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The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

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Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#141

Post by Marcomasino »

danso wrote: post #115
Marcomasino wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked with and directed people of differing ethnic backgrounds, I would pick the Chinese as best to work with. The worst who shall remain nameless, were either augmentative dishonest or lazy and some were as thick as two very thick planks glued together. You had to speak to them in very short sentences and not use big words and still they didn't get it. I didn't experience a large enough sample to form an opi…

Initial comment from you ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819307 ): > I used deal with a self declared Asperger who was top class in his field. The thing is whenever I asked him do you know how to fix this problem. The answer was invariably, 'sorry I don't know how to do that'. From your comment above: > The worst [group of people] who shall remain nameless, were either augmentative dishonest or lazy and some…

I don't think so, I'm always willing to share the knowledge. It also seems to be stereotypical Aspergers to hoard information. Doesn't matter as much in other professions but I have been in places where if the chief techie were to be thrown under a bus the place would be out of business, as no one else understood his system.

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#142

Post by mahouse »

digler999 wrote: post #56
mahouse wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should make them aware that they should refrain from holding any position where they have to deal with people. I am sure you have never edited Wikipedia; the amount of users and admins that more than obviously suffer from autism spectrum disorders and OCDs is very, very high, and they are crippling the bureaucratic processes of the wiki. I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct" but I think just l…

> I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct" It's not about PC. It's about violating their rights. Please, post your full medical charts, prescription lists, and any mental health counseling notes or treatments for addiction you've ever undertaken, so I can use them to mock you.

None. :)

And I'm not violating the rights of somebody by pointing out they have an illness, sorry.

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#143

Post by sandworm101 »

mitchtbaum wrote: post #138
sandworm101 wrote: post #44

There is a finite pattern whenever one relies on volunteers. Most will come and go, but a few hang around and rise to the top. Lacking renumeration, they tend towards self-gratification. Some handle extra responsibility well, but others start building their own little castles from which to berate all below. This process is inevitable once you have multiple ranks of volunteers. I've seen this with charities, open sour…

> Things always go south when you have volunteers bossing around other volunteers. You showed this well. Thank you for finding this pattern and telling about it clearly. > The answer is to keep all volunteers equal. (Un)Fortunately this would break. Logically, how can you have one group of equals enforce their rules with unequal power? Naturally, influence (roles(?)) emerge(s). For social animals to want to stick tog…

The other advantage of true hunter/gatherer activities is that their physical nature allows people to rotate in and out of roles naturally.

If you are walking in the woods, everyone has down/slow days. Hiking/climbing groups know this and so rarely have dedicated leaders. Look at the military groups that occasionally climb mountains (ie wounded warriors on everest). On day one they throw the entire "rank" thing out the window. They know it doesn't work for mountaineering. Instead decisions are generally made by the person least tired/hungry/dehydrated at the time. That's how a hunting party would work: If Bob's got a sore foot today, he isn't going to be the one flushing the deer and instead might be today's planner/leader.

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#144

Post by phicoh »

sparkzilla wrote: post #39

An interesting paper that basically says that the number of editors is declining due to the difficulty in keeping and retaining new users. Any person who has tried to edit Wikipedia will know that aggressive rule-wielding wikifanatics immediately try to kill newcomer edits using whatever tools they have to hand. But it's important to realize that Wikipedia's ambiguous rules and arbitrary decisions are not a bug, but…

Comparing wikipedia to openstreetmap, it seems to be a community problem, not a software problem.

An open structure means that you have to watch what others are doing constantly. But that doesn't explain the huge number of stories where reasonable edits are reverted. That can only happen because the wikipedia (editor) community is ok with that.

My conclusion is that wikipedia forgot to redefine itself. Originally, wikipedia was a summary based on existing literature. But pretty soon users took wikipedia way beyond that. Using it to document stuff, instead of summarising stuff documented else where.

Most wikis are a tool to collectively create documentation. And somehow wikipedia is stuck in older world, and not what most wikipedia users expect it to be.

My conclusion, until the project reforms and allows original content, I won't contribute.

