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Comments: 632 +- News: Contributors Leaving Wikipedia In Record Numbers on Wednesday November 25, @11:49AM
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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."
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New wiki user (Score:5, Funny)
No need to keep posting slashdot stories on Wikipedia's impending demise. Just follow this new user page [wikipedia.org] on wikipedia.
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".
Parent
Copy editors leaving WSJ in droves (Score:5, Informative)
That is one of the dumber stories the WSJ wrote, although since Murdoch took over, there have been a lot of dumb, poorly edited stories.
The significant fact, as I and other readers pointed out in the comments, is that it's meaningless to say that 50,000 wikipedia editors left, unless you know the base number that it's drawn from.
Google search for "Number of Wikipedia editors." 300,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times. So that would make it 17%. Aren't WSJ reporters supposed to do that?
But another WSJ reader said:
Guys, Do your homework. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia becoming less relevant or the other reasons discussed. It's because they mahttp://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedia-In-Record-Numbers?art_pos=6#de a technical change to the site that makes it less attractive for spammers to use. It's a good thing that these spammers are no longer editing the site to link to their blogs / websites.
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Wikipedia_Adds_NOFOLLOW_Attribute_To_Outbound_Lin [webmonkey.com]
Parent
Re:Copy editors leaving WSJ in droves (Score:5, Informative)
Now there's a post that should be marked informative. Unfortunately, your link is broken.
webmonkey (January 22, 2007): Wikipedia Adds NOFOLLOW Attribute To Outbound Links [webmonkey.com]
webmonkey (January 26, 2007): Wikipedia to Web: "Stop Following Me!" [webmonkey.com]
Parent
A suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:A suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't know about that specifically, but I do know that Wikipedia's structure lends itself to fascist-style controls.
As one record, I'll point you to the records of the cities of Milwaukee WI and Oak Creek WI, and the page of past Milwaukee mayor (and later, co-re-founder of the US Socialist Party) Frank Zeidler.
What happened? Far from being objective, the articles for these are whitewashed to remove any mention of Zeidler that is not glowingly positive. It's been done repeatedly over the years by one "Orangemike", previously just a maltempered user with severe (codeword: WP:OWN) "ownership issues" but later given admin status thanks to being buddy-buddy with the left-wing crowd.
He admits that he's hopelessly biased, especially since he calls Zeidler a "good friend" of his [wikipedia.org], but the whitewash and abuse of power have been consistent over the years as relates to Milwaukee, Zeidler, Oak Creek, and especially the circumstances surrounding the adoption of WI 66.0215, aka "The Oak Creek Law", which was put in place specifically to stop Zeidler's extreme abuses in gobbling up small towns.
With administrators like that, it's no wonder the "encyclopedia" is failing fast. If you look at the currently-active administrators of Wikipedia, they all have their little fiefdoms of "owned" articles, they all know how to play the system (and all protect each other when questions are raised about their behavior), and so the chance of needed change happening has a statistical probability rapidly approaching zero, and likely today so small today as to be inexpressible in 32-bit floating point math.
Parent
Re:A suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
This is also the downfall I predict for the experiment that is StackOverflow.
StackOverflow has a very simple well defined purpose: answering programming questions. I don't quite see how moderators/admins would ever have much reason for abuse on that site, especially as all the voting is done by the community or the one asking the question. There is some room on deciding what is ontopic and what is offtopic, but the core is pretty clear.
I have no idea how Slashdot has survived 12 years,
Slashdot, unlike say Digg or Youtube, has a discussion and moderation system that actually works. And having such a system encourages users to write useful comments and it also encourages moderators to give useful moderations. 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. 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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Re:Rules are to be broken, but not on Wikipedia. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why I like subject-specific wikis (see sig). An article of no importance to Wikipedia may very useful in another wiki. There are also other benefits, such as community rules more appropriate to the subject.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Not only the english Wikipedia (Score:4, Interesting)
As a long-time contributor (Score:5, Insightful)
As an infrequent contributor (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used to make maybe 5 edits per year since Wikipedia began. Recently I've made a lot less, and it's not because I've run out of things to contribute.
Of the past 5 edits I've made, I think 4 of them have been tagged as a "good faith edit" and removed because they didn't live up to their new policies. Really, I understand their motivation -- they want everything to be as verifiable as possible. But I think this goes against what made Wikipedia big in the first place.
It used to be so quick and easy to add new information. Anyone who spotted an error was compelled to correct it. It brought the entire internet together as one big community. Now you have to stay caught up with their ever-changing policies, be prepared to defend an edit in the discussion page, etc. -- it's no longer quick and easy. It's no longer fun to contribute. It's more like actual work now. I'm glad that some people can still enjoy doing it because I find Wikipedia an invaluable resource, but as an 'infrequent' contributor, I have a lot of trouble finding the motivation to put up with it any more.
