editorials is somewhat troubling, though. That said, it is a product that has not had a rethink of its internals or structure in ~20 years? So it had a great run. Either become the next World Book or the first social encyclopedia, but trying to balance both has been a journey indeed.
Animats 11y ago
We keep hearing this argument, usually from print authors who are struggling to remain relevant. Really, Wikipedia is in good shape, having reached the point where there are articles on most things of significance. Let's take a look at the last 10 new articles on Wikipedia right now: EDULITE Institute Air Reserve Component New York Declaration on Forests Daniel lopez lauber Northeastern Conference (Wisconsin) Embassy of the United States, Mexico City RU.TV Castle of Evil Diagnosis of multiple sclerosis Arlington Beardtime Some of those subject might be worth an article, but it's not like Wikipedia really needs an article on any of those subjects. Most of the important stuff was covered in the first 500K articles. Of course Wikipedia is hard to edit from a phone. Small screen devices are for mostly-output applications. Writing anything longer than a text message is hard on a phone. Editing documents is hard on a phone. Writing a footnoted paper on a phone or tablet is painful, even though you can now run Microsoft Word on Android devices. Does anyone on HN program from a phone except in dire emergencies? Writers use keyboards. Readers use tablets and phones. Wikipedia's bureaucracy is somewhat complex, but it beats having some group of "moderators" with unquestionable authority. Editing Wikipedia has become daunting mostly because it's now expected that almost everything be cited. That's a good thing, because it prevents blog-type blithering. But many people aren't used to that, especially if they never went to a reasonably tough high school or college.
fauigerzigerk 11y ago
Is it really such a bad sign if the number of editors goes down after most content that many people know about has already been written and refined for a number of years? I would be very surprised if the difficulty of writing wikipedia articles on 6" screens has anything to do with it.
- DanBC 11y ago
  But the quality of that refined content is not very good. There's still huge amounts of work that need to be done. But trying to do that is sometimes like walking through molasses. So yes, it does matter.
  - fauigerzigerk 11y ago
    The problem is that the quality is better than most people's expertise on the subject. Back when there were no articles on some subjects, many could make a contribution because many knew more than nothing about the subject. In any event, I don't see how that relates to editing on a 6" screen.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Wikipedia needs people to check citations and provide citations. That's really freaking hard on a mobile phone.
      - fauigerzigerk 11y ago
        That's a good point.
Fannon 11y ago
I also don't think that the problem is the rise of mobile devices here. My perception is that Wikipedia has developed a culture that where new people are really discouraged from starting and contributing. The problem is both social and technological. And while the MediaWiki software is open source, it forms a rather closed / restricted sub-area of open source software. They reinvent alot within their community. I'd be very happy if they did some steps like Drupal 8, integrating part of the Symfony 2 Framework. Nevertheless, Wikipedia / MediaWiki are still very powerful and I don't see any viable alternative to them as of now. It was / is a highly successful project. Not many software projects grow so old and are still relevant.

53 points by dctoedt 11y ago

The press really loves to write pieces about how Wikipedia is in a constant state of disrepair. If you were to go off what's written about Wikipedia in the press, you'd think it was filled with child pornography and that the project was a horrible, miserable failure. That said, "One board member, María Sefidari, warned that 'some communities have become so change-resistant and innovation-averse” that they risk staying “stuck in 2006 while the rest of the Internet is thinking about 2020 and the next three billion users.'" ..is probably the best quote from this article. Wikipedia has a new set of growing pains now that it's a fully-established project. It will never be done, but a lack of increase of new contributors, month-on-month, isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world for Wikipedia. A focus on long-term maintenance (which includes not pissing off long-term editors, as the article mentions) and mobile growth seems smart.

