Wikipedia's Participation Problem 372
holy_calamity writes "More people use Wikipedia than ever but the number of people contributing to the project has declined by a third since 2007, and it still has significant gaps in its quality and coverage. MIT Technology Review reports on the troubled efforts to make the site more welcoming to newcomers, which Jimmy Wales says must succeed if Wikipedia is to address its failings."
Unfriendly Elitists (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:4, Insightful)
In my direct experience the majority of hardcore contributors and long-time editors are complete ideologues and giant assholes who are extraordinarily hostile to any outsiders or differing thought.
That is the same experience I have had and I'll bet it's the same experience that many people have had.
The battles on Wikipedia are well documented. Articles deleted, added back, deleted again. Back and forth in a never ending battle of arrogant assholes with giant egos. But the biggest problem is that the few people who have any power to actually do anything about it are completely clueless, as demonstrated out in TFA:
the Wikimedia Foundation, the 187-person nonprofit that pays for the legal and technical infrastructure supporting Wikipedia, is staging a kind of rescue mission. The foundation can’t order the volunteer community to change the way it operates. But by tweaking Wikipedia’s website and software, it hopes to steer the encyclopedia onto a more sustainable path.
. Because re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic will make a big difference.
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:5, Insightful)
"Because re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic will make a big difference."
Which thoroughly pisses me off, considering that wikipedia is the biggest free and easily accessible repository of human knowledge (outside of the NSA).
As imperfect as a tiny minority of articles are, their creators being only humans, it's still a monumental achievement.
On a related note, they should share with Google a Nobel Peace Prize for the countless nasty arguments settled by a simple search.
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I wouldn't call the NSA's repository "free and easily accessible"... unless you know their root password? Sharesies?
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:4, Funny)
P@ssword1234 worked for me.
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:4, Funny)
It's paid with my tax dollars, so I should have access to it.
After all there is no private or sensitive information in there, it's only metadata, right?
(and yes, I do need to re-read when I change sentence structures just before posting, but how can the preview annoy me if it's useful?)
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On a related note, they should share with Google a Nobel Peace Prize for the countless nasty arguments settled by a simple search.
Don't forget all the arguments won with a quick edit followed by a "Let's check Wikipedia!"
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"Let's check Wikipedia!" is often followed by "That's what Wikipedia says, anyone can edit Wikipedia!"
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When the interest was a smaller and people were not really into SEO AltaVista worked very nicely. Google works because it's really rather good at working around those types who try to rig the results with SEO tactics.
How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have not tried to contribute to wikipedia yet (though I have thought about it, I have been unsure whether I want to try given the currently climate described), but it occurred to me: how does one become an editor?
I am wondering, if current editors are appointed and have permanent control and this is causing problems, what if Wikipedia switched to something akin to slashdot's moderation (and metamoderation) tool? Let random people vote on if they think the change was warranted. They don't need to be experts on the topic, just answer yes or no as to whether the change was significant and properly documented with references. If so, then vote ok, and overrule the mods that may be blocking it. Is that not possible?
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:5, Funny)
Switch them to Slashdot's system? Ha. You must want to take all of Wikipedia and flush it down the toilet. Good idea.
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Everyone is an editor on wikipedia, many edits are entirely anonymous (IP address only).
what you're talking about is an Admin.
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Editors are self appointed. You just get an account, find articles you are interested in you think you can help, and start.
Wikipedia has in theory a bottom up system and in practice a top down one. The tension drives a lot of the problem. It is hard to describe if you have never contributed, but if you try you will within 6 months get bit hard.
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:5, Interesting)
Precisely this.
At one time, ages ago, getting admin privileges was easy. Make some good edits, prove you could contribute well, and you were basically in.
Then came editcountitis, where people with less than X thousand edits (I think it's at what, 50,000 now?) were cast aside. Editcountitis created the current "revert monkey" culture and the fast-action tools so that people can automatically revert anything that happens without even reading the edit. Push button, issue revert. Most of these monkeys sit around slapping "revert" all day without reading; some of them actually just use a script to automatically click "revert" on their tool of choice in order to pad their edit counts.
Then came, also, the cliques. Self-protecting groups formed, and the worst is the admins because once you are an admin, you are expected to ALWAYS back up the actions of another admin. You can't badmouth other admins - that's not the way the game is played - but you can be as ugly and mean-spirited to any normal user you want, and when they respond in kind you can either issue a block yourself or ask a supposedly "uninvolved" admin to be your proxy in return for Favors To Be Named Later. Because after all, "civility" only applies to those who don't have the Special Buttons.
The way the game is played, if you are trying to influence an article on Wikipedia, is simple. You revert-monkey someone right to the point of 3RR. You never discuss anything on a talk page and if you've hit 3RR, you find someone to collude with to start reverting in tag-team, then you accuse the other side of either "breaking 3RR" or "not discussing." If you want to and have the backing of a friendly admin, you get them blocked and then issue gloating messages or just template the hell out of them to further infuriate them and bait them into responding "incivilly" to your harassment, at which point your friend the admin gets to escalate the blocks over and over again. Eventually, you'll run the new person off and you get to [[WP:OWN]] your article again, so long as you can keep new editors from ever sticking around long enough for them to actually work and discuss and change the consensus.
