Contributors Leaving Wikipedia In Record Numbers 632
Hugh Pickens writes "CNET reports that the volunteers who create Wikipedia's pages, check facts and adapt the site are abandoning Wikipedia in unprecedented numbers, with tens of thousands of editors going 'dead' — no longer actively contributing and updating the site — a trend many experts believe could threaten Wikipedia's future. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language version of Wikipedia suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period in 2008. 'If you don't have enough people to take care of the project it could vanish quickly,' says Felipe Ortega at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, who created a computer system to analyze the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages. 'We're not in that situation yet. But eventually, if the negative trends follow, we could be in that situation.' Contributors are becoming disenchanted with the process of adding to the site, which is becoming increasingly difficult says Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality and a regular editor of the site. 'There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. Wikipedia grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many contributors.' Arguments over various articles have also taken their toll. 'Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again,' adds Ortega."
Rules are to be broken, but not on Wikipedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
They also have a stupid rule regarding "how important stuff has to be" before it can be added as a new article on Wikipedia. That one alone is the main reason I never again will try to contribute anything to it.
Always happens - bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
Europe has been there for a while.
The US is getting there now.
People are never content to leave well enough alone.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe not finished, but certainly quite aways toward it.
“If you don’t have enough people to take care of the project it could vanish quickly"
That's an odd thing to say. For a game such as an MMO, it would be detrimental to have all the players leave; but a reference is a different kind of game: even with no new contributions and no more editing, there is still a vast mass of articles on historical (history up until today, at least) subjects, and they're not likely to disappear just because the contributors do.
Future schmuture (Score:2, Insightful)
Wikipedia is what it is. Even if all the contributors dropped dead right now, it'd be the best encyclopedia around for quite some time yet.
As a long-time contributor (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovation vs maintanence (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
or Heilongjiang
I think a lot more could be written about the Northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang. It's got a ridiculously small Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] (even in simplified Chinese [wikipedia.org]) yet is home to 38 million people and is about the area of Texas [wikipedia.org]. And after all that this province has a vastly smaller page than Texas (especially if you look at Texas as a portal page). That's a higher population and area than most US states. If those people spoke English and had more access to internet, I'm sure this page could harbor a lot more encyclopedic information.
What I'm trying to say is: your articles are finished. If the world revolved around you, Wikipedia would be complete. But not to the billions of other people in the world. So keep your claims of "it's finished, dummies" to yourself.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing I've learned in life, when people are being dicks they're doing it for a reason that benefits them.
The keyword being them - not necessarily the project.
There are many discussions in dozens of blogs about what the benefit for the Wikipedia "inner circle" is. Most of it isn't very friendly. Much of it sounds right nevertheless.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
Having said that, I don't think even with their draconian and arbitrary relevancy policies that they're anywhere near the end of everything that would fit on the site. The issue is not that they're running out of things to put up, it's that they're actively driving contributors away by subjecting them to all these hoops to jump through that didn't exist before. You have the old guard admins fighting amongst themselves, and throwing up arbitrary restrictions to make it harder and more frustrating for new editors to get involved.
Wikipedia is also much more susceptible to rot than most other sites. Without a steady stream of admins coming in and doing the grunt work of cleaning up the many thousands of articles on the site, those articles will eventually be taken over by the trolls and become useless. Eventually, enough articles will suffer this fate that no one will consider the site any kind of good resource anymore, and we will have lost something truly remarkable.
Wikipedia as it stood not too long ago was a remarkable testament to the power of collaborative editing, and represented an incredible resource. If it continues the slide it's on, it will end up being an object lesson in how political infighting and needless bureaucracy (particularly bureaucracy designed to protect personal fiefdoms) can ruin things for everyone.
Re:Future schmuture (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia around? Maybe if you're looking up the number of Star Wars references in an episode of Super Mario Bros. Super Show or the episode history of some esoteric anime series.
Re:As a long-time contributor (Score:4, Insightful)
Third, the deletionism has combined with a general attitude that is very bad unwelcoming to newcomers.
You totally correct. I believe the number of people leaving is actually the result that most wiki editors wanted. It seems that every entry has at least one editors who does not want anyone messing with "his" entry.
I long ago gave up any attempt to correct misspelled words or inconsistencies within the same entry.
Re:Innovation vs maintanence (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup, that's pretty much the nature of crowd-sourcing. Sure, there'll be a certain segment that will remain dedicated to the project/task, but a lot of others will fall away when the novelty wears off or it's perceived as becoming too much work.
Wikipedia:Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Har har har. How very funny.
Actually, the Wikipedia:Statistics [wikipedia.org] page gets you all the stats there's to be had.
Also, Wikimedia:Statistics [wikimedia.org] is showing a steady influx of New Wikipedians [wikimedia.org] and Active Wikipedians [wikimedia.org], albeit not quite as many as previously.
Hmm, I wonder if this is more a publicity stunt in relation with their current funds drive?