Parent
Re:As a long-time contributor (Score:5, Interesting)
My favorite tag is "citation needed."
I generally read this as, "someone needs to look up a citation for this, and I'm too high and mighty to stoop to such a level! Do it for me, peons!"
Whatever happened to the encyclopedia *anybody* can edit? Either find and add the citation yourself, or delete the fact for having no citation. But shitting those little tags all over the pages doesn't accomplish anything except making the article hard to read.
Parent
This isn't surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Couple that with the natural tendency of people to burn themselves out of things after a while and the natural idea that as the wiki grows, it shouldn't need edits on old content and people have less and less to contribute, and you end up with a declining contribution pool... It's bound to happen inevitably, it's just a matter of when and how they deal with it when it starts to happen.
Not a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
add one (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly the reasons I left a long time ago. Glad to see others are finally doing the same, maybe the Wikipedia leadership will wake up.
"Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again," adds Ortega."
Been there, done that. You've contributed to improve an article, a dozen people have worked on it. Then a fucktard comes along and nominates it for deletion because of lack of "notability". Delete discussion goes on, clear consensus on "keep".
Two months pass. Article gets improved further. Next fucktard comes along, delete nomination. Discussion, with links to the first one, consensus arrives at "keep" again.
Winter holidays. The same fucktard from the 2nd time comes along and nominates the article a 3rd time. This time, vocal people are away or just tired of it all. Whoops, delete request accepted by a narrow margin, all the work of everyone goes *poof*.
So you treat people like shit, destroy the result of their volunteer work, and then you're surprised they're leaving? You've gotta be kidding me.
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.
Parent
Innovation vs maintanence (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm wondering if it degrades. (Score:5, Funny)
Kid's paper after using Wiki as his source:
George W. Bush, the US' first retarded President, started wars in the Middle East to help his Vice President's (Dick Cheney) portfolio.
Of course, they'll be folks on the other side:
Barak Obama, America's first Socialist President along with the Wicked Witch of the West, Nancy Pelosi, turned the US into a bankrupt shell of its former self.
Then, there will be others....
Ray Vaness, the World's greatest porn actress, has been a great influence on American politics.
Now, just think of all those little kids putting references to porn actresses into their school papers and bringing them home?
I for on welcome the chaos that may ensue.
Uncontrolled administrators (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia also has a problem with site admins who do things like block people first and ask questions later. I myself was blocked for merely reporting (in the proper venue) that another user was editing in violation of his community ban.
There are admins who it appears can violate every community rule yet won't receive any sanctions. Of course people are leaving - the admins have driven them away.
Then there are the cases where people have been hounded off Wikipedia and later it has been shown that they were correct and their antagonist was the one who should have been banned.
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.
A sign of possible improvement (Score:5, Interesting)
I stopped participating on Wikipedia years ago due to deletionists slashing and burning any and alls article in the name of HURR HURR NOT NOTABLE. I mean, why bother? That said, I recently saw something interesting - about two months ago someone wrote an article about her negative Wikipedia experience - Bullypedia, A Wikipedian Who's Tired of Getting Beat Up [uptake.com]. As a result of this article, some folks got together to start WP:NEWT [wikipedia.org], where they wrote articles while posing as n00bs to see how they were treated. In some cases, they were in fact treated poorly indeed. Gems include "The reason I deleted the article was that the wikilinks did not have the proper markup. In addition, "See also" should be used instead of "See articles" and "External links" should be substituted for "Sites". Willking1979 (talk) 02:43, 6 October 2009 (UTC)" [wikipedia.org] and User:Multixfer throwing a total shitfit when (fully appropriately) outed as being a total asshole [wikipedia.org].
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.
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.
Re:How about anti-science? (Score:5, Informative)
Way back when I was editing the "scientific skepticism" article, and I had some clownshoes nutcases fighting me because they had some sort of mystical, anti-science bent. From vandalizing in anti-science quotations from prominent wackjobs to inserting claims with citations by people talking about angels or people living with no brains in their heads, to libel about writers on scientific skepticism, I couldn't handle it. I committed the sin of reverting the page 3 times in one day which got me in hot water, same as the other guy, but I was still in the wrong despite how clearly what I was saying was simply true (and verifiable) information while the other guys' was pseudoscientific, bizarre nonsense, the type of crank that believes anything that isn't established science.