The goal of wikipedia's admins is to drive off new editors, and anyone who tells you differently is likely a wikipedia admin.
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem with Wikipedia is basically described by Animal House. Initially conceived as a criticism of communism, Wikipedia's editing system was also a form. Except there was no central bureau to control it all. That's the only difference.
Basically, Wikipedia's goal is an encyclopedia where "Everyone is equal".
But as we all know the full quote is "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others".
And Wikipedia is a perfect modern day illustration of what happened in the early to mid 20th century - it starts out as everyone is equal, but soon, some become "more equal" and thus end up in control.
So we basically had the 21st century exploration into communism - and the same results occur - you end up with a group of "elites" that end up controlling the entire site while the proles think they have power and control.
And the unfortunate thing is, human nature will ensure that "some are more equal than others" because there will always been a human desire for power. (Or greed.).
The only good thing is that it's only Wikipedia so as an experiment, its effect on the world are minimal.
It's also why most successful FOSS projects are benevolent dictator style things because power abhors a vacuum. If no one is a leader, someone will become one either by mutual agreement or through forcefulness.
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I think you meant "Animal Farm [imdb.com]" (book link [msxnet.org]), not "Animal House. [imdb.com]"
But the mental image of wikipedia admins as insufferable pigs is something I can totally get behind.
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I was honestly hoping for an Animal House analogy. Was disappointed by the third line when I realized he meant to say Animal Farm.
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Oh, come on. There's got to be something in Animal House that can provide an adequate analogy.
Urination capacity? >:)
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, you like totally saw the wrong movie...
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:4, Funny)
If you post anything at all expected it to get deleted.
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Pretty much. I've created several articles that were fast-deleted by an admin, against policy of course. Last time (in September), I insisted on policy being followed, so the article was put on RFD, but it did attract some upvotes. I haven't bothered checking what happened to it in the end.
But Pokemon characters have pretty good coverage!
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:4, Funny)
Not quite. I've told this before but it's worth repeating. I live in a very small town (>50 people), the wiki article says that the town was devastated by a fire in the 60s. I removed it because there was no fire, at all. It was reversed and added back and I was told I needed a reference or cite. How do you cite something that didn't happen?
The fire wasn't cited either, but it's still there.
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, that happens sometimes. People get a bit fanatical about reverting vandalism. The best thing to do is to always use an edit summary with polite, neutral language that directly cites Wikipedia policy. For example: "remove unverifiable, unsourced statement, per [[WP:V]]" or even just say something terse like "unsourced". That will signal to people that you're at least vaguely familiar with Wikipedia's policies and not a simple vandal who likes to randomly remove sentences.
When people challenge you, tell them the burden of proof lies on them. You can cite [[WP:BURDEN]], Wikipedia policy which explicitly states this.
how to (try to) deal with falsehoods on wikipedia (Score:4, Interesting)
I've told this before but it's worth repeating. I live in a very small town (>50 people), the wiki article says that the town was devastated by a fire in the 60s. I removed it because there was no fire, at all. It was reversed and added back and I was told I needed a reference or cite. How do you cite something that didn't happen?
The fire wasn't cited either, but it's still there.
I don't have a complete answer, but one of the things you could do is stick in a 'citation needed' flag. Then you could post on the article's discussion-page to state your challenge to the false content, and say that if no citation is forthcoming you'll delete the unsupported content. That may flush out any a-hole who wants to start an edit war (which is something that can attract WP sanctions anyway), and then if you have the stomach for it you can argue/fight directly if needed -- and if you haven't become tired of all the bullshit.
(Seems to me, btw, one of the neat things about this very flawed wikipedia thing is that at least it did (does?) raise consciousness about the need for checking suspect 'facts' and proper sources. There have even been 'citation needed' T-shirts.)
Maybe you could even stimulate the creation of a 'reliable source' (according to the wikipedia policies) by getting the nearest local newspaper to run a letter or article about wikipedia's false claim about your locality. Then cite that.
HTH
-wb-
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Why is anybody who just wants to correct some misinformation going to go through this much work? I'd just be like, "fuck it then." And that's exactly what's happening.
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Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:4, Informative)
187 people?! What the hell do they do all day?
Anyway, I agree with the sentiment in this thread. The last time I tried to actually make a change to Wikipedia it was the most unbelievably retarded experience I've had for a long time. The fact that that community would try to kill something as basic as a WYSIWYG editor doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Basic summary of experience: The Wikipedia article on Bitcoin has a statement like, "Bitcoin has been criticised for being a ponzi scheme". The citations for this "fact" are, (1) an article in The Register which simply repeats the statement that "Bitcoin has been criticised for having the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme" and links to some random guys blog post which doesn't even make that claim, and (2) an article in Reuters which again says at the top merely that it's been "variously dismissed as a Ponzi scheme or lauded as the greatest invention since the internet".