At least, "Wikipedia shows signs of stalling as number of volunteers falls sharply" should probably have been "Wikipedia shows signs of maturity as number of new volunteers falls slighly".
Sisyphus (Score:5, Insightful)
EITHER
you monitory your pages every day
all the while remembering that they aren't "your" pages, and that all you can do is make your best evidence-based case and hope that other agree with it...
OR
you don't, and you watch as bitrot and entropy slowly but relentlessly degrade the pages to something you can't bear to look at any more.
I maintained some pages for about a year, and then after one particularly nasty edit war I gave up. Not in a petulant "they won't have me to kick around any more" way. I just stopped caring so much. Wikipedia dropped off my mental list of sites that I check every day.
I still use Wikipedia—it's near the top of every SERP. But I haven't tried to edit anything there in years.
Wikipedia is for anal retentives (Score:1, Insightful)
You have to be obsesive to mantain as a Wikipedia contributor. All if not most of my contribution was deleted, including CC licensed images.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
The paradox is that as the number of useful contributors leave, the number of vandals is sure to only increase. If there are no provisions for better restricting the damage caused by vandals, the nature of the project as a reliable repository of information could in fact vanish.
Hostile embedded community (Score:3, Insightful)
Balderdash (pronounced /B*ryhed734as/)
Hello new user. Thanks for adding your contribution to Wikipedia, but you are not worthy. Here's a slap in your face. There is no point in re-adding your article, because I am watching you, my reputation is better then yours and I have much more free time on my hands then you do.
This new article doesn't meet Wikipedia's requirements for Notability [wikipedia.org]. I've never heard of this topic, and I've heard of everything on the planet. Therefore, I am recommending this article for deletion, and then you'll have to redo it from scratch.
If you don't respond quickly, we'll delete the article. You DO check the deletion logs every day, don't you?
Wikipedia desperately needs a Flash-based editor. (Score:1, Insightful)
The theory is that anyone should be able to edit Wikipedia.
This theory is easily shredded to pieces. Let's copy some of the raw code from the article about Obama (and we should expect this to be the pinnacle of Wikipedianess):
Obama intervened in the [[Automobile Industry Bailout|troubled automotive industry]]{{cite news|title=White House questions viability of GM, Chrysler|date=March 30, 2009|work=The Huffington Post|url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/30/obama-denies-bailout-fund_n_180563.html}} in March, renewing loans for [[General Motors]] and [[Chrysler Corporation]] to continue operations while reorganizing. Over the following months the White House set terms for both firms' bankruptcies, including the [[Chrysler bankruptcy|sale of Chrysler]] to Italian automaker [[Fiat]]{{cite news|title=Chrysler and Union Agree to Deal Before Federal Deadline|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/business/27chrysler.html?_r=2&bl&ex=1240977600&en=670e4df8295b2843&ei=5087%0A}} and a [[General Motors bankruptcy|reorganization of GM]] giving the U.S. government a temporary 60% equity stake in the company, with the Canadian government shouldering a 12% stake.{{cite news|title=GM Begins Bankruptcy Process With Filing for Affiliate|author=John Hughes, Caroline Salas, Jeff Green, and Bob Van Voris|url=http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aw4F_L7E4xYg|work=Bloomberg.com|date=June 1, 2009}} He also signed into law the [[Car Allowance Rebate System]], known colloquially as "Cash for Clunkers" bill, on August 7, 2009.{{cite news|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/21clunkers.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=cash%20for%20clunkers&st=cse|title=Government Will End Clunker Program Early |author= Nick Bunkley|publisher=''[[New York Times]]''|date=2009-08-20|accessdate=2009-08-21}}
This should be supplemented with a Flash-based editor, where you could simply click on words and type in details in a drop-down menu to mark it as a reference.
And that is just one of the momentous amount of problems Wikipedia has. I remember in the old days, there were actually some people saying that "if you contribute to Wikipedia, you could even mention it in a job interview" - at the moment, if someone told me that they're a Wikipedia editor, I would assume they were a zealous sociopath. Do you think that none of them noticed that Wikipedia was getting inaccessible to ordinary users? No, power and status is like water, if 999 paths are blocked it will take number 1000.
Re:As a long-time contributor (Score:3, Insightful)
Good. It's real simple. Encyclopedias are not sources. They are where you go to get an introduction on a topic and leads to sources.
Re:Wikipedia:Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever. All I know is, Wikipedia is hugely useful to me, and has cost me nothing. My sincere thanks go out to all those who made useful additions to Wikipedia, and to Wales for making it happen.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
But the contents of Wikipedia are creative commons so if enough people get fed up with their policies then they can start the whole thing up again with all the current content, but without the current rules and admins ....
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
The noteworthiness filter, and the arbitrary nature with which it's applied by editors more motivated by protecting their own personal turf than building a quality resource, is ruining the site for a lot of people.