thanksgiving 11y ago
The English Wikipedia has a lot of contributors but smaller siblings such as new.wikipedia do not have this luxury. To be fair though, the problem isn't unique to Wikipedia as few people read and write in the language. https://new.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B6%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B7:RecentChanges&days=30&from=&limit=500 https://new.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=special:RecentChanges&days=30&from=&limit=500 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=special:RecentCha...
- prodigal_erik 11y ago
  Off topic, I get why ne.wikipedia.org is in Nepali, but why does new.wikipedia.org have different content in the same language?
  - pooper 11y ago
    new is nepal bhasa or NEWari which is the language of the Nepal valley (also commonly known as Kathmandu valley).
    - prodigal_erik 11y ago
      Ah, different language, same script. TIL.
      - thanksgiving 11y ago
        There is Ranjana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_alphabet and Devnagari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari From what I understand, language and alphabets are related but not the same. For example, you can write in Japanese with roman alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese Thus, it is possible to write in Newari (also known as Nepal Bhasa which literally translates to Nepal Language) in devnagari as well as ranjana. I cannot read or write in Ranjana. I can read or write Devnagari.
prawn 11y ago
If I were to go off only what I read on HN, I'd think Wikipedia was weak, completely flawed and inaccurate. In my experience, it's excellent - informative and free. But then I read it through a lens knowing that it's created by volunteers and may suffer graffiti, and I'm surprised more on HN don't do the same rather than cut it down. The media are just happy to cut down any tall poppy with public recognition because it incites interest.

sehugg 11y ago

I've found editing Wikipedia (as a casual user) to be more daunting than it was five or so years ago, much in part due to figuring out the citation system. Also, uploading images (even those you own) was a headache that took a while to navigate. I don't think though that people will all transition to mobile and forget how to edit markup on keyboards, as the article suggests ... at least not anytime soon.

Strilanc 11y ago
I agree with both those criticisms. The citation templates are hard to find (I had to google them), bury their example usages, and you can't even find out if you did it wrong until the bot that rewrites the particular citation template you used comes by and fails. When I was uploading images I think I managed to get all the way to the last step of five before realizing I was supposed to be using wikimedia instead. The actual user experience for citing should be "just give me the link". Then wikipedia should do the rest. Is it an arxiv link? That's a very common site; scrap the data. Is it a docid link? Ditto. Is it some random pdf? Do your best to parse out the title and authors. Actually, even the URL might be overkill. A random bag of words about the paper (its title, or author and year, or just half-remembered fragments) could be more than enough. A naive search of google scholar with that bag of words, augmented with context from the surrounding article, could potentially have an excellent hit rate.
- hopscotch 11y ago
  Crossref is a non-google site, sponsored by the publishers, that, in my opinion, is friendlier for automation. Anecdotally, I get better results from them, too.
- lwf 11y ago
  > The actual user experience for citing should be "just give me the link". Then wikipedia should do the rest. You're absolutely right. And Wikipedia's Visual Editor[1] does just that: http://i.imgur.com/0yM2koH.png http://i.imgur.com/0yM2koH.png http://i.imgur.com/opVTplc.png http://i.imgur.com/opVTplc.png It isn't perfect, but it's constantly being improved. It was at one point rolled out as the default editing experience on the English Wikipedia[2], but was made opt-in after feedback from the community[3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor#History https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor#History [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC

Sir_Substance 11y ago

I'm hypothesizing here, so I'm willing for someone with actual data to tell me otherwise, but I don't believe that the traditional desktop users have gone anywhere. The massive increase in mobile traffic is coming from people who formerly didn't use the internet except when they had to. Mothers, cricketers, grandfathers, plumbers. All those people who you could never see hunched in front of a keyboard are now discovering the internet via their fancy status-symbol phones. Which is cool and all, but importantly it means wikipedias editors, and desktop users in general, aren't reducing. There's as many of them as there ever were, and their growth rate probably hasn't slowed either. I imagine the venn diagram of "people inclined to edit an online encyclopedia" and "people who will find a mobile phone claustrophobic" is probably pretty much a perfect circle.

