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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

#91

Post by gscott »

fluxon wrote: post #40
muaddirac wrote: post #26

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…

Thank you for the effort. Good edit summaries are really helpful to other editors - that fact is not well explained as you're trying to save an edit. It's a frequently thankless job. Now (thanks to concerted effort by the Wikilove project) thanking an editor for a specific edit is now easy and tidy with a single click of "thank" in the edit history. They're notified by an upcount in their red notification box - no me…

I edited a Wikipedia page yesterday, gave a very strong reason in the edit comment. 20 hours later my edit is still there... The system isn't totally broken just many people watching the new edits for spam and other things and they might get a bit overzealous sometimes.

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

#92

Post by mjn »

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…

If you do remember a journal article, it's perfectly fine to put in an incomplete citation with a note, and someone will fix it up. Einstein's paper on foo (FIXME: fill out this citation) or something is typically sufficient for someone to track it down. It's not sufficient to just say that you know it's true, though, for good reason; a lot of "common knowledge", even among scientists, is incorrectly or imprecisely remembered. Typically we are most reliable in our specific sub-specialty, where we actually will have no trouble coming up with sources off the top of our heads (in my very specific sub-sub-specialty, I could rattle off sources for almost anything without even needing to look them up). Outside our sub-specialty, we may remember some things but not 100% reliably, and often based on obsolete or incomplete knowledge (e.g. a course from university years ago) that someone familiar with the literature would be able to do a better job of covering. Hence the importance of referring directly to sources, not only to cite them, but to make sure the information is actually in those sources precisely as remembered. To me, "I know X is true, but I don't know where you can verify that" is a bit of a red flag, typical of e.g. something someone vaguely remembers from med-school or undergrad, rather than something they really have a solid handle on.

In any case, as an academic myself, I find it weird that we, of all people, would find ourselves "too busy to reference" or something. That's an attitude one finds among students asked to write papers, but academics do not have problems peppering supporting references all over the place; it's basically second nature. Some academics even get in arguments with book publishers because the publisher always want to remove the "clutter" of too many citations and footnotes that intimidate the general reader...

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

#93

Post by chris_mahan »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #74
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, a…

I earned a barnstar in 2004, and was an admin from around 2003 to 2011. Heck I even ran for a board election (got 30+ votes too!)

I agree with everything you said.

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

#94

Post by csense »

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…

Congratulations. You've re-invented the pull request.

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

#96

Post by cgore »

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…

For my own references, I have a git repo in my home directory, ~/references/, which has everything I consider important stored as PDFs that I "printed" via Firefox. It is the only way to make sure it is still around.

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

#97

Post by vacri »

There seems to be a formula to hatchet-job articles about Wikipedia these days. Point to pokemon and porn stars instead of the history and science, say it's not quality (despite beating Britannica for accuracy), say there's a dearth of new articles (despite the natural slow-down due to low-hanging fruit being exhausted), and suggest that having to back up the things you say is stifling bureaucracy, and that the community should just somehow psychically know who is an expert and who isn't.

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

#98

Post by kstenerud »

mjn wrote: post #83
barrkel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I'd rather not have the Talk page or the "editors", and a lot more actual data input. The barrier for entry to writing articles has to be way, way lower than it is; it shouldn't require a negotiation with a bunch of self-important petty bureaucrats. What those self-important guys (they're mostly guys) miss is that the best is the enemy of the good. Their misguided approach to quality actively prevents improv…

New contributions to established articles should often be discussed on the talk page because of (a) though, and the fact that people sometimes just come in and start making major changes without looking at the work that's already been done is one thing that actively drives experts away. After a few history experts discuss the conflicting sources and an article reaches a semi-stable state after considerable discussion…

In that case, would it not make sense to have metadata associated with a particular section, detailing the final consensus and how it was reached? Kind of like a comment describing a non-obvious section of code. Otherwise you have the equivalent of telling someone "Before you modify this code, look through the entire git history to see why it's the way it is today".

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

#99

Post by tokenadult »

It was calming to read the thoughtful comments here after reading the interesting article submitted to open this thread. And I need some calming today, because I spent a lot of what was meant to be my "free" time yesterday evening in a rollicking dispute on my Wikipedia user talk page about one tiny edit I did the day before. Indeed, the experience of being a Wikipedia editor is usually not even fun, not to mention not rewarding.

