Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006) • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#71

Post by shdjchduwne7 » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 9:07 AM UTC

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #59

quanticle wrote: post #22

Wales is right about one thing, though. This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. The problem is that, as a commu…

It really depends on what you edit. Sci/tech/math is pretty much un-monitored in my experience. The economics pages are full of weird pet theories. Meanwhile, as you say, current events, biographies, and a lot of other less technical pages (that don't require the deep background that the article refers to) are infested with deletionists.

It really seems to come down to politics, specifically whether or not /any/ group considers a topic political. I've made a few reasonably long albeit anonymous edits to the pages for specific regional cuisines and so far the only thing that's been changed is someone altered my wording a little once by breaking a sentence up into two.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#72

Post by goto11 » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 1:44 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #49

goto11 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you disagree with the numbers presented in article?

He may accept numbers in article and still think that 14 years later things are different. Wikipedia changed policies in the meantime, society changed in the meantime. He may also think that more representative selection of articles to run test on would end up differently.

How would a more representative test end up? Are there better numbers available?

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#73

Post by gatestone » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #66

2006, using data primarily from Wikipedia articles written before then, was a very long time ago. Things have changed a lot: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.0323.pdf

Small special wikis are very different fron Wikipedia.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#74

Post by MaxBarraclough » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

instagraham wrote: post #60

onyva wrote: post #3

From my experience with trying to contribute to the Hebrew version, try contributing focusing on expanding an existing article and watch what happens. In my case there was a very strong push back even against adding links that expand on issues mentioned which imho helped to balance an obvious slant. I gave up after a while. At university of course you’re warned not to use Wikipedia, it’s not acceptable as a reference…

> At university of course you’re warned not to use Wikipedia, it’s not acceptable as a reference The reason for this is too often misconstrued as being that Wikipedia is somehow misleading. The reality is that you do you reference something that is not a primary source. When everything on Wikipedia ostensibly has to link to something, it is just lazy to cite "wikipedia" as source for something. I mean, I imagine you…

Interestingly Wikipedia itself promotes the use of secondary sources, discouraging over-reliance on primary and tertiary sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_primary_...