sparkzilla 11y ago
I agree that the number of mobile users isn't a factor in declining editor numbers, but the absolute number of editors is in serious decline. It's already evident that many lightly trafficked pages are not being updated. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...
lnanek2 11y ago
As a Facebook stock owner, yes the desktop numbers are going down in general. They took a huge hit when traffic started moving to mobile and they weren't showing ads there yet, then a corresponding rise when they moved the ads to where the people are going. You can find it in their reports. Wikipedia is no doubt the same.
- apta 11y ago
  What is the relevance of you being a FB stock owner to the rest of your comment?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

hartror 11y ago

> In 2005, during Wikipedia’s peak years, there were months when more than 60 editors were made administrator — a position with special privileges in editing the English-language edition. For the past year, it has sometimes struggled to promote even one per month. Or has Wikipedia reached a point of maturity where the group of contributors is largely stable and the core content written and refined?

pbreit 11y ago
Yeah, normally once an encyclopedia has been produced there is only a fraction of ongoing work.
DanBC 11y ago
Administrator used to be no big deal. Users got a small number of extra tools to help them do the work. Now adminship is a big deal. Getting adminship is hard and has caused some editors to make sub-optimal choices. (See vandal patrol or the various admin-wannabe schemes.)

sparkzilla 11y ago

It's not the keyboards that are the problem. Wikipedia will not survive because the site has a huge amount of software issues, the most notable being the wiki-software itself, which is almost 15 years old and simply not suited to the demands of the modern web. The software is the cause of almost every problem the site has (including bias, harassment, censorship, Gender Gap, lack of media support, hideous textbook like formatting and more) but the cult-like status attached to it ensures it cannot be meaningfully updated. Decline is inevitable. For more on these issues see this blog post [1] Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. While it was dealing with "encyclopedic" topics it was fine, but now that the encyclopedia part is pretty much done, editors are building up pages that are actually news archives, a task the wiki software does not handle well. As for the author's claims that that Wikipedia has no substantial competition -- it's coming. My site, Newslines, aims to take away all Wikipedia's news and biography pages, replacing Wikipedia's article-based writing system with a news event-driven approach that results in far less bias, and pages that readers can sort and filter. We even have video! You can see a couple of pages we are working on here [2][3]. So far our writers, who receive revenue share for their efforts, have added over 30,000 posts on 8000 different topics. [1] http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ [2] http://newslines.org/dylann-roof/?order=ASC http://newslines.org/dylann-roof/?order=ASC [3] http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC

zachrose 11y ago
... which is almost 15 years old and simply not suited to the demands of the modern web. What are the demands of the modern web?
- setpatchaddress 11y ago
  Insatiable lust for cat/kitten videos, probably.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  How about video and document embedding for a start. Wikipedia has almost zero embedding, which is kind of useful when you want to see more about news events (video and document embedding directly in the page), or even see an actor's performance, or a trailer, or a music clip. Wikipedia looks and acts like a textbook on the web, instead of a purpose-designed site that includes all relevant media about a topic. People have just got so used to it that they can't imagine doing things another way.

robbrown451 11y ago

I think the lack of participation now has more to do with Wikipedia becoming mature, where it doesn't really need a lot more added, except actual new information. There was a long period where most anyone with the inclination could find something to add. It's a lot harder now. Contributions are much more scrutinized now, and there are much more stringent requirements for citations. Which is good...that means that it is being refined, rather than just bulked up. But that takes less people. Even if the organization were to go away (which doesn't seem at all likely), all the work that has gone into it is there for eternity. Others can build upon it.

degenerate 11y ago
Bingo. I'd edit wikipedia if it was needed, but it's just not needed. And you would too, and you over there, and that guy too. We're all standing by, but there's people doing it already. It has nothing to do with phones. There's a term for what this article is doing, but I forget the expression... it's trying to make a story out of nothing.

