The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
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The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
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Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#2Is it really that bad? I had contributed to some articles a few years ago and didn't encounter a 'crushing bureaucracy', but a very welcoming community.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#3Is it me, or could we use a new wikipedia-- maybe even use git to push changes, and track changes a gitopedia if you will.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#4Is it me, or could we use a new wikipedia-- maybe even use git to push changes, and track changes a gitopedia if you will.
How would that address the issues of contributions and quality of articles? Would using git not reduce the group of potential contributors?
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#5I did 3000 edits, starting in 2002, but I essentially stopped in 2008, because of the infighting and the self-appointed regulators.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#6Is it really that bad? I had contributed to some articles a few years ago and didn't encounter a 'crushing bureaucracy', but a very welcoming community.
It's big enough that you can have pretty different experiences in different kinds of articles. I mostly write history stuff, and my experiences there are pretty good. People seem to appreciate new articles on stuff like a Greek archaeological site, a 19th-century politician, etc., or expansions to existing articles, as long as the information has references. [Actually that's my own theory for part of the decline: around 2007 it became much more necessary to include citations for your additions, which raises the barrier to entry.]
In history articles, things mostly get contentious around subjects that seem inherently contentious for non-Wikipedia-related reasons. The archives of the talk page for "Armenian Genocide" are rather extensive and not always cordial, because people have very different ideas about what should go in it, some of them strongly held. But it's at least converged on a decent article imo.
When there aren't the same passions around the historical disputes, I've found the environment pretty supportive. I worked on a biography of an ancient Roman politician where there was quite a bit of inconsistency between what different classicists had written about him, but the discussion was just trying to figure out how we should deal with that in the article, and where the mainstream historical consensus lay (if anywhere), not hugely partisan or anything.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#7Interesting read, and it reminds me of a really annoying experience I once had with one of the StackExchange sites.
There was a question about Emacs, and the answer was a chunk of elisp that was wrong - one of the closing parens was in the wrong place, so it caused an error. OK, easy fix! But I don't have enough karma to edit answers on StackExchange and have them submit cleanly, so I submitted an 'edit suggestion' or whatever they're called.
Unfortunately edit suggestions can't be submitted unless they have at least five characters of difference - seems like a fair rule to prevent tiny changes but five characters of difference can be a world of difference in elisp.
So I pad out the edit suggestion with a comment that added some value, only to have the suggestion rejected by a user who freely admitted to having "no emacs experience" because he "didn't think it looked valuable".
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It also reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor of mathematics that taught one of my classes. He said he started and stopped editing Wikipedia the same day - when one of his changes to a graph theory article was reverted by someone who was "a computer repair technician" because of some Wiki-rule.
It's very possible that he did break the rule and his edit should've been undone, but at the same time he's the editor that Wikipedia desperately needs to attract.
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Sites like this have Harrison Bergeron's Handicapper General ensuring that all contributions are seen as "equal", so it's not at all surprising that the article identifies one of the more comprehensive Wikipedia articles as "List of Pokemon".
Wikipedia needs to figure out how to say that the guy who wrote a paper with Erdös gets more leeway on mathematical articles than a guy who repairs computers all day.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#8Is it me, or could we use a new wikipedia-- maybe even use git to push changes, and track changes a gitopedia if you will.
Because "wiki" was a buzzword in 2000s, and "git" is a buzzword of the 2010?
Is a million forks the missing feature of the wikipedia experience?
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#9Well all of the low-hanging fruit is taken. A contributor has to resort to increasingly obscure topics in order to have editorial control of an article. Otherwise they're editing a page where each paragraph has an active editor who likes it exactly as it is.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#10What a coincidence that a story about the decline of WP comes out right after they delete a bunch of PR agency accounts!