The problems here are numerous. Firstly, the citations don't actually back up the claim. Even though finding idiots on the internet who don't understand the definition of any given term is trivial, neither citation succeeds in actually doing so. Instead they merely assert that unspecific people believe that, which is circular. Secondly, one can actually check the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme and see that a free-floating asset class cannot meet that definition. So the claim fails basic logic.
There have been raging arguments about this on the Talk page for over a year now, heck maybe over two years. Here's a quote from the current incarnation:
This is the kind of "what the fuck" statement that just kills interest in editing Wikipedia dead. This guy, who is apparently quite knowledgeable about Wikipedia's policies, agrees that the statement is bogus yet says it cannot be removed due to Wikipedia policy - in flat and total contradiction of common sense.
Previous rounds of this flamewar (that were since deleted) did in fact provide well reasoned arguments that the statement was false, some written specifically for Wikipedia. But it turned out that they were all invalidated by Wikipedia policy because variously, someones blog was not a valid source (whereas an article on the Register was), logic-based discussion on the Talk page was "original research", etc.
When you see pages which are camped by idiots who constantly cite policy as a justification for ignoring basic common sense you quickly realise the entire project is doomed. Something like Wikipedia can only work if there's some kind of strong personality or driving force that actively shapes the community in a positive direction. A rudderless community rapidly devolves into absurd bureaucratic in-fighting of the kind that makes the civil service look proactive and lean. In that regard TFA is completely correct.
Letter to the editor (Score:3, Insightful)
The Wikipedia article on Bitcoin has a statement like, "Bitcoin has been criticised for being a ponzi scheme". The citations for this "fact" are [...] (2) an article in Reuters [...] one can actually check the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme and see that a free-floating asset class cannot meet that definition.
If the reliable sources are wrong, Wikipedia will be wrong. As Philip Roth demonstrated, to get a correction into Wikipedia, you first have to bring it to the attention of reliable sources. Write a letter to the editor of every newspaper that has carried the erroneous Reuters article, for example, to clarify for the record the difference between a Ponzi scheme and a free-floating asset class. Find some published [wikipedia.org] economists with blogs and get them to clarify the difference. Then you'll be able to cite these
This, this, and more this! (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I've tried to contribute in my areas of expertise (and we're talking very modest and very non-controversial stuff), I've been met with a wall of pricks who basically stop anyone who isn't in the inner circle from making even the most benign contributions, additions, or edits. The editors there suffered from a clear case of what we in the old college frat used to call the "It's my party of no one else is invited" syndrome (in reference to newer fraternity brothers who wanted to make the frat as exclusive as possible, exactly one second after they got in). It didn't take me long to get tired of even trying.
Now, that was a few years ago, admittedly. But it was enough to drive me away and make me vow never to return. Maybe things have changed since then, but I'm not really looking to find out.
Yep... this is *the* problem, here and now.... (Score:3)
It's really too bad, IMO, because I get a lot of value out of Wikipedia. Regardless, the in-fighting over article submissions is totally unacceptable and will lead to its demise eventually, if something isn't done about it.
As an example, one of my good friends tried to submit a few articles to cover specific BBS "door games" from the 1980's -- only to have his articles flagged for removal as containing "irrelevant" information. (I can't remember the exact claim, but whoever moderates the submissions appare
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I think this is an important point. I remember the article about Richard Stallman [wikipedia.org] even had RMS himself try to make a few factual edits to the article about himself. The problem was that RMS didn't source anything that he added to the article, assuming that using himself as a reference was more than sufficient.
THAT started a whole bunch of interesting discussions (especially given the particularly caustic nature of RMS in the first place) but surprisingly ended up with RMS backing off and simply letting ot
Re:This, this, and more this! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've written at least a half-dozen Wikipedia articles or major article sections on a few different topics (bios of various authors, among others). None were summarily deleted or reverted; as far as I can tell (I don't keep close watch on them), they all still exist, and most still incorporate significant amounts of my contributions. They all seem to be in better shape now than when I first wrote them.
Here's what I did: First, I registered an account. Whenever I was thinking of making major changes/additions to an existing article (in some cases it was non-existent or a stub), I first posted on the talk page, expressing my interest in the topic, diplomatically describing what I thought could be improved, outlining what I was planning to do, and asking for comments and suggestions. This rarely got any replies, but ensured I wouldn't be stepping too hard on any toes.
In parallel with this, I figured out what the best available sources on the topic were: online material, sure (more for orientation than for incorporating), but preferably published books. If I didn't have them already I got hold of them, either through the library or second-hand (or Google Books if not in copyright). In some cases, articles in academic journals were more useful, and I was able to access these through a university library. I read or at least skimmed them.
Then I wrote the contribution, using (not copying verbatim) the information from the references and providing citations to them. I tried to write in a straightforward but encyclopedic style, to format it to be consistent with the rest of the article, and to follow the letter and the spirit of Wikipedia rules. I submitted my edits, and sometimes made another comment on the talk page, inviting comments or explaining any deletions I'd made.