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#145

Post by restalis »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #120
gozur88 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something Jerry Pournelle used to complain about. He edited some pages relating to the US space program. Events in which he took part or knew the people involved. Then he'd come back a month later and find the page had been edited again with the incorrect information re-inserted. Eventually he just gave up. And then there are political problems. The Tyson affair is a good example - Neil deGrasse Tyson spent m…

The "famous person tried to contribute to stuff they were involved in" thing comes up a lot. The wikipedia answer is that they want published sources that people can cite and review. This seems a bit crazy when the famous person is someone you respect and trust, but as soon as self-publicists, frauds and quacks get involved, this becomes a useful guideline. And of course you can't have one rule for some and another r…

"And of course you can't have one rule for some and another rule for the rest."

We can (and do) have recognition only for some (and not just for everybody, i.e. "the rest"). It may be a flawed solution, but that is how things work in the real life.

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#146

Post by tamana »

mangeletti wrote: post #5

Wikipedia has problems, but I think it's worth noting that Wikipedia has enough content to fill 2,200x volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica[1], or, a small library. I don't think it's necessarily an existential problem that the public image of Wikipedia's relevance is reaching a sort of "trough of disillusionment" due to some of its governance issues. It has simply reached a scale where it faces a new set or hurdles to…

99% of Wklikipedia's millions of satisfied users have no awareness or interest in its governance issues.

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#147

Post by tamana »

sangnoir wrote: post #140
anigbrowl wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bug, not a feature. A huge proportion of that content is crap (eg it's perfectly reasonable to have entries for popular anime shows, but we don't need hundreds of stub pages for every character in the show), and even a lot of the good content is poorly curated. A lot of the math articles articles are very poorly written, for example, but attempts to improve them are often reverted on the grounds that 'Wikip…

> it's perfectly reasonable to have entries for popular anime shows, but we don't need hundreds of stub pages for every character in the show You know what grinds my gears? Pages upon pages of 'useless'[1] anime guest-characters, and yet when I tried to add pages for real-life artistes from my (3rd world) country, I had the pages deleted for "lack of notability". This must have happened a decade ago, but I told mysel…

Did you have citations for those artists? We're you hindered by the lack of citations possible for artists who weren't written about?

Sadly, wikipedia doesn't support the notion of citing "art installed at so and so location, viewed by so and so people" unless someone wrote it down in a western publication.

In a real sense, an encyclopedia is a history of books, not a history of the world. This is an unfortunate consequence of writing's special "viral" place among forms of communication, and the medium is the message etc

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#148

Post by tamana »

mangeletti wrote: post #7
placeybordeaux wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.

I'm suggesting that there hasn't been as much of a decline in community as there has been a decline in the available encyclopedia-relevant information left in the world that isn't already published on Wikipedia. Also, the public perception is related to the drop of users and vice versa. There has been a lot of negative press lately, specifically related to problems in the community.

> There has been a lot of negative press lately,

In am extremely small geek bubble. Your non-HN/Reddit neighbors aren't aware of such press.

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#149

Post by tamana »

Alupis wrote: post #92
placeybordeaux wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.

> How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors. Well, in fairness, the declining number of active editors is likely linked to the public perception of Wikipedia. Teachers and professors hound into students Wikipedia is not for academic use and is full of nonsense and other wrong information. Mos…

educators have always hated everything new, and encyclopedia had never been a valid source for a research paper. That has nothing to do with wikipedia

Re: The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]

#150

Post by tamana »

sandworm101 wrote: post #44

There is a finite pattern whenever one relies on volunteers. Most will come and go, but a few hang around and rise to the top. Lacking renumeration, they tend towards self-gratification. Some handle extra responsibility well, but others start building their own little castles from which to berate all below. This process is inevitable once you have multiple ranks of volunteers. I've seen this with charities, open sour…

Is this specific to volunteerism? The problem you describe sounds like the famous "middle management" nonsense of the corporate world. People who are neither the owner/dictator nor independents or line workers, justify their existence by pushing people around to self-gratify/justify
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