... and they want $20 million for our work that they don't want. poor Wikipedia
The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
291–300 of 353 posts
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have deliberately ignored the most contentious part of the Wikipedia policy regarding articles, which is the "Notability" rule. Why an Internet-based encyclopedia with no editors, printed version, or quality control feels the need to limit articles to "notable subjects" is beyond me - it isn't like we're going to run out of electrons any time soon. In this particular case, it was quite clear this person existed a…
Why hasn't anyone taken wikipedia's content and put in it another mediawiki setup run without a deletionist policy?
Not quite what you are looking for, but interesting resources nonetheless:
Deletionpedia:
http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
See also the Semantic Web/Linked Data resource DBPedia (which tends to have poor uptime, so I am linking the DBPedialite here):
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow AfD closely. I'm a programmer. But I just had a look through the latest AfDs and I have to say there's little I disagreed with. This one was sponsored by a very prolific Wikipedian, though, who has a particular affection for the rule that one event doesn't make you notable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... Which is totally outrageous. It's tempting to conclude the nominat…
Actually; that is a prime example of where the deletion process is failing - because the only option is "delete or not delete". That article is a problem; if you read it, it is not a biography, it describes an event. Which, I suspect, is the point the nominator was trying to make. For a reader, the content is better presented in an article on Women's rights in Egypt (or activism in Egypt) with the title redirected th…
Right. Being able to flag anything for deletion, then going through the hassle of defending it puts the onus on not deleting it, not on those who want to delete it, which I think it wrong.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason is because deletion is one of the single biggest areans for status games. See, from the outside, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. And there's a community there to write an encyclopedia. Sensible, no? Actually, the community comes first and the encyclopedia is a side-effect. The community functions very politically, and very much like a game as well. The original intention might have been an encyclopedia with…
On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand.... 95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and because so many people do get involved, the actually-useful work is 5% of a very large number. If some change in policy cut the political bullshit in half but drove away two-thirds of the people…
With your figures, assuming 100k edits being created.
Cut the "bullshit" by half leads to 47.5k useful edits (95%/2; or at least ones without bullshit) plus your original 5k leads to 52.5k useful edits. Except we've only a third of the people - assuming equal distribution of edits - so 17.5k of edits are now useful. More than a 3 fold increase in useful edits in the same amount of time.
So in fact if you change the system to put off a lot of people in your hypothetical manner you can improve the useful edits.
This is akin to pricing out "toxic" customers. Or having complex methods that filter out the more intellectual as those with most power (arguably the problem being ascribed to Wikipedia in the article).
Assumptions here make the figures entirely unrealistic but I think the general thrust is nonetheless sound?
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#295From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction > Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. There's the problem. Wikipedia should stop being an encyclopedia and start being Wikipedia.
I completely agree. I think Wikipedia should stop trying to be an encyclopaedia and start being a source of encyclopaedic information. The whole notability blame game detracts from it overall. Sure some elementary school in North-East Canada might seem useless now but in 500 years that entire area might be a huge city. History tells us that sometimes inane details from the past become our keys to understanding the pa…
It is a question of verifiability and maintainability. Why you would think that having broken windows would help is beyond me.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It wants, and needs, _quality_ participation" I think the word/phrase you are likely looking for is "fanatic dedication".
If knowing the fairly simple rules of the site you are participating in counts as fanatic dedication, I weep for the internet. Do you feel one has to be fanatically dedicated to HN to know why "reply" links don't always appear right away?
The history of the problem with WP is not that there's a lack of people willing to provide quality participation. Everyone from professional authors to nuclear physicists have been screwed by the bureaucratic psychosis that pervades contributing to WP.
Almost by definition, high quality participants are such because they have spent an inordinate amount of time in their area of expertise. They don't have the time to deal with "the WP way", Even contributing an article to WP is a "big deal" for these kinds of people because of the time it takes to do it.
But because WP invariably turns almost any submission, no matter the quality, into a situation of content defense, quality participants simply don't have the time to:
a) waste defending perfectly good material b) waste learning the ins and outs of WP on how to defend the perfectly good material and manage it through a multi-week AfD process -- possibly several times.