I find it particularly egregious that on their "five facts" page, which is trying to get people to donate money, Fact #4 states: "We exist so that every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." The noteworthiness nonsense makes this a blatant lie. They are no longer in any way interested in "the sum of all knowledge" and are in fact actively working to keep the site from becoming the sum of all knowledge. However, they're still more than happy to claim that as their goal because it sounds good for fundraising purposes.
Re:A suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
I am interested in your equation of a progressive to socialists and the assertion that neither allow multiple view points.
Are you saying that the Chinese Socialist Party is progressive? Or just that all progressive parties are socialists(and then that not all socialists are progressive)?
Does this preclude conservative parties from being socialists?
Are you implying that conservative parties always allow multiple view points?
I'm curious.
Re:add one (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:As a long-time contributor (Score:3, Insightful)
I've never understood why this is bad. Does the existence of a Pokemon article somehow lessen the legitimacy of an article about the Battle of the Bulge? Storage of the information is surely not a problem. If that's what people want to contribute, then maybe that's what people will want to look up. Isn't it more important to have people in the community who participate than having them contributing elsewhere? Seriously, other than the obvious fact that you personally aren't interested in insert obscure niche here, what's the problem?
I've also never seen a very good argument for why Star Trek is more relevant than anything else. Is there a base number of fans required? But there are pretty obscure bands, and most fans hate the Star Trek movies but they are all listed. The distinction just seems arbitrary.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like Wikipedia simply needs to be forked, just like many open-source projects which had bad leadership (XFree86 is a good example). Then the new leadership can institute better rules and policies.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
It still is. But the experiment of information anarchy on the Internet has run its course, because it turned out not be very useful or interesting. Not, for the most part, because of big eviiil government, but simply because the signal to noise ratio is so low that it isn't worthwhile. Moderated web forums have pushed Usenet aside. Email blacklists have limited which IPs allowed to originate outgoing email. Facebook has replaced homebrew home pages. The existence of Wikipedia in the first place is a testament to the need for organization and filtering; otherwise we'd all just post our wisdom to our own little web sites and let users combine it all with search engines. It is possible that Wikipedia will take this too far and become too heavy-handed, but the simple fact that it's changing is not evidence of that in itself. Rather, it is maturing, and the fact is, a random user editing a random Wikipedia page is now more likely to make it worse than to make it better.
Re:As a long-time contributor (Score:2, Insightful)
It just isn't worth the fight anymore. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was an old-timer on Wikipedia who began contributing in 2002.
I've witnessed layers and layers of bureaucracy be added to Wikipedia all under the benevolent dictatorship of Jimbo. I've witnessed what used to be a culture where all editors were considered equal become one where there are definite castes and hierarchies (and cabals).
It just isn't worth the effort to edit anymore.
Case in point: from 2002 to 2006 I was one of the primary editors of a set of articles that had to do with a subject that definitely has politics surrounding it. All the editors involved and I did our best to present both sides of the topic and to try to keep the articles fair and balanced. The number of editors was sparse and it was relatively easy to keep the articles on track.
A couple of years ago a new user started editing these articles. He was extremely contentious but a skilled at wikilawyering. Every edit he didn't agree with would be dragged by him down a rathole of WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:POV, WP:PSTS, and so and and so on ad infinitum. It doesn't matter how well *your* edits are sourced from quality peer-reviewed sources. If he didn't agree with your edits he would find something to complain about; the journal you are citing isn't respected enough, the author you are quoting has an obvious bias, your summary of the published literature doesn't agree with how he would summarize the published literature, etc, etc, etc. Similarly, any objection you had to his edits (or to the overall effect his edits in aggregate were having on the article) would also be dragged down a similar path of his gaming the system.
Editing the articles involved simply became too painful to continue. If you wanted to make any change that this user would disagree with then you had to prepare yourself of days of arguing with him before he would leave you alone. Similarly, one became hesitant to "correct" any of his articles because of the time-sink that you knew arguing with him was going to become.
The existing editors tried many times to work within the system to make this user stop. There were multiple attempts at mediation and arbitration. But over time all of the "old" editors simply gave up. It just wasn't worth the effort anymore.
When I visit these articles today I am ashamed at what they have become. What was once a fair attempt to present all sides of an issue has become extremely one-sided and quite misleading to a reader not familiar with the subject. The "problem user" has become in effect the only editor of these articles, tolerating only a handful of other editors who primarily make grammatical and punctuation changes.
The only hope for the articles in question is that this user eventually gets tired and quits. He has won in his attempt to take over these articles, everyone with an established interest has been driven away, and I don't think any new user is going to be able to mount a challenge as he will simply tie them down in wikilawyering forever.
Re:Uncontrolled administrators (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia:Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
My sincere thanks also go out to those who made useful additions to Wikipedia, the 35% of Wikipedians who delete those useful additions for no reason or because they have been plagiarized by other sites and the plagiarism attributed to the original Wikipedia author, and the remaining 62% of Wikipedians who have added to the signal-to-noise ratio.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course a lot of crap is coming in. It always has. The problem is that many start to assume anything added by a newbie is crap until proven otherwise.
