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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

#71

Post by anonymous »

fluxon wrote: post #42
ISL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physicist here: I stopped making contributions to Wikipedia after a few edits and reversions, I stopped too. Furthermore, the danger that something I'd put a lot of time into could be replaced meant that it's not worth sinking a lot of time into it. The citation policy makes a ton of pragmatic sense, and I understand why it's there. It's an unfriendly way to meet the Wikipedia community. (an alternative way to addres…

Please come back and make suggestions on Talk pages, rather than directly edit. There, you can actively discuss, cite sources (your own and hopefully others), and make real contributions which will last. Experts have a special kind of conflict of interest: their possible bias when directly editing. Discussing will moderate and ameliorate that bias, before it gets into the article. This approach will help as science a…

Well you can keep his edit and send the guy a polite message that he ought to cite his sources soon or you'll remove what he added. I mean, at worst you'll just have an article without a citation for a short while, without driving people away. What you are doing right now is this:

          .-.     
          |U|     
          | |     
          | |     
         _| |_    
        | | | |-. 
       /|     ` | 
      | |       | 
      |         | 
      \         / 
       |       |  
       |       |
       FUCK  YOU

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

#72

Post by Jtsummers »

fluxon wrote: post #59
Jtsummers wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue with online sources is the impermanence of URLs. Unlike the original concept, things change over time. Domain names are bought and sold or allowed to expire, site maintainers stop (other work or health), maintainers change and decide on a new schema. Even if there were a valid URL for every citation today (that is, every book, magazine, newspaper, etc was made available online), in a year half of them c…

There's a bit of a movement to encourage going back to Real Books(tm) for sourcing. But lots of wikipedians know about and lament linkrot, site death, and robots.txt hijacking (which can "disappear" an entire dead site from the Wayback Machine behind a domain squatter's temp page). So we soldier on with archive.org, WebCite, archive.is (new, and under indictment for bot spamming at the moment), and several other arch…

I understand, and I've noticed what seems to be a trend in WP articles of more "hard" sources. I think that's fantastic. My personal frustration as a would-be editor came from 3 types of edits that I would make that would frequently be reverted (years ago, and I haven't been back to edit since):

1. Grammar/typos - for whatever reason correcting "then" and "than" ticked some people off. "Could/would/should of", "intensive purposes", "loose/lose". These are common mistakes that happen with either careless writing or non-native speakers. The content can be good, but it feels like amateur hour and cleaning it up should be encouraged. Most of my changes of this sort were reverted within hours, even though I would include a comment in my commit explaining the changes.

2. Correcting based on the citations provided. Read an article, see something that seemed off, go to the citation. The citation states the exact opposite of the WP article (or some segment of the article), and I'd make changes based on that (usually it was careful editing so that it was a paraphrase or quote that dropped a "not" or something).

3. New content. I was new to WP editing, so I didn't know all the arcana (the process seems as esoteric to new editors as the old AD&D manuals seem to modern RPG players). I'd write something, post it, have the citations, realize I didn't put them in the day after. Everything was gone. I'd remake the changes with the citations, and it'd still be reverted (I honestly can't recall anymore which articles). I'm not doing research, there was no POV issues, I was just fleshing out content that was barebones. I'm the sort of person that could've been a good maintenance editor, filling in sparse articles or rectifying the information in others. Instead, the community seemed to actively reject my contributions. After a few starts like this, I saw no reason to persist.

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

#73

Post by moocowduckquack »

ISL wrote: post #36
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.

Physicist here: I stopped making contributions to Wikipedia after a few edits and reversions, I stopped too. Furthermore, the danger that something I'd put a lot of time into could be replaced meant that it's not worth sinking a lot of time into it. The citation policy makes a ton of pragmatic sense, and I understand why it's there. It's an unfriendly way to meet the Wikipedia community. (an alternative way to addres…

It would be cool to have a git flavoured wikipedia type thing integrated into jstor.

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

#74

Post by jaysonelliot »

lwf wrote: post #21

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 particul…

As a part of the system, I hope you'll work with the rest of the Wikipedia High Priests to address the problem that so many people have pointed out for years.

The ability to contribute to Wikipedia is based more on one's expertise navigating the insular secret-handshake culture of Wikipedia than upon actual expertise or knowledge.

Naturally, Wikipedia needs safeguards to protect against the vandalism, manipulation, and inaccurate information that would flood the site if left unchecked. But in doing so, it's grown into a secret club where only the people with time to learn its byzantine customs and rules participate. Some effort should be made to contribute, but the majority of one's time should be spent on subject matter expertise, gathering quality citations, and good, clear writing—not on learning the intricacies of entering said content.