The wiki admins were quick to point out "NPOV!" regarding scientific facts, and if you can't take a point of view over scientific evidence then even the most obscure "revelation" and superstition should, according to this line of thought, be given equal time. It is just like the evolution vs creationist nonsense, with the wiki staff taking a "both sides get to speak" position. It was ridiculous! If you're going to treat established, mainstream science on the same level as obscure fantasy then the whole endeavor is useless. Wikipedia was supposed to be a compendium of knowledge, not "claims." Science essentially is the purest form of our knowledge, and with such a backhanded attitude toward... just, ugh.
Additionally, when asked about the page being frozen with clearly untrue and unscientific information, the staff knee-slapped about how "oh, the page is ALWAYS frozen on the wrong one." So, clearly, wikipedia bureaucrats have a relativistic view of truth as well. Fascinating. They told me to just "let the community take care of it," despite none of them willing to listen to my pleas and step in and fix it. I gave up and came back a month later with the problems not being fixed. Ugh.
I won out in the end, with the page being changed significantly to include more (accurate) information and without the nonsense, but seeing what I went through I'm not going to give wikipedia much consideration anymore.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Interesting)
Well I'm a mathematician and to my mind there is an awful lot to be done on the mathematics pages on Wikipedia.
The majority of mathematics articles on Wikipedia typically begin with a rambling, incoherent and unhelpful introduction to the topic. When they do begin to properly define the entity at hand, they typically pick the most opaque and rambling definition possible. Important properties are often glossed over while any pertinent mathematical oddities are given their own individual sections on the page. Throughout the spectacle, hyperlinks to equally poorly written articles are liberally thrown down as though the author believes the reader would actually benefit from the topics convoluted connections to some advanced graduate level topic. This article [everything2.net] basically sums up the situation in a nutshell.
I've actually attempted to change things, but it's an uphill struggle which I for one know I can't win. Time and again I have been faced with what I can only describe as completely inane article custodians whos arguments at times read like a satire of themselves. In the instance of only one article I was told that "Compound interest is the best way to introduce e^x as everyone understands compound interest", "It's better to talk about the properties of a function before defining it", and "Thinking that a certain method is a better way to introduce a topic breaks Neutral Point of View policy."
At times, the stonewalling becomes so exasperating that I end up losing patience somewhat and end up essentially telling these people outright that they are being stupid. Bad idea. I have recently been brought up on Wikiettique charges of hurting someone's feelings [wikipedia.org], and despite my complete and utter lack of ability to change just about anything on the site, have been labeled "a bully"; a label to go with my being a "Point of Viewer".
My current opinion is that the Wikipedia editors and custodians have the mentality of 12 year olds. I have tried and tried to explain to these people that the articles they have taken charge of are in need of serious reform; with mathematical bric-a-brac like havercosine [wikipedia.org] coming before the sum of cosines formula on trigonometry pages. If you try and change something, they will revert it. If you try and argue a case, they will dismiss it. If you press them on their opinions, they will appeal to WP:RULES. If you press them further, they will quite literally start crying. I deeply, deeply wish I was exaggerating here. I cannot believe I once thought so highly of Wikipedia and the people that ran it. The influence of these pages on the learning and perception of mathematics worldwide terrifies me.
Now, maybe I'm just an old crank, too stuck in my old ways. But you tell me where the formula for the the sum "cosA + cosB" should be on this page [wikipedia.org]. Before or after the formula for the sum of an infinite number of cosines, or that for "versed cosine"? Now; guess where it is?
Wikipedia is rotten from the top to the bottom. I used to think that the rot set in at the top with Wales, and slowly trickled down to the user base. Now I'm not so sure. It may be that 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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Informative)
I'd add that the concept of "compendium of all human knowledge" included a whole lot of stuff that can't be cited. Unfortunately, Wikipedia decided that it was supposed to compete with Brittanica and other traditional encyclopedias and needed academic citations. All of a sudden humans who knew things outside the realms of academia were lesser again, and people who knew how to make a citation were greater, even if they didn't understand what they were citing.
I myself stopped participating after having an extended argument related to a minor edit I made, but the other guy had a citation. While I had real world experience on the issue and the other guy didn't, he had the citation. When I finally got the book he cited through inter-library loan, it turned out he had completely misunderstood the text.
I think Wikipedia or something like it will evolve to include different tags that let people determine if they want to read uncited or irrelevant information.
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Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Interesting)
I also quit after an extended argument over citations.
His citation was to a fanciful coffee table reference book published before the system in question was declassified, and which was widely cited elsewhere on the web. My citation was to a professional academic analysis written a decade after the system was declassified, but which existed only in a few thousand hard copies. (Damm thing cost me nearly $100.00, in comparison his was usually found in $10 bins around Christmas time. At least that's where I got my copy of it.) In addition I had actually worked on the system in question.