As a thought example, let's say 80% of new articles are crap. Then let's say 90% is deletions are accurate. 90% is pretty good, but that still means about 44% of good new articles are deleted.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you are missing one possible cause of the whining about "deletionism".
I see the problem as editors who revert any changes to articles without taking a moment to verify the fact before they remove it.
Often a few seconds of search would have lead to a citation for the fact.
Adding the citation would improve the article, whereas a knee jerk reaction to delete the new information leads to stagnation.
Often when I check the contribution history of the editors involved, it consists almost entirely of deleting statements that people have added.
Re:As a long-time contributor (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely true. World Book, Britannica, etc. These are considered authoritative sources sufficient for grade-schoolers.
They did do a report on Wikipedia, though, to the teacher's credit. It covered what you could get from it, how to check validity of sources, things like this.
One of the best parts? My kid chose to use the vandalized page on laptops as an example of one of the issues. (The Laptop entry had some really weird stuff on it a week or two ago - it has since been locked)
Re:add one (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:May I ask (Score:2, Insightful)
See: cyanogenmod (a popular firmware distribution for the Android OS). Oh wait, you can't.
That's because it was deleted multiple times-- despite clear notability, numerous citations from other pages, and overwhelming "keep" votes from an active and engaged group of editors.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
from fans who want to blither endlessly about their favorite movie/comic book/Star Trek episode/vampire. That's what Wikia is for.
Why not?
Wikipedia already hosts plenty of articles on Star Wars [wikipedia.org], including many pages about characters and episodes.
Is there Wikipedia rule against writing these sorts of fluffy articles? If so, why are those rules applied against Star Trek episodes, but not against Star Wars? The reasoning and deletions seem arbitrary.
I find it ironic that contributions to technical articles about Linux, databases and system administration get deleted, but Wikipedia still has a 2000 word article about Chewbacca.
I agree that Wikipedia isn't a great place to host a list of your favorite comic book, and I'd rather that Wikipedia focus on 'important' topics.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the problem with wikipedia is fairly effectively demonstrated with the following two examples:
Some guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) [wikipedia.org] for deletion and fails in his attempt. So what does he do? Merges every episode, save that one, into List of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes [wikipedia.org]. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
And then there's Torchic [wikipedia.org]. A front page featured article with 20 paragraphs and 46 citations now reduced to redirecting to a list of pokemon, with 2-3 paragraphs (depending on whether or not a one sentence paragraph counts) and no citations. Amazing stuff.
Re:add one (Score:5, Insightful)
If you define "random fucktards who keep pushing against the consensus until they wear out the article's defenders and supporters" as "serious issues", then yeah. But personally, I don't generally count trolls with time on their hands to wear down supporters as prima facie evidence that the article had serious issues.
So long as you don't come to the attention of a serious troll or deletionist and his clique, yes - reliable sources are adequate. But if you do, heaven help you - as you often find yourself wearing nothing but Speedo's in the middle of a thermonuclear blast.
Re:A suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the real problem, which is that Wikipedia's policies/procedures are designed around two major flaws:
#1 - Administrators are always assumed to be in the right, despite clear and frequent misbehavior on their part
#2 - The assumption is that consensus never changes, and the "consensus" of whatever group (or admin-protected individual) "owns" a particular page has a vested interest in driving away all new contributors one by one, lest enough show up that the consensus indeed changes.
For example, I'm reminded of Lie #2 [livejournal.com]: "Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia."
I'll quote the relevant part:
Interestingly enough, the BITE policy has a telling statement: nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility or elitism. Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators.
The more people get away with treating newcomers as if they are plaguebearers, the more newcomers get driven off. Even established users are being treated this way more and more, and it's no surprise they give up as well. Combine hatred of newcomers with an outgoing flux of tired contributors who've simply had enough of the abusive "ruling class" administrators, and it's no surprise that they're in sharp decline.
Re:Sisyphus (Score:4, Insightful)
It's fascinating, and telling, that you fail to include "examine the new edit for quality" or any other positive statement on your list. You appear predisposed to revert.
From your 'to do' list above, it's abundantly obvious that you failed to remember that - as your 'to do' list is nothing but a list of ways to keep the article preserved in amber.
You illustrates precisely why people are leaving in record droves.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed.
Part of this nonsense is due to cliques, and part of it is due to the fact the mission statement is idiotic.
Wikipedia should have been split into a dozen difference sites ages ago. First thing to be split out: everything fictional
They don't belong in an encyclopedia anyway, and Wikipedia's 'notability' guidelines on that are sheer nonsense.
Please note I'm not trying to say that no one should document fictional stuff. I'm all for that, I have no problem at all. But it should be somewhere else.
Next thing to remove: 95% of the places. Again, doesn't belong in an encyclopedia, but in an almanac. One with some sort of map interface.
How about anti-science? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the folks who were actually busy writing the articles agreed, but every time an attempt was made to change the policies, our efforts would be met with great resistance from people who simply did not know what they were talking about, let alone make any contributions of the kind. You could see from their edit histories that these people were bureaucrats: they produced very little content and an amazing amount of hot air. Yet, they have enormous influence at WP due simply to their dogged persistence.