I expect there's a certain badge of honor that comes from being a part of the system. Once you've put hundreds of hours into learning a system and joining a community, outsiders and newcomers are viewed with suspicion at best. Why let some latecomer barge in and just start writing when everyone already in the community had to work harder to get there? But it's that "community consensus" you talk about that makes Wikipedia the closed culture it is today. As long as a small, demographically homogeneous group holds the keys to participation, Wikipedia will suffer.

It's like the Catholic church, centuries ago, when the liturgy was in Latin, and only the initiated could have access to the scriptures—everyone else had to rely on their interpretations. Wikipedia needs its Martin Luther.

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

#75

Post by TillE »

justincormack wrote: post #37
smoyer wrote: post #17

Well ... there was always a limited amount of information in printed encyclopedia's, and since printing included incremental costs, the editors were careful to make sure each article had enough value to be included. Is it possible that all the important articles have been written and are, at this point, well vetted? Perhaps there aren't enough topics left for all the people that would be writing articles? Or perhaps…

Thats not true at all, but the interests of the editors do not cover everything. Also you need reference books for most stuff, online sources are not that great. eg loads of historical subjects are not covered at all well.

> loads of historical subjects are not covered at all well

That's been precisely my experience too. Even compared to traditional encyclopedias and broad reference material, Wikipedia does not fare well at all.

Read one good book on the Middle Ages and you'll find hundreds of significant facts that would be appropriate for Wikipedia, but simply aren't there.

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

#76

Post by wslh »

owenmarshall wrote: post #7

Interesting 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' o…

I think Wikipedia must evolve like old search engines evolved to using a pagerank.

Obviously I don't know how to solve this issue but at first editors must be evaluated by the audience and their scores accessible. All the other Wikipedia processes are bureaucratic .

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

#77

Post by swalling »

ilamont wrote: post #33

The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to st…

People want to create content, not fix other people's grammatical mistakes.

Hey, I'm the product manager for that work (also quoted in the article). I thought I might mention that we've A/B tested our task suggestion workflow extensively, and the answer is definitively that Wikipedians want to do both things. I can share links to all our research, which is public, if you want.

There are basically two kinds of people who sign up for Wikipedia: those with something to do in mind, and those who want a suggestion of where to start. The evidence we've gathered so far shows that many new contributors like being able to get started and learn the ropes doing something that's easy and not intimidating. They have a positive first experience editing, and then they typically move on to other tasks, having gained more confidence. We are giving people options, not requiring anyone to do N number of grammatical fixes in order to earn badges, privileges or anything of the sort.

I should also note that among more advanced editors, there is actually a popular Guild of Copyeditors that does highly-coordinated copyediting drives on Wikipedia. Not to mention all the peer review for quality that happens in other places. Never underestimate the interest of grammar nazis in fixing your comma usage. ;)

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

#78

Post by ISL »

owenmarshall wrote: post #57
rhizome wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation) You mean, "hey, I wrote it, you go look it up if you don't believe me?" Down that path lies madness. And Fox News. Academics aren't supposed to have "trade secrets" by definition, because that impedes the teacher and researcher's motivation. Historically, anyway, by my understanding.

I don't think that's what is meant by "go looking for the citation." I read it more as "by being an expert in this subject I know this is true; by being an expert in this subject I also probably don't have time to find the journal that has the article in question, cite it per Wikipedia's rules, and put it in the article." Frankly that sounds like a great task for editors that aren't subject experts. Maybe the expert…

Will wikipedia accept a citation like:

[1] Widely-known result, probably in Jackson's Electrodynamics

as enough of a citation to placate the reversion police?

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

#79

Post by Jtsummers »

0x006A wrote: post #4
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.

How would that address the issues of contributions and quality of articles? Would using git not reduce the group of potential contributors?

How about, instead of git, a git-like (or really, modern version control like) model, rather than the linear, non-branching model that makes "pending" changes and "suggested" changes impossible to accurately convey. While the underlying tech may be git, and that certainly makes it easy and largely natural to the tech crowd, it's also an open tool for others to build proper editors/apps on top of.

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

#80

Post by swalling »

Contero wrote: post #27

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 im…

Yes, this is an idea we definitely want to try at Wikimedia.

Right now, some of our most popular articles in English are perpetually semi-protected, meaning anonymous or brand new contributors can't edit. That means millions of pageviews are on articles that don't even have an edit button visible. :(

Some Wikipedias, like German, Polish, Russian and others already use a system called "Flagged Revisions", which is an obtuse name for software that instead of protecting a page, delays edits and makes them subject to approval from someone experienced. Unfortunately the workflow for this software is clunky and it doesn't seem to be helping German and other Wikipedias stay vibrant.

I'd really like to A/B test a very easy "suggest an edit" as an alternative. I think it could work, because Wikipedians are already pretty good at staying on top of the request queue, if you manage to make a request on the Talk page. One thing we'd need to be careful of is not garnering suggestions by cannibalizing the people who would otherwise have just edited.

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