tokenadult 11y ago

As a note at the end of the article points out, Andrew Lih, the author of the article kindly submitted here, is someone who literally wrote the book about Wikipedia, namely the book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.[1] His book is one of the books I read as I transitioned from being a reader of Wikipedia to being an editor of Wikipedia in 2010. I think the best point he made in the current article needs more emphasis in the article, and more discussion here on Hacker News. "The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes — the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in." Big time. The governance on Wikipedia is basically a mobocracy, and it is not producing good improvements to articles. Contrary to what several comments posted earlier in this thread (while I was examining my Wikipedia watchlist) say, I don't think much of Wikipedia is very good at all yet. There was the famous study that suggested that Wikipedia was no worse (based on a sampling of articles in the study) than the Encyclopedia Britannica at that time, and plainly a typical Wikipedia article is better than a typical single-author website on the same topic somewhere on the Internet, but Wikipedia is actually a LOT worse than the content of other reference books college-educated people can find by consulting an academic library. Wikipedia currently wins reader attention because of the extreme convenience of doing ill-formed Google searches on the Internet as a whole and then examining whatever Wikipedia articles show up highest in the search results. Yes, that is a contribution to the quality of freely available online information. But remarkably few of the 5,000 most viewed articles on Wikipedia each week[2] are even up to "B class" on Wikipedia's very generous quality rating scale, and "good article" or "featured article" quality articles on highly viewed topics are even rarer. I work at improving some of the high-page-view articles. Two of the 5,000 articles on the weekly top 5,000 list (they are there every week without fail) that are at "good article" quality level are articles that I helped improve. But the petty edit warring and endless wikilawyering about silly issues, often solely in the interest of pushing fringe points of view, has ruined a lot of Wikipedia's articles and has driven away many productive editors who are disgusted by all that interpersonal drama with unaccountable strangers. What I would like to see tried is a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize, with careful work done on prize criteria and funding for a substantial prize by a philanthropist, to see if there is a better way to organize a crowd-sourced project to build a free, online encyclopedia, both as to software base and as to organizational structure. I suspect that there are two or three models of a new encyclopedia that could force Wikipedia to change or be left in the dust. Elon Musk could really make himself famous by trying to fund a prize like this, but he is by far not the only Silicon Valley entrepreneur who could afford to fund a meaningful prize in this space. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Wikipedia-Revolution-Nobodies-Encyclopedia/dp/B002KAOS60 http://www.amazon.com/The-Wikipedia-Revolution-Nobodies-Ency... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pag...

hlfcoding 11y ago

Their iOS app[1] looks promising, but the reviews seem to indicate it's still not there yet. Back in 2004, I had friends who grew addicted to casual browsing of Wikipedia in the browser. I'm not sure if that activity translates well to mobile browsers, but that it's probably a variety of factors: lack of integration with the device OS, longer average latency, more user actions to navigate content (accordion interface). As far as editing, not having input accessories for the markup syntax makes editing on mobile painful. Luckily, these problems all seem surmountable. [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-mobile/id324715238?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-mobile/id324715238...

wavefunction 11y ago

Wikipedia should integrate NLP querying so you can ask it questions and it can attempt/succeed at presenting relevant and useful information from its graph. edit voice search for mobile as well

bane 11y ago

So as an experiment, about a year ago, I helped created this page [1][2] (it had been around for a while, but had been deleted a few times). Some editor keeps deleting it or redirecting it to "cold chills" which it isn't. It's also not ASMR. I've never had any edit to WP last longer than 24 hours, so I was surprise some version of what I helped resurrect still around. It's been worked on, edited, and even had some warning flags placed on it. In general, it's an improvement over what I originally provided. Trouble is, I can't tell if this is because this is a weird and obscure topic area, or because what I provided (with links to research papers) was good enough for some bot not to automatically submit for deletion. Some of my original phrases have even survived which is pretty amazing. Contributing to WP is terrifying. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8190451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8190451