In my view, the fact that more productive editors are now leaving as opposed to arriving is only partly explained by the low-hanging-fruit phenomenon. I, along with many others, was willing to take WP -- or at least my small corner of it -- to the next level, but the problem is that those bureaucrats simply don't share the same vision. When it comes to certain subjects that enter into their own realm of consciousness, it seems like they'd rather keep things looking like an expanded version of the old encyclopedia that their parents once bought when they were kids. It's completely at odds with Jimbo's original vision, but try telling them that.
As a result, the easy work has already been done, but anyone with the knowledge to do the hard stuff is quickly discouraged. I suspect most professional biologists don't even bother; a few of the ones I spoke to outside of WP had a low opinion of the site precisely because scientific names were not being used for article titles.
Finally, there's the problem of vandalism. Since I've left, no one has stepped in to keep an eye on the articles I wrote, let alone expand them in any meaningful way. The vandalism, however, is constant. Most of the obvious stuff gets reverted, but it's the subtle vandalism that is the most problematic. Unless you're a specialist, you just can't tell the difference. Either WP should start paying specialists to keep watch, or they should start try treating their own volunteer specialists with more respect. I've heard for years that WP v2 was supposed to solve a lot of vandalism problems, but so far it hasn't appeared.
Be Bold (Score:3, Insightful)
You did the right thing: your were Bold, in keeping with Wikipedia's Be Bold [wikipedia.org] guideline. If the moderator disagrees, they should bring up the subject on the discussion page -- but not scold you (see ad hominem [wikipedia.org]) for being bold.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia. There can be more than one version of an article.
I've always wondered why, when you encounter a page in the middle of an edit war, why the page doesn't provide a link at the top that says: "This page is currently experiencing an edit war because of controversial content. Click here to see the most up-to-date page along with a recent annotated edit history explaining the different points of view--go there if you have a point of view to contribute. The page you are now viewing is a locked version of the page as it existed before the controversy started, and will be replaced with the final edited version of the page when the controversy ends."
It's the web. Don't force people to choose. Show the low-controversy information for those who want that. Show the controversial up to the second page for people that want that. And let them edit that page for people that want to take up arms in the edit war. Why do we always all have to agree on everything?
As opposed to just locking the page, giving it a slightly more out-of-band place to exist and still comply with basic wikipedian principles will make most everyone happy, and allows these pages to be categorized for easy browsing. "Today, I want to browse the edit wars!" I bet there's a lot of useful information in those wars that comes through too, and every now and then privileged editors could pick through the carnage, take out the best factual bits, and integrate that content into the low-controversy page.
I expect some pages would probably spend more time in an edit war state than not (some might always stay in that state). That's fine too, as long as there's a filter between the two, why not just capture everything?
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:2, Insightful)
If a citation doesn't come with your information, you aren't the sort of person who should be editing an encyclopedia. The point is not just to increase the quality of Wikipedia, but the quality of the editors - which despite the fearmongering in this article are in ample supply.
If you add citations to citation-free facts, you're encouraging people to add more citation-free facts, further increasing the cleanup burden, and making it harder to distinguish between uncited yet factual information and uncited lies.
Re:A suggestion (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupid assumption #3: That consensus is possible with everyone.
For example, pages about Islam that show pictures of Mork, or whatever their god's name is. To most people this is like Greek gods, or Christianity, some made-up child stuff like Santa, but to real believers in this it's like oxygen.
Wikipedia assumes that these people can be talked to logically. Like, if you explain often enough how the prohibition against pictures applies to them, not to non-believers such as yourself, that they'll understand.
Pft. That's not good enough for religious people. In their mind the article belongs to them because it mentions them.
That's why WP needs, imho, multiple pages and github style forking on the same topic. Let the god-fearing make their little god-pleasing page, and let the rest of the world ignore it.
You can't speak reasonably to someone who fears a drawing of a dead-man, or come to any consensus other than babbling idiocy.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
> What if they made "releases" of wikipedia every year or so
Yeah! And they could print it out and bind it all in a series of books. Maybe they could have door-to-door Wikipedia salesmen. What a truly original idea!
But seriously, part of the idea is to be better than an encyclopedia because the articles aren't stuck in semi-permanent revisions.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a huge double standard applied to what is considered obscure on Wikipedia. I once wrote a very complete article on Metz, France, one of the largest cities in France, and it got deleted for being "obscure" and because "Wikipedia can't have an article on every no name city nobody has every heard of", yet we have plenty of Wikipedia enormous wikipedia articles on US cities that are a tenth the size of Metz, France. I also wrote an article on Ancient Mound civilizations and it got put in for deletion for being "obscure", then got deleted when I mentioned it was based on my PhD thesis for being "original research"--I'm one of a few dozen people in the world who are even qualified to write it! It's insane.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
It's because the rules of noteworthiness are not applied to subjects that are not noteworthy, only to subjects which the compete with the personal turf of the deletionist. This means articles about subjects which are involved in a bit of fan-infight especially if they have a more popular competitor are more likely to be deleted than something that no one has personal feelings attached to.