I'm not claiming this is a guaranteed way to get your text on Wikipedia, but in my experience it worked. While I've also had some negative Wikipedia experiences (with smaller edits to other pages, where I didn't go through such an elaborate procedure), overall I find that as long as you understand the basic Wikipedia principles (what kind of stuff belongs and doesn't belong), can separate yourself from the work enough that your edits aren't blatantly about your own ego or biases, have solid sources for what you write, and can string a coherent sentence together, people will usually take you seriously.
There are many disgruntled attempted-Wikipedia-editors out there, some with more legitimate grievances than others. Sometimes it seems like most people who have tried to contribute got shot down. But of course, the most embittered ones are the ones most likely to go on about it: the real distribution could be quite different. Or maybe it's simply that most people aren't capable of making good, suitable contributions to an open encyclopedia. Would that be particularly surprising?
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:5, Insightful)
Real experts don't want to go to the trouble of battling with presumptuous morons over the Internet.
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:5, Funny)
Real experts don't want to go to the trouble of battling with presumptuous morons over the Internet.
The more you know, the less you say. And vice versa.
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We don't mind sometimes, but when you are asked to work 8-10 hours a day then raise a family there isn't a whole lot of time for dealing with people who think we should get rid of the Internet, or that gold is the only real money.
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And yet you post on slashdot.
Notice how the post didn't get reverted and then attributed to a sockpuppet that may need to be blocked from making posts in the future.
Remarkable, isn't it?
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Being modded down on slashdot isn't the same thing at all. The "offending" comments are all still there and easily accessed. Finding dissenting opinions on Wikipedia is a lot more involved, requiring you to iterate through the article history comparing the past and present for differences.
Hell, I view slashdot at -1 just so I don't miss comments that shied too far away from the groupthink.
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Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:4, Insightful)
The specialists I heard of (in this case mathematics) say that their articles and edits are rejected without acceptable explanations, so they've stopped trying. Others have reported the same experience in different fields, but those I only know of from the internet.
That doesn't sound to me like they want to improve the system...though some have said it's a great source for Pokemon.
Whatever. I once contributed an article, but it's gone, and I'm not likely to waste time trying to restore it.
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:5, Insightful)
Why shouldn't they?
It's true they do have other venues, but often experts like to share their expertise and interest with others. But if you make it difficult to publish, then they'll only publish where they get significant benefits. That frequently means paywalls. If you want it to be without paywalls, then don't make them fight a bunch of ignorant assholes to publish, because they'll only try a couple of times, and then not only will they quit, but they'll tell their associates not to bother.
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Why shouldn't they?
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. They have a flat out formal policy which states there is no original research. Now the justification for that policy is really in place to drive out nut jobs and conspiracy theorists (which at one time was openly proclaimed by Jimmy Wales but now it isn't so much) because there were a whole bunch of idiots who saw Wikipedia as the golden opportunity to spout off all of their crazy ideas that no peer reviewed journal would ever consider. If Wikipedia permitted original resear
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Yes, I concur, same experience here. Submitted a biographical stub once on an Australian media personality and theoretical physicist who published in several high profile journals.
He had the same name us some UK rugby athlete and it bothered me that Wikipedia seemed to value athletes over accomplished scientists.
Article got deleted for lack of notability. Guess what, I am not going to write another Wikipedia entry.
The established editors are the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Their main contribution is to drive people who don't think like they do off.
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When the deletionists started dominating the process my enthusiasm for contributing anything dropped off greatly. Whether I'm contributing on my own or watching as formerly useful material contributed by other people disappears because it supposedly isn't "noteworthy" enough, it doesn't exactly inspire people to participate.
Re:The established editors are the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you notice how every post so far in this thread basically has made the same basic complaint about Wiki's power-tripping inner-circle editors?
You can, of course, choose to ignore that with flippant BS mocking the GPs intent. Or, you can take the hint that when a hundred random people all tell you the same thing, they probably don't all just have a grudge over having an ego-page repeatedly deleted.
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Yes, I've noticed. It's just that everyone complains, and no one even begins to consider the set of systems that lead to that condition and acknowledge that such difficulty is near inevitable. They just want to present their clearly superior views on a subject, but don't want to work within the context of a collaborative system.
Not one person has proposed a solution, because such solutions are almost exclusively of the "elegant, simple and wrong" variety.
Re:The established editors are the problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
Take away editorial privileges from anyone with more deletions/reversions than actual contributions. Done.
Simple. Elegant. Wrong. A huge percentage of edits on Wikipedia are vandalism. A huge percentage of new articles are ads. Getting rid of those is an important job.
I would also suggest the age-old technique of using known-quality data to audit the editors - Assemble a team of known-good content creators and have them contribute under a variety of pseudonyms. Instantly fire any editor that decides to measure his dick against that known-good content. Best of all, Jimbo doesn't even need to do that in secret - In fact, he shouldn't do it secretly... That way it puts all the editors on notice - Don't fuck with legit content if you want to keep your god-like powers.
Simple, elegant, batshit retarded. You're basically saying "appoint a council of perfect guardians of rightness". It's the most authoritarian, opposite of project-goal design possible.
