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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

#21

Post by lwf »

The "Wikipedia's Bureaucracy" chart is sort of frustrating.

It used to be that being in the "Administrator" group was basically the only granularity we had to differentiate users. People complained that they only wanted to work on some things, like vandalism patrolling, or file maintenance, or creating accounts on behalf of other users.

So we unbundled, so that people could get the rights they wanted to do a particular task.

And in other cases, like with Checkuser, the Bureaucrat group, and Oversight, the advanced privileges are in fact dangerous and therefore are appropriately restricted.

Actual governance is pretty simple: the only things that are truly binding are community consensus (as determined by a sufficiently public discussion, closed at its end by one or more administrators) and decisions of the Arbitration Committee, which conducts its business on public Wikipedia pages. Administrators have some leeway in terms of blocking and closing discussions, but everything is subject to review.

NB: I'm part of the system, granted. I'm an administrator, Oversighter, and CheckUser. But these roles exist for good reasons, and I think the unbundling helps increase participation, by letting people help out without requiring full community trust in all matters.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#22

Post by fluxon »

hyperpape wrote: post #14
brianpgordon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that your professor tried to write content from his own knowledge rather than strictly from published sources. The problem is that anyone can claim to be a math professor with expertise on graph theory. For this reason, everyone - even experts - need to cite sources in order to add content to Wikipedia.

Over my years of editing Wikipedia off and on, I've come to think this is mostly a bad excuse. The issue is that very few articles meet Wikipedia's real standards for citations. Yet new content provided by experts is often challenged for lacking citations, perhaps because of a sort of status quo bias. What needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system a…

I agree that many articles lack sufficient reliable sources. Only college or postgrad textbooks are considered reliable sources, but not great ones, unless written by noted and/or frequently cited authors.

In my opinion, experts should be sincerely welcomed to kibbitz on talk pages - not directly in editing articles - with a strong invitation to cite sources other than themselves. This approach, optimistically, will keep bias on the Talk page, and out of articles, and give experts a substantial real and perceived voice, currently lacking.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#23

Post by admax88q »

mathattack wrote: post #20
rhizome wrote: post #10

What a coincidence that a story about the decline of WP comes out right after they delete a bunch of PR agency accounts!

In the spirit of Wikipedia, can you provide a citation? :-)

A citation showing what? That Wikipedia deleted PR accounts recently? Or that this article was posted after that happened?

Both those events are easily searchable. Hacker News comments are not a fucking encyclopaedia.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#24

Post by sp332 »

gohrt wrote: post #8
gremlinsinc wrote: post #3

Is 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?

Yeah! Although I'm not sure git is the right model. I'd like something where people can have "channels" that are their own contributions, then various levels of aggregation and curation so that I can subscribe to a few massive, "mainstream" channels plus a few smaller special-interest wikis.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#25

Post by fluxon »

cldr wrote: post #19
hyperpape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over my years of editing Wikipedia off and on, I've come to think this is mostly a bad excuse. The issue is that very few articles meet Wikipedia's real standards for citations. Yet new content provided by experts is often challenged for lacking citations, perhaps because of a sort of status quo bias. What needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system a…

I was thinking about this the other day and I came to think that Wikipedia's rule about citations is this: Wikipedia does not want to be a source of information. It wants to be a collection/aggregation of other sources of information, and those other sources have to be accessible to others for all time (i.e. not a human being but a book written by a human being). What I mean to say is that Wikipedia's system is one t…

Agreed, and well said.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#26

Post by muaddirac »

An ex of mine edited a wiki article and added false information to it. I think that sort of thing is very harmful, so I removed it. A day later the edit was reverted. I tried a few months later. It, too, was reverted.

I had someone else try. It was reverted. I tried once more, probably two years later (after the "fact" had time to propagate throughout the internet), and it too was reverted.

The reason it was reverted every time? Apparently I didn't sufficiently explain the edit. It didn't require explanation: it was an uncited, demonstrably false fact. It asserted the existence and publication of a book (in recent history) that was never published. It is impossible to find a copy of it. It does not exist. I didn't know how to explain it any better than that.

A few months ago, I saw that someone finally noticed it was fake and removed it for good.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#27

Post by Contero »

What I think wikipedia needs more than anything is a new way to propose an edit without actually committing it, and to be able to solicit feedback or have others fix it for you before having it finally approved and submitted. It needs to be something where an inexperienced editor can make a good edit proposal without having to be completely versed in wikipedia's editing policies.

Talk pages are a horrendous way to implement this. Making an edit proposal should be extremely new-user friendly.

I think a proposal and dialog format would do a much better job at absorbing new content than what happens currently, which seems to be a revert if you run afoul of any editing policy.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#28

Post by ctdonath »

brianpgordon wrote: post #9

Well 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.

This. Wikipedia has reached a point where most of what people are interested in writing about has been written about, or has been staked out by more active participants, leaving the bulk of remaining work either obscure or maintenance, neither of which is motivatingly interesting to most people.

Hence a recurring theme: the great failing of FOSS products (free as in beer) is precisely that a non-trivial amount of work which needs doing doesn't get done because there is no incentive to do it: it is hard, boring, unappreciated, and/or expensive to the point that the only way to get it done is to pay someone to do it. Unless Wikipedia pays somebody to round things out and constantly polish content, it will suffer stagnation.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#29

Post by hyperpape »

cldr wrote: post #19
hyperpape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over my years of editing Wikipedia off and on, I've come to think this is mostly a bad excuse. The issue is that very few articles meet Wikipedia's real standards for citations. Yet new content provided by experts is often challenged for lacking citations, perhaps because of a sort of status quo bias. What needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system a…

I was thinking about this the other day and I came to think that Wikipedia's rule about citations is this: Wikipedia does not want to be a source of information. It wants to be a collection/aggregation of other sources of information, and those other sources have to be accessible to others for all time (i.e. not a human being but a book written by a human being). What I mean to say is that Wikipedia's system is one t…

I agree that Wikipedia's goal is to be the collection of things that we know that we know. So we do need citations. But when an article is wrong and doesn't already have thorough citations for every claim, should we demand citations for every new contribution?

My point is really about process: when someone comes to us with a bit of knowledge, but no citations and limited understanding of the Wikipedia process, how do we react?

The model whereanyone can edit and see their changes live has real benefits and costs. It makes it easy to make your first contribution, but it also means that if an editor doesn't like it, they just revert it. Sometimes, maybe changes should go in a queue or something.

I come to Wikipedia, and dump a ton of graph theory on some page. An editor says "look, this isn't quite how it works, but it looks like you're trying to improve the page. Is this stuff you have citations for? Do you know what textbooks would cover it?"

Maybe my edits don't go live immediately, but it's better than the current situation, where they just get reverted by some guy spouting WP:STQ!

(That's the grain of truth the comment down below that Wikipedia needs to be more like git).

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#30

Post by hyperpape »

fluxon wrote: post #22
hyperpape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over my years of editing Wikipedia off and on, I've come to think this is mostly a bad excuse. The issue is that very few articles meet Wikipedia's real standards for citations. Yet new content provided by experts is often challenged for lacking citations, perhaps because of a sort of status quo bias. What needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system a…

I agree that many articles lack sufficient reliable sources. Only college or postgrad textbooks are considered reliable sources, but not great ones, unless written by noted and/or frequently cited authors. In my opinion, experts should be sincerely welcomed to kibbitz on talk pages - not directly in editing articles - with a strong invitation to cite sources other than themselves. This approach, optimistically, will…

Yeah, but the talk pages are basically just sewers for a lot of articles. I look at a talk page and my thought is "god, no one will ever read what I write here".
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