Re:Rules are to be broken, but not on Wikipedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the biggest question, what does it COST to have fancruft in wikipedia?
Inability to play dominance games by being a deletionist.
Which is the primary form of recreation for "those in charge" of Wikipedia.
They're not happy until you're not happy.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course a lot of crap is coming in. It always has. The problem is that many start to assume anything added by a newbie is crap until proven otherwise.
As a thought example, let's say 80% of new articles are crap. Then let's say 90% is deletions are accurate. 90% is pretty good, but that still means about 44% of good new articles are deleted.
I'm having trouble understanding your math on this one.
1,000 articles total
800 are crap
200 are good
90% of deletions are accurate.
Let's say 100 articles are deleted.
90% of them, or 90 total are bad articles.
10%, or 10 of them, are good articles.
The end result is that, of 200 articles, 10 were deleted. That's 5%.
Now, if you meant to say that 90% of all articles are handled correctly, then you could say:
720 of the bad articles are removed, leaving 80 still in the system.
20 of the good articles are removed, leaving 180 in the system.
The end result is that, 97 percent of the articles removed were crap, and 30% of the articles remaining are bad.
If I'm missing something, could you let me know?
Re:May I ask (Score:4, Insightful)
What's "unverifiable" about a blog?
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but you are an egocentric narrow-minded asshole!
And I am not insulting you or trolling, because I’m merely stating facts. Really? Well...
Most of the whining about “deletionism” is from fans who want to blither endlessly about their favorite movie/comic book/Star Trek episode/vampire. That”s what Wikia is for.
What else would make you think, that you are the one who gets to decide what belongs and does not belong somewhere?
Or is it that elusive “everybody” guy, that makes you think you know what belongs where, and use him as an excuse?
YOU do NOT have ANY right at ALL to tell ANYONE what is important to HIM. And you DO NOT OWN Wikipedia.
So if a person thinks this is important enough to be written down, than it IS. By definition. Period. No discussion.
Your problem is, that you don’t fix your end.
If you want your Wikipedia, build your own.
Wanna know what normal people do when they don’t think that what YOU say is important/relevant?
They TUNE OUT! They simply don’t listen or read it.
There. “A simple solution for the non-egocentric man!” Was it that hard?
Re:Be Bold (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know why this reply is labeled redundant except to show a bias against stating a legitimate concerns and problems with Wikipedia. It sounds like there is a broken mod system here on /. as well. Not that this is also stating the obvious.
Being bold and adding a correction was exactly the point of Wikipedia in the first place. The admin/moderator/irate protectionist user is the one who should have posted the objection on the talk page and "Assume Good Faith" on the part of users who may be new editors to the article or especially to Wikipedia. Minor edits, in particular, should be encouraged and cherished.
Far too often it seems like changes on wiki projects take on a sense of committee and don't actually get anything done. Writing by committee tends to be the worst possible kind, so having somebody be bold and improve the language of an article with a specific voice (not necessarily a specific POV.... I'm talking the tone of the language in the article) can be an improvement.
I do object to off-topic content being added to article I monitor, but it has to be rather substantial (> a paragraph) and clearly going off on a tangent that may be better made as a separate article.
Of course I tend to be an inclusionist at heart and consider the words that somebody has written in good faith to be valuable resources.not to be discarded for light reasons.
Re:A suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
There are vandals who enjoy breaking things. Again and again, especially after a beer or two. ... ... well, sometimes someone wins in a lottery.
There are fucktards who, well, enjoy breaking things anonymously. Especially after a beer
There are idiots who think they are right and will fight you to death. Sometimes they are right
There are teenagers who know too much - but not enough.
There are bureaucrats who insist every i is dotted or else your change is bye-bye. Others who insist this particular change should be approved anyway.
There are mentally ill people who do things you'd never imagine. Especially if anonymous. And not stopped. Even if stopped, actually.
There are mentally ill people who do things you'd never imagine. Especially if on power. Even virtual power like a Wikipedia whatnot. Or maybe especially, wouldn't know.
Wikipedia has a future of [citation needed], in "bad, worse, statistic" sense.
Volunteer organisation syndrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Any useful organisation that depends on volunteers degrades when the original memes die.
The geeks invent it, the enlightened make it easy to use, a few champions popularise it, the bullies move in with the rest of the crowd and it's no longer interesting. It's a common pattern, really.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
Deletionists are all assholes. Sounds implausible that 100% of them could be, but netcraft confirms it or something.
Seriously though, deleting something is a huge power-trip and so you get people who could never make anything on their own tearing things down with glee.
I stopped editing when I heard of deletionists. Never directly encountered one, but when Wikipedia started backing these jerks I took it as a sign.