Sure there's lots of junk that ends up submitted to WP, and if you read through the comments here, nobody is really up in arms about that, it's when the actual high quality material (which might represent dozens or hundreds of hours of high quality work) is tossed out because some WP editor has trouble functioning in society and decided that they couldn't handle invaders on their patch of electrons that we end up with the problem you see here.
So no, the only ones who are able to have any sort of impact on WP are the ones who are able to have fanatical dedication to learning the ins and outs of WP and are able to manage an edit through the tortured, arbitrary and capricious bureaucratic processes that define WP today.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think his point still stands - and this plays into the "systemic bias" point that other posters here have made. The issue here is not that citations are required (they ought to be, otherwise how can we ascertain truthfulness?), but rather it's heavily biased towards certain types of citations. A poster mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Wikipedia's articles on animal husbandry are laughably incorrect, to the p…
Sure, people cite online stuff more, because people are lazy. But I haven't seen any bias against people who do cite books. That's mostly what I cite, since I write articles while I'm working my way through books, citing the book in the process. People seem to actually welcome it, if anything. I've added some information not previously available online that way about some archaeological sites, Greek wines, old AI sys…
"But I haven't seen any bias against people who do cite books."
If you recall the great programming language AfD wars of recent. The problem was precisely that the editors exhibited an extraordinary bias against two things:
a) references of printed material -- because they didn't have a copy so they couldn't verify it, and/or the proceedings were not perceived to be notable enough on that particular editors radar to be counted
b) references of printed material in another language - as odd as it may seem, people who communicate in other languages do have something to say and produce material that can be referenced. But because the editor couldn't read that language, it was dismissed.
I'd believe what you posted, the trouble free utopian life of a contributor, maybe 5 years ago when one could actually contribute to WP without having all their changes reverted followed by snide comments from capricious editors. But the reality is that there are very large numbers of people who won't even be bothered contributing anymore (and you can see a fraction of a percent represented in the comments here) because the experience of doing so was shamefully poor.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you're right on 20% but I'll tell you that 100% of the article was a temper tantrum. Had the author looked into why these rules are necessary and suggested a more efficient process maybe he could have been taken seriously. Instead he rattled on about how it was hard for him to nag people into seeing things his way and upset that all his effort went to waste. People who argue about the campaigns to tarnish Wikip…
> Had the author looked into why these rules are necessary and suggested a more efficient process maybe he could have been taken seriously. Suggesting more efficient processes for Wikipedia is a never ending tarpit that doesn't get anywhere, no matter how committed you are and how established you are in the community. Any hidebound culture filled with red tape has horror stories and experiences that seem to justify e…
I see your point but I still believe Wikipedia should be hard to submit to. We obviously know Wikipedia's history and I've only contributed once. The rest I've read from other sources.
I would ask why it's so very important for his contribution to be accepted? This really isn't about the process as much as it is the OP not getting his way. He just shields himself with an argument over user experience as an excuse to whine. It's all there in the subtext.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#299What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI. Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make. All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snow…
> Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. That assumes that it would be beneficial to have people who don't understand anything about what makes an article worth keeping making requests like that. It also assumes that requesting deletion review is Wikipedia's most valuable place to spend developer and designer ti…
No, it assumes that user task design should follow the tenets of good UI design.
What I'm hearing you say is that usability barriers are a good thing because they stop people who don't understand the system from using the system, which is the refrain of all defenders of bad UI design. We've seen plenty of disruption in the area of software UI design in recent years that disprove such a theory.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're wrong. If Wikipedia didn't have spthese standards then every idiot including myself would be creating pages that are just spam. You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. Now, we all know a Wikipedia page doesn't have the weight of other sources and can be crap at times but so far…
The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low... I have a hard time believing that there's any grave risk to throwing open the doors on Wikipedia, simply because not all Wikipedia articles are equal. I've been on the other end of this. The shitty little start-up I worked on for many years somehow managed to squeak past the finish line of notability and keep its shitty little Wikipedia entry from being deleted…
Well that same thing also wouldn't hurt me either but I'm not Coca Cola. That's what I'm talking about. No one cares about small businesses or startups at all. If you're a company that no one even searches for on Google Places this doesn't apply to you.
It is a fact that these things happen and whether it's harmful or not it isn't right and it's the reason for these policies.