You know who did that? Citizendium. They don't even fucking exist anymore.
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"appoint a council of perfect guardians of rightness".
Isn't this what they've already done by creating a group of people with absolute power of delete?
Re:The established editors are the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, enforce their own rules for one. Bots that do nothing but revert aren't "Assuming Good Faith", are they? But they're still common. (In fact, why are bots allowed at all, come to think of it?)
I would also suggest:
1) They fix the deletion problem by making it possible for non-admins to view "deleted" pages. Right now, if a user (in good faith) writes a long article that gets deleted, they have no way to even VIEW it, much less CORRECT the problems it was deleted over. That's ridiculous. You've just flushed that user's goodwill down the toilet. You might as well send a email to them reading, "The Wikipedia project says FUCK YOU!".
2) They come up with a more democratic method of selecting admins, one that doesn't involve "being Jimmy Wales' personal friend" or "having lots of tiny edits".
3) When they beg for donations, something that might help is acknowledging the problems and explaining to users how the donations are intended to resolve them.
All I've really seen so far is, "our hosting costs are high". Well ok. But frankly at this point I don't give a shit if you can't pay your hosting-- explain to me how you're making Wikipedia better to earn my money, not just "we need money to do more of the same broken shit we've been doing for the last 5 years".
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As for self-promotion. Self-promotion was often the start of many good articles. Clean out the unreferenced material if it is a good article and move on.
No, no it wasn't. Pretty much 2 categories make up the majority. Illegal copy and paste from PR brochure, or some kid in high school writing about themselves or their friends.
As for vaguely inappropriate that's often the big problem. The assumption back then was that everything was appropriate unless there was a very good reason not to have it.
No, verifiability has pretty much always been a wikipedia thing. You claim it was different in 2006, but when I started in 2005, the rule that everything had to have a reliable source was quite established. Maybe one or two slashdotters predate that rule, which is from like 2003 or so.
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Verifiability was interpreted differently then. There was verifiability relative to the material. A game walkthrough had lower standards than articles about a famous battle.
As for high school kids writing about his friends. Come on, you know that's not what I meant. Pastors writing about their denomination's history. Mayors writing about their towns. Franchise family members writing about the history of the franchise.
Bad Answer to the Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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it is not a welcoming place for any contributors.
FTFY
Re:Bad Answer to the Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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Think how annoying this must be for the established editors though:
You've just got this article prefect and some mayfly comes along and *changes it*. You'd got it the prefect mix of concise and thorough and someone with a different opinion, sorry someone who is wrong comes along and ruins it; and somehow you're the bad boy for trying to maintain standards!
They must be leaving out of frustration too,
(Yes I stopped editing pages or even participating in the talk pages several years ago, they don't want your h
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I was planning to help out... (Score:5, Funny)
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After going through similar situations several times I stopped trying to edit. I put pointers on talk pages once in a while, but even that is unpleasant.
The first time Jimmy Wales did his "let me put my big ugly face on every page and beg for money" campaign, that linked to a talk page. I put on that page that I would NEVER give Wikipedia any donations until they had their community under control. It's never gotten even close to being under control. It's one of the most unfriendly community of users I'v
Re:I was planning to help out... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there's the bit where they keep deleting lists of things inside articles, particularly lists of trivia. Trivia lists are one of the quickest and most rewarding things to skim through. (This is why every site on the internet these days frequently posts articles in the form of lists. They get a lot of hits.)
Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia. It's sometimes less informative but it's usually more fun, and i don't get the feeling there's a band of people running around deleting the stuff i'm interested in.
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Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia.
Oh, I do that as well, nice to know I'm not the only one. But....TVTropes will ruin your life.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife [tvtropes.org]
Or at least increase the number of open tabs you have.
Obligatory XKCD
http://xkcd.com/609/ [xkcd.com]
Re:I was planning to help out... (Score:4, Interesting)
And there's the single greatest problem. There are assholes out there who spend their days sprinkling "citation needed"s around like they were pixie dust. The most unremarkable non-controversial everyone-knows third-grade logic kind of statements get one, and, once applied, can never, ever be gotten rid of. "Shallots have an oniony/garlicky flavor" [citation needed]. And so it will remain until the end of time. Try deleting it and wait to see how it takes for someone to revert it. More futile yet, try to find a "non-anecdotal" reference to satisfy the pixie-dusters.
Re:I was planning to help out... (Score:5, Funny)
And there's the single greatest problem. There are assholes out there who spend their days sprinkling "citation needed"s around like they were pixie dust.
[citation needed]
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Someone should do a page just of hilarious "citation needed" edits on Wikipedia. I've seen some pretty funny/bizarre ones, especially lately. Someone could post "The Earth has a moon" on there and some prick would have a [citation needed] slapped on it five seconds later.
Even better, someone should publish a *book* of them, and then *it* could be the citation. :)
Why I don't edit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why I don't edit (Score:5, Interesting)
I converted a paragraph that looked like it had been run through Google translate a few times into actual English. It was reverted. The people that claim Wikipedia entries as their own are generally some of the dumbest people on the internet. The YouTube commenters are the ones in charge.