Now everything I read on there says it's worse. Read through some arbitration and it's almost always some retard claiming he's been injured by other editors accurate summations of him and his abilities. There's a surplus of thin-skinned people who need blow-jobs if you point out their typos, let alone serious errors, and who whine as if their retarded little feelings deserve attention.
IMHO, fork WP. Into an article for every contributor, and use some sort of slashdot-style (choose who you trust) moderation for finding the good pages. Idiots could fork an article and scribble all over it without needing to be reverted or punished - they'd just be ignored.
Re:A suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot, unlike say Digg or Youtube, has a discussion and moderation system that actually works
Your definition of "Works" may vary, of course - I can definitely see things to do that would improve Slashdot's system (one example in the past was the removal of displaying how much karma people actually had).
And having such a system encourages users to write useful comments and it also encourages moderators to give useful moderations
Oddly enough, there has been a problem on Slashdot with organized groups similar to Digg's "bury brigades" who make extraneous accounts to play the "mod point lotto" more often, and then direct their mod points negatively. Again, no system's perfect.
With other sites just trying to read a discussion or follow a thread is already a PITA, having a mod system limited to up down votes on top of that, instead of Slashdots Funny, Informative, Offtopic, etc. just encourages rating on agreement instead of on quality of the comment.
Oddly enough, the "troll" rating is most commonly abused on Slashdot, though all three (troll, offtopic, overrated) are regularly abused.
On Youtube the video upload can also play censor and remove any comments or lock them, which makes it pretty much impossible to comment on a controversial video. Having a character limit and a crap UI just guarantees that nobody will ever write a useful comment on that system
Letting people play censor is invariably a bad idea. Last time I suggested removing Slashdot's negative-mods and simply allowing the upmods to go all the way to 10 rather than 5 on the scale, someone said "but then we'd never get rid of the GNAA posts"... it's an odd balance in the best of times.
At what point do you hand out weapons instead of tools? In the case of both Slashdot and Wikipedia, I think there are too many weapons (which is what adminpower on Wikipedia really is these days) and not enough constructive tools.
Re:A suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, yeah, maybe.
I gave up on Digg after about three days due to the mindlessness of most comments. I continue to read Slashdot because about half the comments show some sign that they are the result of the efforts of intelligent lifeforms. There are things to be learned on Slashdot ... which is more than you can say for most Internet sites. Slashdot must be doing something right.
Wikipedia: Seems to me like most articles are pretty damn good. (Full disclosure -- I wrote a lot of Wikipedia articles early on. Stopped because of some changes in my situation, not because I was mad at anyone). Most of my work has been heavily rewritten since and has been much improved thereby. In the early days, my sense was that we were just trying to get content as comprehensive and good as the other on-line encyclopedias -- not all that high a bar I think.
I do think that Wikipedia covers most things pretty well today. Most of the hoopla seems to focus on the very few articles that are controversial. Occasionally, I encounter an article that clearly needs work and once in a very great while I correct something that is obviously wrong. But mostly, it has reached a stage where one has to know a hell of a lot about the subject to hand in order to improve the current articles.
I'm not sure that either Slashdot or Wikipedia needs much in the way of changes. They seem to be doing pretty well just the way they are.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:1, Insightful)
So, in other words, Wikipedia is turning into another heavily guarded Ivory Fortress just like rot-stricken academia, where your level of entrenchment within the Bureaucracy of Knowledge determines your level of correctness.
Academic culture is poisonous. I'm all for citing literature as a means of supporting statements made in that the reader can explore further, learn how the conclusions you endorse were arrived at, and so forth, but citation absolutely is not proof. When all you need to prove yourself correct is the mere citation of the testimony of a so-called expert, regardless as to whether or not that testimony is factually correct, proof becomes worthless and you wind up with a situation like we have today where a nameless 'they' tells us what is and isn't true, and 'they' are correct because 'they' said so. Claiming that citation equals proof is an implicit appeal to authority and therefore fallacious.
Re:A suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh... no, I'm not. I'm an outside observer.
And from where I sit, your behavior - such as posting comments as to how you "will not allow" anything non-positive to be said about your "friend" - has been out of line.
At the very least, given your personal connection, you should have recused yourself from the article and let someone without a stake look over. Instead, following your edits, you appear to have banned or "called for a friend" to ban at least two people who were trying to de-POV the language you yourself had inserted glorifying your friend.
Re:As a long-time contributor (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want an exhastive list of companies, check the yellow pages
"If you want useful information, check someplace other than Wikipedia!" Yeah, I think people are starting to understand that idea.
So it's good that they're leaving! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet oddly, despite all this, it still works well enough.
As for TFA, I don't see that losing thousands of editors is a problem, as it tells us nothing about how many are left! It also doesn't tell us who those editors are - are they the ones who made lots of decent articles? Wikipedia isn't a company losing employees or paid members, so the statistic is meaningless. You don't need hundreds of thousands of editors to write an encyclopedia (how many does Britannica have?)
Hell, for all we know, these people leaving are more likely to be the problem editors you talk about, in which case, good riddance!
