Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
blog.ericgoldman.org
Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#2Anonymous editing is a real problem for Wikipedia. There are already numerous "edit wars" by anonymous editors - mostly on ideological/political issues, but also celebrity people changing articles about them to remove criticism, for example. These abuses/debates will likely continue to get worse. That's why we at phdtree wiki project (http://phdtree.org/) don't allow anonymous editing.
What Wikipedia needs is a good karma system, like the one used by HN.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#3I know a guy who's a "Wikipedia consultant." He's a longtime editor who now sells his services to companies and people looking to polish their image. I'm glad the practice hasn't spread.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#4Anonymous editing is a real problem for Wikipedia. There are already numerous "edit wars" by anonymous editors - mostly on ideological/political issues, but also celebrity people changing articles about them to remove criticism, for example. These abuses/debates will likely continue to get worse. That's why we at phdtree wiki project ( http://phdtree.org/ ) don't allow anonymous editing. What Wikipedia needs is a goo…
Blah! Shameless plug. PR firms employ real people to edit web content to reflect clients favorably.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#5My 2005 Prediction of Wikipedia's Failure By 2010 Was Wrong
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict...
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#6Wikipedia's open nature helps it. Several years ago I did a "wiki patrol" for new edits. There is an IRC channel and programs and facilities for this. Most of the cleanup I did was of well-meaning people who did not understand Wikipedia's markup format and the like. Some was vandalism. Lots of people do these "patrols". I would not underestimate Wikipedia's ability to deal with spammers. The open nature of it all helps it.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#7My 2005 Prediction of Wikipedia's Failure By 2010 Was Wrong http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict...
This analysis is off in a couple ways.
First: the incentives to spam Wikipedia remain enormous; Wikipedia has incredible search mojo. The kind of spam he's talking about is of a kind with Wordpress comment spam, but the kind of spam Wikipedia deals with in reality is more sophisticated, and involves entire bogus articles.
Second, flagged revisions are a tool that suppresses edit wars, and are used on (last I checked) a tiny subset of all the pages on WP. That "most important technical change" restricting "anyone from editing" WP hasn't been and never will be deployed sitewide.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#8Separately, Jimmy Wales reportedly said that 0.7% of Wikipedia's users have made 50% of all Wikipedia edits and 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles, and he was quoted in the New York Times in June as saying “A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence...But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community” of about 1,000 Wikipedians.
I believe Aaron Swartz did some statistical analysis on this and found it not to be true .. a small number of editors make the most # of edits, but the content is written by a very large number of editors.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#9It's useful to read this to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem WP faced even in 2006, when it already had huge traction. Wikipedia is an amazing achievement, maybe even up there in the leaderboard of western civilization, and the fact that they managed to do it despite an active decentralized motivated adversary (the forces of vanispamcruftisement) is just one aspect of that.
Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)
#10I'm so glad this hasn't happened...yet.