The powers that be decided than since he could point to places on the web that cited his citation - it was obviously more correct than mine.
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Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Wikipedia is home to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_ducks [wikipedia.org] the rules can't be that draconian
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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.
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Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Interesting)
Hosting Wikipedia is very expensive, so a fork would be difficult for someone to maintain. I could grab a copy of the DB easily; it's only about 5GB, but the images, movies, and other resources are a few TB (at least). Then you add on the bandwidth for hosting it and the CPU costs for people editing it and you'll find it's not so easy. Hosting it on something like FreeNet would be a nice idea, but I don't know how well FreeNet handles wiki-like functionality.
Claiming that Wikipedia is finished is hilarious. Of the last ten things I've looked up on Wikipedia, four have been stubs. I contributed a little bit, but never really felt encourage to participate a lot in Wikipedia for two reasons:
First, deletionists irritated me. A couple of pages that I made some changes to were marked for deletion and then removed. Looking at the history of the people nominating and voting for deletion, none of them had made any changes to Wikipedia other than to propose and vote for deletion. I don't really see that any content should be deleted from Wikipedia. At most, it should be moved to a specialist wiki, and if one doesn't exist then it should be created and the Wikipedia page should be redirected to a general page on the subject that links to the specialist Wiki. I suggested this well over a year ago, but still people delete content from Wikipedia. There's little incentive to contribute anything to a project where someone who has made no positive contribution can come along and delete your effort.
The second issue was that there was no concept of responsibility for articles. Most of the time when I spotted something wrong on a Wikipedia page, I made a note on the talk page. If I checked back a few months later, no one had responded and no one had made any changes. Fine, I can make changes myself, but then I'd be writing in my own style which would disrupt the flow of the page. Ideally, each page should have a maintainer and various editors. The maintainer should be responsible for making changes, the editors (who can be one-off visitors) should be responsible for flagging errors. Possibly this belief on my part is an artefact of the way that I work normally (I'm a freelance writer), but it is how I produce my best results.
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Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Interesting)
This is much, much easier said than done. Wikipedia is far more than just the content, and it would take a significant problem in the community to make a difference of this nature.
The Spanish Wikipedia community did get to the point that a majority of the Spanish language editors left and formed their own alternate wiki, with their own funding sources and infrastructure. Because of the fact that the Spanish Wikipedia was never really deleted, the two communities have essentially co-existed and shared content with each other.
This is also one of the few "successful" forks I've seen for a project like Wikipedia. I was also encouraged to do something similar with the Wikibooks project when editors were not happy with some Wikimedia foundation policies getting shoved down the throat of the Wikibooks users. Knowing the problems with forking, I encouraged the editors to stay put and fight the policies from within. In retrospect, I'm still not sure I made the correct decision there, but it did keep the community mostly in tact.
The only way you are going to see a major shift is if the Wikimedia Foundation no longer can financially support and sustain Wikipedia servers and infrastructure. There is quite a bit of fluff to the Wikimedia's budget that can be trimmed before that becomes a significant issue and possibility.
Coming up with an alternative to the Wikimedia Foundation is the real trick, and something that I don't think could be developed nearly so easily as simply ripping a copy of the latest Wikipedia content dump. If you can create a legitimate alternative non-profit foundation to compete with the WMF, that would be a chance to make a huge difference. The question then is.... why? If you have the bucks to create such a legal structure, why are you wasting resources in this manner?
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Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. The important articles were in the first million. Let's see what's coming in right now:
Any questions?
That's why most new articles are deleted. 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.
Wikia ended up as a hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Trek|Craft|Wars|Gate] wikis, and the low-end advertisers who target that demographic. It's not going to get Jimbo Wales a private jet. [theregister.co.uk] It's useful to Wikipedia, though, in that the rabid fans can be diverted to Wikia, which has rather lower standards for inclusion.
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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.
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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.
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Re:It's finished, dummies (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:too much political bias (Score:5, Interesting)
As to what constitutes neutrality on Hezbollah, I think the issue just goes to show there is no neutrality anywhere. Every article is going to have biases either explicit or implicit as all human beings have biases explicit or implicit. Hell, there was a months-long flamewar on the Brazil article on whether it constituted linguistic imperialism to spell it Brazil rather than Brasil. I didn't expect "neutrality" in the mythological sense, but what I did expect was that the words of the senior leadership of Hezbollah on their motivations and agenda be included in an article on their organization.
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best encyclopedia (Score:5, Funny)
it'd be the best encyclopedia around for quite some time yet.
citation needed
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