The obvious point is that Wikipedia reached immense popularity in 2007-2008 IIRC, so there'd obviously be an influx of people who edit for a while, and then get bored. That's not a problem as long as you've still got the original editors, and indeed, too many editors may just give more problems.
Wikipedia got to being a Top 10 website before these 49,000 came along, I'm sure it can manage without them.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:1, Insightful)
Wikipedia "is rotten from top to the bottom", because you think some things on a list of trigonometry identies are in the wrong order? For heaven's sake, get some perspective - even though there are plenty of issues to work on, that doesn't make the whole thing flawed.
The irony is that, someone, somewhere, will also be criticising Wikipedia as being full of annoying editors, based on their experience with you!
If you argue by throwing ad hominems and insults rather than reasoning, perhaps that is your problem. I'm not sure what the best way to introduce e^x is - but there is no right answer, and it's reasonable that different people will have different opinions.
I'm a mathematician too. Yes, there's plenty to be done, but that doesn't mean there is some kind of conspiracy against getting things done; it doesn't mean you alone are right and everyone else is wrong. It's not immediately obvious to me why the order of identities in an article should matter - and can you point me where you tried to change it, or brought the issue up for discussion? I can't find anything in the history.
In response to the original point about Wikipedia being finished or not, I think it's at the stage of "doing the last 10% takes 90% of the time". Wikipedia is mostly done in some sense, in that every mainstream topic you can think of has an article that is fairly extensive. But adding the polish - getting those articles up to Featured Article status, or filling in articles on less mainstream areas, takes a lot of time.
Wikipedia was always going to primarily attract the type of person who is not interesting in providing knowledge for all, but only those for whom its articles are personal prestige projects, intended to impress only themselves and their imagined audience.
Well, it attracted you, so yes that does seem to be the case.
Re:A suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm saying you are not unbiased, and that you should long ago have recused yourself from articles you have a personal stake in.
This is not saying your objections don't have merit - the wording you pasted I would certainly have edited down. However, I would not completely have removed it, having taken a look at the history of the county in question. It certainly does appear that the comments about the "iron ring", as well as the writing of the law itself, relate directly to your friend's policies and behavior as Milwaukee mayor at the time, whether you want to call him a "communist" or "christian socialist" or whatever title else you wish to pin upon him.
You simply removed the wording entirely, and I can find no place where you even attempted to reach a compromise or consensus view; indeed, it appears that you behaved instead in a provocatory manner to try to goad your opponents each time into crossing the "imaginary line" of violating wikipedia policy, before you were yourself given the weapons of adminship. Additionally, your comments in past edits of the article and related edits elsewhere show that, rather than having the goal of making the encyclopedia better, you have a goal of making your deceased friend look good. That simply isn't in keeping with the making of an honest encyclopedia.
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:3, Insightful)
"was always going to primarily attract the type of person who is not interesting in providing knowledge for all, but only those for whom its articles are personal prestige projects, intended to impress only themselves and their imagined audience."
Sounds like it's doing a great job of emulating the hallowed halls of academia, then... :)
Just like DMOZ (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone remember DMOZ?
It use to be the be all to end all directory to get in to for new sites on the web. I have not had a new site listed on DMOZ in at least 6 years, and have not bothered even trying in at least 4 years. Wikipedia has gone the same way. Even if I have an authoritative site on a subject (not many other sites), and I am myself an authority on a subject, getting things published is nearly impossible now because of all the little kingdoms that have popped up on wikipedia pages. I simply quit trying.
Re:As a long-time contributor (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there a base number of fans required? But there are pretty obscure bands, and most fans hate the Star Trek movies but they are all listed. The distinction just seems arbitrary.
The distinction is how much coverage the subject has had in scholarly or mainstream media.
The simple reason Wikipedia is dying because... (Score:1, Insightful)
...it's no longer edited by true consensus, but the consensus of a very few who strong-arm wherever and whenever they can. Every Wikipedia project is controlled by a tight clique, every tight clique has at least one admin in their back pocket, and every pocketed admin knows full well of the rampant sockpuppetry/meatpuppetry that goes on (ironic, considering that sock/meat accusations are the easiest tool to use to squelch new editors who don't toe the line). In some cases, the admin(s) are doing all three.
The recent debacle on the Linux Mint article displays much of the abuse (and many of the dirty tricks) that anyone not toeing the line (in this case, an editor who dared to remove the horribly-written section on Clement Lefebvre's comments on Israel) may be subjected to. Only when *Clement Lefebvre himself* showed up to shut up the phony "consensus" down was there a remedy. Unfortunately, that happens very rarely.
Re:May I ask (Score:3, Insightful)
I would never argue that Wikipedia has problems. But in this special case the problem lies probably elsewhere.
Re:It does affect readers (Score:3, Insightful)
To put it bluntly, you can't trust any source for finding info on things with political aspects. Even if the people writing it aren't making propaganda on purpose, they can't help but see reality through their own value system.