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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

#121

Post by nitrogen »

aaronem wrote: post #86
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…

Sorry to hear you had that trouble on Stack Overflow -- I assume it was SO, anyway; most of the Emacs questions tend to live there. I doubt you care at this point, but for others who might, it's generally a better alternative for a new user to comment with the correction, than to try to edit; comments are globally visible no matter who makes them, and a comment pointing out an error like that one is very likely to re…

Comments are only available at 50 reputation points (or some number requiring a large number of previous reputation building actions), which a new user wouldn't have.

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

#122

Post by nitrogen »

bane wrote: post #50
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…

It's said that the best way to be a primary source for wikipedia is to write a webpage that posits the change you want to make to a WP article, then cite that page when you make the change.

I thought Wikipedia wanted secondary sources (i.e. newspapers, journals, textbooks, biographies) that have reported on primary sources (individual papers, original research).

I also thought it was frowned upon to cite your own research.

Have these positions changed?

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

#123

Post by nitrogen »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #106
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…

This is by far wikipedia's biggest weakness. The people with the power at too disconnect from what matters. Even worse, they have a false sense of their own importance. And wikipedia's reference guidelines are silly at best. Wikipedia wasn't designed to scale to what it is now, and a lot of the erroneous assumptions baked into the design are causing growth of the site to become more and more unsustainable.

I think you could insert any large system (Facebook, bigcorps, governments, etc.) in the place of Wikipedia in your comment and it would be accurate. What can be done about it?

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

#124

Post by ddebernardy »

nullc wrote: post #119
ddebernardy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your mindset is precisely why Wikipedia has been turning new editors off for years now. Congrats! You've summarized and illustrated the entire article in three short paragraphs.

I'm not sure what you'd have him say. McDonalds is surely turning aways scads of customers by not providing their food for free. Certainly there are many things Wikipedia could do to be more welcoming. But not permitting editing by others and/or paying people to edit are not within the Wikipedia model any more than McDonalds giving away all their food would be. There is nothing wrong with being polite but firm about…

In my view, a large part of the problem is that many of the rules or the way they're enforced borders on the idiotic.

Take [citation needed] as a case in point. It's aggressively and mindlessly waved all over the place, irrespective of pre-existing content in wikipedia itself and obvious factual information.

Say you contribute one or two sentence summary of related pages -- complete with links. Or worse, a sentence or two that expands on an existing statement by merely highlighting the obvious assumptions or implications. Such edits have good odds of being greeted with the dreadful [citation needed] or reversed outright by some random rules zealot.

Adding insult to injury, the latter seem perfectly content with sources such as The Onion and slimy news sites. The thing that really matters is that it must be written somewhere else. It's then up to random editors to decide whether that somewhere else is credible or not.

Admittedly, would-be editors can jump back in to defend their edit, appeal, etc. and even expand on it with the requested citation. But this seldom occurs, because it leaves such a sour taste in their mouth that they grunt in bemusement, scoff the whole thing as hogwash, and move on with their life.

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

#125

Post by quanticle »

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…

And they're both oh so successful, right?

Sure, Wikipedia isn't perfect. But I would question any method of evaluation that ends up preferring Citizendium to it.

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

#126

Post by quanticle »

aaronem wrote: post #84
Aldo_MX wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up StackExchange since day 1, I found no difference between being registered or not, any useful action is blocked because I'm a new user, and I would rather stay away than spend time figuring out my way through a hostile site like that.

If you care, or for others who haven't yet approached Stack Exchange sites [1] in the wrong way and found themselves put off as a result, the way to start building reputation is by answering questions , not just accurately but as extensively and generally as you can manage, with bonus points for considering edge and corner cases. Play to your strengths in terms of domain knowledge, especially in relatively obscure do…

The problem with StackExchange is that it's turned into the Eve Online of technology forums. It's fun for the few people who managed to get in early or got lucky and asked a question or posted an answer with lots of upvotes. And, simultaneously, it has a forbidding learning curve for everyone else.

I was involved in StackOverflow when it was still fairly young (before the whole StackExchange concept had taken off). I asked questions, I answered questions, I got up to ~1k points and then I stopped going for a while. When I returned, I felt distinctly unwelcome. The social mores had shifted to such a degree, I felt like I was coming in as a new user rather than one with some experience at the site. The experience was very off-putting, and I consider a large part of the reason why I haven't made any contributions to StackOverflow in a long while.

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

#127

Post by quanticle »

DanBC wrote: post #47
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.

If I had the money I'd fork WP. I'd take the 100,000 most important articles and get those vetted, corrected, written nicely, with better (and more consistent) open source graphics, and with multiple good quality cites. It'd go on the line, and people would be able to suggest edits and that page would ask them to provide a citation. This version would be suitable for children to use. The ledes would be re-written to…

The problem is that Wikipedia's selection process for Featured Articles and Good Articles doesn't take into account the importance of the article. So you have lots of excellently written, thoroughly researched articles... about South Park seasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_(season_13)

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

#128

Post by notahacker »

DanBC wrote: post #47
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.

If I had the money I'd fork WP. I'd take the 100,000 most important articles and get those vetted, corrected, written nicely, with better (and more consistent) open source graphics, and with multiple good quality cites. It'd go on the line, and people would be able to suggest edits and that page would ask them to provide a citation. This version would be suitable for children to use. The ledes would be re-written to…

If it's money, rather than time, that's the problem I bet you'd find support for such a project on Kickstarter...

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

#129

Post by Paul_S »

I think it's pretty clear why this is. I used to contribute a lot and then my content was repeatedly cut because of streamlining and simplification or the whole page got scrapped because it's not notable. When I read a wikipedia article I often check the history to see if there wasn't a time when the page was actually more complete before the article has been streamlined to the lowest common denominator.

Fuck that.

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

#130

Post by sesqu »

mjn wrote: post #100
kstenerud wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you have a problem with experts disagreeing about facts, arguing over them, reaching a consensus, and then other "experts" starting up the argument again - it really sounds like you're doing a poor job of communicating the researched consensus in the relevant article.

When that sort of stuff happens, I think you should make sure the incorrect information is referenced in the article as a misconception, or just have the correct information associated with citations. False information should only be erased if it is not "in the wild", so to speak.

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