Wikipedia Losing Contributors, Says Wales 533
derGoldstein writes
"According to an AP report, 'Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said the nonprofit company that runs the site is scrambling to simplify editing procedures in an attempt to retain volunteers.' He explained, 'We are not replenishing our ranks... It is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important.' Despite Wikipedia's wide-reaching popularity, Wales said the typical profile of a contributor is 'a 26-year-old geeky male' who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website."
Sick of the cabals (Score:5, Interesting)
Or more likely they're sick of the cabals that form. Wikipedia has lost lots of contributers over the past few years because of them, and will continue to do so unless these spergmeisters are kicked off the pages that they edit camp.
As usual, it's a couple of intractable morons that ruin it for the casual contributor.
The problem is WikiPolitics (Score:4, Interesting)
Edit the "wrong" article the "wrong" way and you'll get some asshat jumping on you. Wikipedia isn't exactly a friendly place to new people, or even some veterans, so that makes it difficult to retain volunteers.
Re:Easy reason (Score:5, Interesting)
But how do you fix this? Who do you replace them with? The only people who would spend so much time editing instead of reading Wikipedia have got to be really weird.
Maybe all edits could be fed into a queue like the Slashdot metamod where they are evaluated by random visitors side-by-side to see if they are reasonable.
Let's see... my experience with editing Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
I once was an editor there. Allow me to illustrate why I am no longer.
It all started when I dared to step into the turf of something one of the "higher ups" considered his. An edit of me was reverted. Not just something trivial that begs for a "citation needed", it was a well worded and sourced piece of information. The reason was that it was "not enough on topic". Ok, I see that differently, but so be it. Not like I have to have everything I write published.
What bugged me was that the day after, my entry was, almost verbatim, in there again. This time under the name of the person who thought it's "offtopic" only one day earlier. But ok, so be it, some people need it for their ego to be the "only authority" on some subject.
The problem started when this became the rule rather than the exception. Whenever something new developed in an issue, it descended into mind numbing bickering whose version gets to stand. And since I'm more in the fact-gathering and less in the butt-kissing game, usually it's not my version that stands. So hey, maybe they don't need me as an editor.
The last straw was when I removed some defacement (IIRC it was an article about greek pillars and someone made a rude reference of someone fucking someone else up the rear) and it got reverted by my personal stalker. It seems, they get butt-kissing brownie points for doing as many reverts as possible, preferably without reading first what got written.
So, in case you're wondering why you don't get more editors, take a look at the existing ones.
Re:Easy reason (Score:5, Interesting)
I just stopped doing it because I lost interest in doing it. It's time out of my day that I can do things far more entertaining. (It's also my main gripe with people who think that taking care of the world's needs will bring some kind of utopian future. If I didn't have to go to work, I wouldn't do work. I'd be the best damn video game player in the world.)
Re:Politics in everything (Score:5, Interesting)
Which gives the phrase "You can't fight city hall" its peculiar poignancy in the Wikipedia context.
You might wrestle with the cabals of incompetent, self-serving, mildly power-hungry bureaucrats if your life, liberty, family, or property were on the line. You'd walk away from the pointless (and probably fruitless) aggro if it's just Wikipedia, because there is no personal stake. It absolutely isn't worth it. If Wikipedia goes to hell, for the overwhelming majority of people the result will be "and nothing of value was lost."
Sad, too. It had such potential.
Re:Sick of the cabals (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Easy reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup!
This is definitely the core of the problem.
It only takes one aspergers inflicted admin to make a good long term contributer throw their hands up in the air and say "fuck that shit". Additionally other people see this happening and decide not to get involved at all.
The fact that this issue is brough up nearly every time wikipedia is mentioned would indicate that this is a serious and obvious problem ... not the editing interface. I have never heard anyone complain that "it was just so damn hard to get the text to look correct that I stopped contributing". I _have_ heard people rant about control-freak admins on a fairly regular basis.
I think the big problem, as someone mentioned, is that the people who make it to the top are the people who spend all day trolling through articles and correcting things. In other words... the people who are probably running on a lean mixture and take things just a little too seriously. The people you need admining wiki are the occasional contributers who are socially well adjusted (which is why they are "occasional" contributers.. they spend time doing other things with real people). How you achieve this I do not know.. but I think it's the answer.
Re:Unfortunate, but expected (Score:5, Interesting)
You imply laziness where others see frustration. I edited Wikipedia for a long time, and granted not all of my edits were good, but then I watched as my contributions, one-by-one, regardless of quality, got deleted. This took years, mind you, but it left me with the distinct impression that either I had nothing of value to add to Wikipedia, or Wikipedia had nothing of value for me. Perhaps both.
I would go back in a heartbeat if WP worked like it did in 2004 again. But it doesn't, and I don't think that's going to change any time soon, so my edits nowadays are minor, few, and far between.
I tried to edit Wikipedia once (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Easy reason (Score:2, Interesting)
Second this.
I have had a lot of experiences similar to those described by the various posters on this page, of editors reverting worthy changes I had made. I had a particularly upsetting experience on a math-related page, with an editor who really didn't seem to understand the math but viewed the page as "his" property. Actually I'm not really sure if he was an editor, or just someone who spent a lot of time on Wikipedia, but he sure seemed like he knew the procedures. In the end I just dropped the issue.
I'm not even sure that real names would help, because I think these people don't even think of themselves as being dicks, they just develop an attachment to "their" pages and don't realize that they are not experts. They probably believe that they are doing a great service, and would be proud to have their real names attached. My instinct is to propose some kind of meta-procedure for weeding out bad people, but I'm scared this would be quickly subverted by the worst people on the site.
Dan
The Slashdot approach (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot has figured out how to fix this problem.
Most comment sections on news Web sites are junk, usually not worth reading. But on Slashdot, the comments are generally more entertaining and useful than the articles themselves.
Why is this? I think it's because of the clever moderating system. Ordinary users get to vote comments up or down, and the result is that the trash sinks to the bottom, and the good stuff gets highlighted.
So Wikipedea should try the Slashdot approach...let people vote on the edits that should be reverted, and which ones should be kept.
Re:Easy reason (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem here are those who feel that Wikipedia being snowed under by "cruft" articles like a synopsis of each episode of Star Trek or separate articles for each monster in World of Warcraft sort of miss the point of those kind of articles: Those articles help provide the "training" and experience for new users to expand into something more serious like John Robert [wikipedia.org] or Quantum mechanics [wikipedia.org].
Wholesale deletion of the cruft articles drives entire communities away from Wikipedia, which in turn fractures the community and makes Wikipedia less due to the separation of those communities. A similar thing happened on Wikibooks, where most of the game walk through books were deleted on a wholesale basis, along with the "Jokebook" that worked as a proving ground for many new contributors. I still claim that "cleanup" of Wikibooks killed the project and similar things also happened on Wikipedia and the other sister projects.