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Did you reply to the note in the talk page? The standard practice on Wikipedia is to plead your case on the article's talk page after getting reverted [wikipedia.org]
Maybe people who want to donate their time don't want to engage in a big debate about whether their donation is helpful. Not everybody enjoys arguing.
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It wouldn't surprise me to learn that more quality editors have been driven away at this point than actually allowed to contribute.
Statistics (Score:3)
Is there anything to that statistic beyond the slowing of new content since it's a mature product? That's a good thing, right?
Re: (Score:3, Flamebait)
But it's not a mature product. It's a lazy adolescent product only updated by fanbois and axe-grinders (to too large an extent).
It's a great resource if used wisely (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's a great resource if used wisely (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny. I only use it to get information on an episode of a television show.
Fanbois are allowed to write countless pages on minor characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_characters [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
There's hundreds of other TV shows with similar pages.
It's an arbitrary distinction. Someone in power thinks those pages are relevant, and thinks plenty of other things aren't...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That was my question. According to this [slashdot.org] article from 2012, Wikipedia is essentially complete, at least as far as major topics are concerned.
From the earlier article:
So, not only is this artic
Its simple really (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Its simple really (Score:4, Interesting)
Unreasonable rejection is what turns people off.
Unless and until WikiPedia resolves the problem with moderators, participation will continue to decline.
.
No one wants to deal with the Nurse Ratched moderators who seem to hover over certain topics, punishing those who want to contribute.
Re:Its simple really (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, I tried to edit an article to remove The Annoying Caps On Each Word And RANDOM Capitalized Word that were only in two sentences in the middle.
Not a single word changed, just removing annoying formatting.
I'm pretty sure the caps are still there. They were a few months later.
Reject trivial obvious edits, and people won't even try substantive ones.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This. Many Times This.
After dozens of edits as well as additional content on topics of expertise while including the (dreaded) required citations being reverted with prejudice labeled "off topic" I've given up on Wikipedia. How dare I touch someone's pet project with informative additions!
To this day I avoid Wikipedia and remind my children Wikipedia is not a reliable primary source of information. Always use multiple sources even when browsing for simple trivia facts.
Re:Its simple really (Score:5, Insightful)
Fire the fat butt-hurt dweller mods who over-moderate and reject articles for stupid subjective reasons. Unreasonable rejection is what turns people off.
Wikipedia deleted hundreds of pagan articles for lack fo relevance/popularity. There was a huge uproar in the community, but it fell on deaf ears; Many pagan religious leaders' bios were deleted of Wikipedia and the discussion pages were locked so only select and pre-approved people could comment on them -- meaning there was no way to indicate to the bigots that this wasn't just some random stub page on something nobody knew anything about, but was actually reference material used by thousands.
Ever since then, I've secretly hoped for Jimmy to get run over by a bus and wikipedia to explode in a firey ball of zero donations as people realize that the current crop of editors is enforcing their own dogmatic views on others under the guise of some 'community standards'... standards they themselves only sometimes adhere to.
Participation Problem? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly? They need to fix their 'data fiefdom' problem. Whenever you attempt to edit something, your changes are usually encroaching on someone's 'turf' and they will revert your changes (even if your right). You can certainly go back and reverse their change cancellation, but they will come back and cancel out your cancellation of their change and so forth - after a few times, since your new; they will just vote to block you and all of your hard work goes into the pages of 'unaccepted revisions' (which is just shy of the great bit-bucket in the sky).
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia was run by people that equated quantity with quality. It was routine to see someone heralded as authoritative because they had made tens of thousand or more edits. In reality the only thing that shows is that someone is obsessive compulsive, doesn't have a job or has a job where they don't have to work. The result was large numbers of articles that were complete and utter crap, a few that were well qualified and the constant question of was the last edit done by a PhD that's an expert in the field or a bored teenager?
It's long overdue for quantity to step to the wayside so that quality can step up to the plate. When wikipedia can stop ranking editors by quantity and start ranking editors by quality the entire site will gain credibility. The concept that just anyone can know what their talking and edit something accordingly leads to idiots that cite wikipedia over the CDC or a thousand other examples I can think of.
Wikipedia still suffers from tremendous a vocal minority on certain political subjects that are locked and to prevent any viewpoint other than the vocal minority that won the right to represent their view on the given subject. Wikipedia has made improvements, but it has a hell of a long way to go before it can be anything other than a starting point for the curious and gullible.
Get rid of the arseholes.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Jerks with revertbots. (Score:5, Insightful)
The wikipedia community has made itself utterly insular and there's way too much protectionism-via-automation.
Make an edit on an article someone thinks is 'theirs' ? Auto reverted via a bot. Complain about it? vote to block.
The constant barrage of Wikipedia-specific jargon and acronyms, all on its own, is enough to turn off most people.
Wikipedia's culture has very much evolved away from everyman's resource to a rarefied and specialized discipline that requires as much specific knowledge as most jobs.