contingencies 11y ago

Personally, I just quit editing after 15 years (12 as an administrator) in protest at the deletion of good encyclopedic content. Frankly, I can see clearly why new editors don't want to become involved in Wikipedia - the community these days is positively toxic. I think, subconsciously, I was rather hoping someone would fix the problem and invite me back, but not only has the problem not been fixed but nobody seem to give a damn. There was a time when I even attended Wikimedia physical meetings with governments and academics and so forth. Well... no more: so long, and thanks for all the free edits. My solution? Remove all the bullshit policies, reduce things back to a core of spirit-of-the-word driven basics, and then have a random selection of a panel of community judges (extra/uninvolved eyeballs) for anything at all that people want to dispute. This would do far better than the mob rule of yore, while lowering cognitive overhead and friction for new editors.

foopants 11y ago

Good riddance. It is a hateful, bullying, propaganda pile.

sova 11y ago
Not all of it. Just the contentious stuff. If you want to learn about chlorophyll, for example, it's a great resource. The periodic table on Wiki is also really great. The rest that could be classified as editorials is somewhat troubling, though. That said, it is a product that has not had a rethink of its internals or structure in ~20 years? So it had a great run. Either become the next World Book or the first social encyclopedia, but trying to balance both has been a journey indeed.

Animats 11y ago

We keep hearing this argument, usually from print authors who are struggling to remain relevant. Really, Wikipedia is in good shape, having reached the point where there are articles on most things of significance. Let's take a look at the last 10 new articles on Wikipedia right now: EDULITE Institute Air Reserve Component New York Declaration on Forests Daniel lopez lauber Northeastern Conference (Wisconsin) Embassy of the United States, Mexico City RU.TV Castle of Evil Diagnosis of multiple sclerosis Arlington Beardtime Some of those subject might be worth an article, but it's not like Wikipedia really needs an article on any of those subjects. Most of the important stuff was covered in the first 500K articles. Of course Wikipedia is hard to edit from a phone. Small screen devices are for mostly-output applications. Writing anything longer than a text message is hard on a phone. Editing documents is hard on a phone. Writing a footnoted paper on a phone or tablet is painful, even though you can now run Microsoft Word on Android devices. Does anyone on HN program from a phone except in dire emergencies? Writers use keyboards. Readers use tablets and phones. Wikipedia's bureaucracy is somewhat complex, but it beats having some group of "moderators" with unquestionable authority. Editing Wikipedia has become daunting mostly because it's now expected that almost everything be cited. That's a good thing, because it prevents blog-type blithering. But many people aren't used to that, especially if they never went to a reasonably tough high school or college.

fauigerzigerk 11y ago

Is it really such a bad sign if the number of editors goes down after most content that many people know about has already been written and refined for a number of years? I would be very surprised if the difficulty of writing wikipedia articles on 6" screens has anything to do with it.

DanBC 11y ago
But the quality of that refined content is not very good. There's still huge amounts of work that need to be done. But trying to do that is sometimes like walking through molasses. So yes, it does matter.
- fauigerzigerk 11y ago
  The problem is that the quality is better than most people's expertise on the subject. Back when there were no articles on some subjects, many could make a contribution because many knew more than nothing about the subject. In any event, I don't see how that relates to editing on a 6" screen.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Wikipedia needs people to check citations and provide citations. That's really freaking hard on a mobile phone.
    - fauigerzigerk 11y ago
      That's a good point.

Fannon 11y ago

I also don't think that the problem is the rise of mobile devices here. My perception is that Wikipedia has developed a culture that where new people are really discouraged from starting and contributing. The problem is both social and technological. And while the MediaWiki software is open source, it forms a rather closed / restricted sub-area of open source software. They reinvent alot within their community. I'd be very happy if they did some steps like Drupal 8, integrating part of the Symfony 2 Framework. Nevertheless, Wikipedia / MediaWiki are still very powerful and I don't see any viable alternative to them as of now. It was / is a highly successful project. Not many software projects grow so old and are still relevant.