The submitted article notes that "in July 2012, some editors started a page called WikiProject Editor Retention with the idea of creating a place to brainstorm ideas about helping newcomers and fostering a friendlier atmosphere. Today the most vibrant parts of that project’s discussion page have gripes about 'bullying done by administrators,' debates over whether 'Wikipedia has become a bloody madhouse,' and disputes featuring accusations such as 'You registered an account today just to have a go at me?'" Yep, I visited that WikiProject Editor Retention a while ago to see if I could pick up some tips there on how to encourage conscientious editors to stay involved in Wikipedia, but all I found was that kind of dispute and back-biting.

It happens that my main area of professional research is connected to topics that are among the ten most edit-warred topics on Wikipedia.[1] So from the beginning of my involvement on Wikipedia in 2010, I've seen lots of reverts and lots of article talk pages that go on and on and on and on to waste time about petty disputes. Because I used to a professional periodical editor, and later an academic journal editorial assistant when pursuing my postgraduate degree, I have a sense of what a collaborative editing looks like, and I try to suggest to Wikipedians[2] how we can all collaboratively built an even better free, online encyclopedia.

It's slow and pains-taking work to edit articles on controversial topics. I have found it helpful to compile source lists,[3] because Wikipedia always needs new sources, and then post links to the appropriate source lists to the talk pages of articles. Sometimes I see sources taken up by other editors months after I post such a link, gradually improving the quality of some articles. And of course I continually add new sources to my source lists whenever I learn about them from seeing them used in Wikipedia. I go to my alma mater's academic library frequently to circulate reference books about the topics I research (mostly for work, but also for Wikipedia), and I devote a lot of time to verifying sources. About two hours of "free" time today were devoted to transcription typing of quotations from reference books into Wikipedia-format citations, which I hope to use in the next few months to update articles.

To answer some questions that came up in comments posted before this comment, Wikipedia does have a too-radical culture of not taking experts seriously, but indeed that is partly because it is hard to verify who is an expert. Wikipedia got badly burned once by a young guy who claimed to be an older guy with academic credentials and actual expertise on certain topics, and that phony not only pushed around a lot of other editors while editing articles, but even got a job at the Wikimedia Foundation without his background being checked out beforehand.[4] So now Wikipedia is once burned, twice shy about anyone who claims to be an expert. Come with sources, and everyone will join in the scrum of deciding whether or not you are an expert.

One person in this discussion thread claims to be an expert (and I believe him) and he wonders how much of a detailed reference he has to give for a widely known fact. There are a BUNCH of the 4,359,600 articles now on English Wikipedia that cite no sources, or at best only cite the name of a book or article without any page reference. So if you are really sure that a standard reference book in your field backs up a fact you've just inserted in the article, you can add a reference like Smith Handbook of Physics and let other editors sort out what edition of the handbook, and what page of the handbook, backs you up. I see that iterative process of improving references happen all the time, sometimes over years.

We have frequent discussions of the defects of Wikipedia here on Hacker News. I still wonder if there is space for a new effort to build a nonprofit, free, online encyclopedia for the whole world. Is the current Wikipedia just the AltaVista that will be replaced by a yet unknown Google? I think a more healthy and professional editing environment could still let another effort to build an online encyclopedia take off and surpass Wikipedia, if only it had enough seed funding.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23354613

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Editing

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji#Source_L...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.htm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy

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

#100

Post by mjn »

kstenerud wrote: post #98
mjn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New contributions to established articles should often be discussed on the talk page because of (a) though, and the fact that people sometimes just come in and start making major changes without looking at the work that's already been done is one thing that actively drives experts away. After a few history experts discuss the conflicting sources and an article reaches a semi-stable state after considerable discussion…

In that case, would it not make sense to have metadata associated with a particular section, detailing the final consensus and how it was reached? Kind of like a comment describing a non-obvious section of code. Otherwise you have the equivalent of telling someone "Before you modify this code, look through the entire git history to see why it's the way it is today".

Yeah, there have been some discussions of that, but nobody has put together a MediaWiki plugin to do it afaik. Better annotation of regions in general is a longstanding wishlist, so discussions or even citations (or requests for citations) could be attached to a region of text. But then there are problems like how to handle annotations and arbitrary editing/splitting/moving of regions.

As a low-tech solution, you can actually put HTML comments in the source code, which people occasionally do, but it doesn't seem to be a very well-known option. kind of things sometimes appear in the source. I haven't seen them used for longer discussions, though, just one-line "hey, watch out before you do X" things.

On contentious articles with a long history of debate people will sometimes write a summary on the talk page, so you don't have to read through the whole history of the discussion. On most articles, though, the talk page isn't huge, so I find it easy to glance at before making changes.

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