No Big Mystery (Score:5, Interesting)
Pick almost almost any random article, something not too obscure. Look for some cumbersome or inelegant prose and clean it up. Don't even change anything factual, just make the article objectively clearer. This isn't even very hard to do, since many articles are written by technical-types who aren't very proficient at communicating. You see this sort of thing with engineers especially; the kind of people who resented having to take English classes.
Now wait about five minutes. Your edit will automatically be reverted by a bot squatting on the article. And after a few seconds you'll receive an automated message, usually beginning with an insincere and condescending, "Welcome to Wikipedia! I've automatically reverted your edit because...".
You can try to start an edit war, but the entrenched editors of most articles have more seniority than you, they're "experts", and it's really not worth the hassle just to make small changes. So you end up with a lot of articles which seem like they have been written by people with Aspergers, or a tenuous grasp of English. I can't speak to the editing climate in other languages.
I don't have a comprehensive solution to this problem, but it probably has something to do with getting rid of the automated bots which protect pages. That'd be a decent start.
Re: (Score:3)
Wikipedia is an MMORPG (Score:5, Insightful)
I said it yesterday and I'll say it today, Wikipedia is an MMORPG that allows griefing of new players and has no safe zones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG [wikipedia.org]
Anyone who is a higher level than you can kill-steal you whenever they want, retroactively.
The Cabal (Score:2)
Wikipedia has developed a cabal of powerful admins that play Wikipedia ten hours a day instead of completing their degrees. Until their power is curtailed participation will continue to decline.
Let me help (Score:2, Interesting)
You want to address your failings?
Fuck you for making it so difficult to edit Wikipedia successfully. Even to use the talk pages, you have to work with some obscure mark-up language which most people have no intention of ever learning. If you don't, any contribution you make will be deleted for "vandalism".
And double fuck-you for playing favorites with various editors and admins. If you perm-banned the top 1000 most frequent contributors, the quality of wiki would go through the roof.
In other news... (Score:2)
Jimmy Wales is also upset that one of his party guests peed in his swimming pool.
He's trying to use a spoon and a net net to remove the contamination, but somehow that just isn't working.
Jimmy Doesn't See a Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I asked Jimmy directly about this in a pretty even handed way when he did the Slashdot interview questions back in August. He responded:
" Things have mostly stabilized. It's still not a crisis, but I still consider it to be important. One of the most exciting developments is the visual editor, which I hope will bring in a whole new class of editors who were turned off by the complexities of wikitext."
More or less he dismissed the premise that there was a problem in the first place, and any issues that are left could be handled with a better editor UI. Now, I do think the Wikimedia editor needs work, but Jimmy is kidding himself. Maybe he'll get a new rush of editors when they release the new UI, but I'm not convinced they'll stay.
Re: (Score:3)
More or less he dismissed the premise that there was a problem in the first place, and any issues that are left could be handled with a better editor UI. Now, I do think the Wikimedia editor needs work, but Jimmy is kidding himself. Maybe he'll get a new rush of editors when they release the new UI, but I'm not convinced they'll stay.
And there you have Wikipedia's number one problem. The people who originally created it don't give two shits about it any more.
So now you have management by committee and that committee is made up entirely of asshats.
Re: (Score:3)
More or less he dismissed the premise that there was a problem in the first place, and any issues that are left could be handled with a better editor UI. Now, I do think the Wikimedia editor needs work, but Jimmy is kidding himself. Maybe he'll get a new rush of editors when they release the new UI, but I'm not convinced they'll stay.
I pose that his priority is a successful web site. That does not mean accurate well-written articles. It means getting articles that people want to read. Veracity is tertiary, not even secondary.
Wikipedia does not need more editors (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia does not need more editors. It needs editors with more expertise in their subjects.
Why Wikipedia editing is declining (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course Wikipedia editing is declining. The articles that matter were done years ago. Most new articles are on very minor subjects.
Print encyclopedias were like that as well. Writing the original Encyclopedia Brittanica was a huge job, but ongoing maintenance required only a modest staff.
Some of the decline comes from Wikia, which is a hosting services for obsessed fans. Many of the people obsessed with popular-culture trivia content are adding it to Wikia, which monetizes it with ads. Wikia doesn't have a notability requirement, so fans can add as much trivia as they like.
Code should talk, and talk should walk (Score:4, Insightful)
I love wikipedia (and have contributed both $ and time).
There seems to have been a move on Wikipedia away from actual contributing, and towards criticizing others. This drives new folks away.
It's far too easy to slap all the labels on articles. The rate of tagging for problems seems way above the rate of fixing.
Do these sound familiar? "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified." "This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling." "This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed." "This article may need a more detailed summary" "This article may have too many section headers dividing up its content."
Perhaps they could just put a global message up. "This Wikipedia may have items that require editing. If you find such an entry, please fix it yourself."
Before long we are going to have just heavy fisted editors, and the PR flaks paid enough to deal with them and warp the articles.
Most regular people don't have the time to battle it out, but I thank everyone who tries! And I love the "welcome to wikipedia" people, keep up the good work.
