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Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

blog.ericgoldman.org

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Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#11

Post by Steko »

tptacek wrote: post #7
Steko wrote: post #5

My 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…

Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness.

FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.

Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#12

Post by tptacek »

Steko wrote: post #11
tptacek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness. FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.

Good luck, but I don't think you'll be successful with that, because I think notability is an extremely important part of the glue that holds the Wikipedia project together. Without it you not only get a torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff, but you also lose the critical factor that makes the editorial challenge of Wikipedia tractable; without notability, you simply have too many potential articles to fact-check, and no way to fact-check them.

About 15 years ago some friends and I started a company whose technical premise boiled down to taking IRC and replacing the static tree-based "routing" system it has with a real dynamic routing protocol. No more netsplits! Arbitrary topologies! It was so simple! Why would anyone want anything other than a biconnected IRC? It turns out that the moment you lose the static tree property, the whole system goes to hell. All the sudden, messages aren't (and can't be) reliable, because the network can change out from under them while they're being forwarded. So you figure you'll just build a simple reliability scheme for messages to ride on. Oh, wait: IRC is a group messaging system, and not only is the distributed systems GMS problem not particularly easy to build in a "realistic" network, but providing reliability on it is essentially the multicast reliability problem, which is itself so annoying that it's part of why IP multicast failed.

My long-winded point is, sometimes something that seems like an obvious weakness of an existing system is actually fundamental to that system's viability.

Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#13

Post by Steko »

tptacek wrote: post #12
Steko wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness. FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.

Good luck, but I don't think you'll be successful with that, because I think notability is an extremely important part of the glue that holds the Wikipedia project together. Without it you not only get a torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff, but you also lose the critical factor that makes the editorial challenge of Wikipedia tractable; without notability, you…

"torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff"

I don't think people page through online encyclopedias that way. I'm not notable, if I had a wikipedia page I don't think it would link from any page that actually exists today. How could that ever bother you? I don't think you'd come across it unless you googled my name and it took you to my wikipedia page in which case it would seem to be doing good.

Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#14

Post by diminish »

tptacek wrote: post #9

It'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.

on WP, some whole articles are carefully crafted artworks of spam, where vanispamcruftisement movement learned the encylopedia language and you never notice. One day someone will write "vanispamcruftisement manifesto", why spam is a positive moment of western civilization. Spam techniques of once become mainstream ad types with non-relevance diminished and design improved and cost increased. Many social media are flood of spammy posts about 'self'..

Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#16

Post by deskglass »

trysomething wrote: post #8

Separately, 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…

His analysis was better than mine in that he weighed content by persistence. Still, for what it's worth, I found that when edits were weighed by length, the 1000 most frequent editors dominated.

Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#17

Post by DanBC »

Steko wrote: post #11
tptacek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness. FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.

> FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors.

I would mirror the 100,000 most important articles. I'd then fact check them vigorously. Emphasis would be on truth, not verifiability. I'd keep anonymity, but I'd throw out the Wiki - editing would be done by paid employees from "suggested improvements" made by visitors. I'd pay people to create excellent quality diagrams, and include plenty of them. I'm a fan of translating STEM information into Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

Again, this would require lots of cash.

Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#18

Post by DanBC »

Steko wrote: post #13
tptacek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck, but I don't think you'll be successful with that, because I think notability is an extremely important part of the glue that holds the Wikipedia project together. Without it you not only get a torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff, but you also lose the critical factor that makes the editorial challenge of Wikipedia tractable; without notability, you…

"torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff" I don't think people page through online encyclopedias that way. I'm not notable, if I had a wikipedia page I don't think it would link from any page that actually exists today. How could that ever bother you? I don't think you'd come across it unless you googled my name and it took you to my wikipedia page in which case…

I used to hit the [random] link and know I'd get something interesting.

Now, not so much. I'll get a tiny stub of something programmaticly dragged in from some huge database - a town name with maybe some population figure and location; an obscure politician with party affiliation and birthdate.

For people who enjoy gnoming these kind of articles are tedious - what's the point of correcting a comma if no-one is likely to see it?

Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#19

Post by DanBC »

phdtree wrote: post #2

Anonymous 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…

The research is clear - the majority of anonymous edits are good edits.

Re: Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006)

#20

Post by return0 »

tptacek wrote: post #9

It'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.

I wonder how much of this is due to the good top-level leadership, and whether this will change under different leaders.
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