Why I can't engage with Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't even reach the point where I was even affected by the overzealous editors. I quit long before that, and I'm sure a lot of potential editors never even got that far. It's not newbie friendly, and if you want new users, you need to have newbies.
1. The markup language. It's not as trivial to use as it should be. When I first started editing wikipedia, I figured I would start small with typo corrections, cleaning up wording, etc. It's a good thing that was my goal, because trying to figure out the process of editing and getting it looking right was a task in itself. If I were a regular person who noticed an error, or wanted to add a paragraph, by the time I figured out the markup language I'd have forgotten about the correction and probably lost interest.
2. Bots. Why is everything I change automatically reverted in a few minutes. I then have to figure out some weird protocol for defending my change on some specialized discussion page which I need to know the special rules for in order to comment and... you know what, it was just a typo, I don't care anymore
3. Deletion. Diskspace is cheap, if someone wants to devote their life to creating a series of articles on the twist and turns of the 3' wide stream behind his house, that's fine by me. But what the real problem is: Why should I risk learning the language, crafting a decent article with sources, putting it up and doing all that work... only to find out it's been deleted? No thanks, I'd rather go do something productive.
A lot of you are missing the real problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I see a lot of complaints here that boil down to "Subject matter experts try to contribute knowledge, dorky editors revert them over some stupid policy I don't understand the purpose of." From there it just devolves into poo-flinging. Most of you are missing the major policy points that require those reversions, and the truly deep (and perhaps, unsolvable?) problems which are the reasons for those policies. The WP policy stuff is really doing the best it can do, and you're caught up in blaming the "lesser of two evils" results of the process.
The *real* problem for WP can be broken down like this: The WP guys really do genuinely want to build an archive of all human knowledge, freely available to all humans, while minimizing bias and falsehood. They want it to be crowdsourced, too. The obvious problem is that lots of the crowd will contribute false or biased things, and those things have to be filtered out somehow. The primary mechanism of filtration isn't "assign brilliant people in every field to fact-check submissions based on their own expertise", because frankly that would only lead to more bias and more problems. So instead of futilely trying to judge objective truth in that matter, they redefine the objective to a more-attainable version of the truth: we want what's commonly accepted as the truth, not what objectively really is the truth.
The reason for this distinction is it can be enforced easily: all contributions of knowledge have to be backed up by external, 3rd party, editorially-verifiable sources. Then at least the version of truth that passes WP muster can be said to have passed societal muster in general before it arrived on WP, which diverts a large part of the truthiness problem. This leads to a pair of lesser problems, both of which deserve attention, but are very difficult to solve:
1) WP doesn't accept original work from subject matter experts. Even if you *are* the world's leading authority on Quantum Chromodynamics, it's not good enough for you to create an account in your name and start adding random facts from your head to an article about QCD Coloring. Even you, the SME, needs to actually referenced a published book or peer-reviewed journal article for each factoid you add to an article. Obviously, this pisses off SMEs that know what they're talking about; it's annoying to be required to find what is probably an objectively less-qualified source than yourself to back up your claims. Unfortunately, it's the only way to prevent false SMEs: people with an inflated view of their expertise and/or a clear fringe bias. It's also the only way that a committee of non-SME editors can validate the process.
2) Perhaps worse is the problem of self-referential loops with the 3rd-party sourcing. A number of issues come together to create the problem, and a typical example goes like this: A well-meaning person edits an article on Palm Trees in Florida, and adds some hearsay non-sense they heard from their neighbor about a new type of pest imported from Cuba that's attacking the trees and how they might all be gone within 10 years due to this pest. Because very few editors or bots are actively watching the Palm Trees in Florida article, this bullshit goes undetected for a while. Let's say two weeks later, someone gets around to reverting the edit for lack of a verifiable source. However, in the intervening two weeks, a well-meaning reporter for a local news station in Florida happens on the article, sees this shocking fact about Palm Trees dying to pestilence, and writes a local new story about it.
She doesn't cite Wikipedia because, well, that would seem unprofessional. So when the original submitter sees the reversion, the submitter goes googling for evidence to back up the claims and get un-reverted. She stumbles on the local news story and brings it back to the edit war as a verifiable source. The editors pretty much have to accept it, and a new and totally invalid factoid has erroneously become a part of human knowledge.
The problems here are man
Re: (Score:3)
I think the first problem using the QCD example is irrelevent, as if you are a expert, you will have published extensively on the subject. Therefore be better placed than anybody to cite good references. All good reviews articles or books should have 3rd party sourcing. It is a standard part of all factual writing.
Solution: Limit edits per article per day (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem I've encountered is that the article content is determined by whoever has more time for endless debates and edit wars.
One solution is to limit each user's number of edits per article per day. For example, if each editor can only edit each article once per day, or 3 times per week, it would stop a lot of edit wars and eliminate the problem of editors who think they "own" articles. More debate would be moved to the Talk pages.
There would be some drawbacks: For example, editors doing major revisions or fixing their own errors or starting new articles would be overly restricted, but there are workarounds for that. Also, a group of editors would still dominate an article, because collectively they would have many more edits than the newcomer.