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Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

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Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#31

Post by _delirium »

alialkhatib wrote: post #17
Animats wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic reason that Wikipedia editing is down is that most of the job is done. The goal was to produce a reasonably comprehensive encyclopedia. Mission accomplished. Most of the important articles were written years ago. Take a look at new articles being created. They are mostly about very minor subjects. This was typical of the paper encyclopedias. The initial creation of the Encyclopedia Brittanica was a huge job…

Most non-English versions of Wikipedia have dramatically less content than the English language version, and even the more common language versions like Spanish seem to be significantly less accurate. Make whatever claims you want about what role we should play in English hegemony (blah blah blah), but that's one feature Wikipedia affords where the job is far from done.

That's true, but also a different situation with different data: many of the non-English versions do not have a similar decline in edits. The total size of the English Wikipedia seems to be slowly plateauing, but many others still have approximately linear growth.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#32

Post by _delirium »

nma83 wrote: post #20

mediawiki-mode in emacs seems like a good solution, and emacs has proven to be a good enough IDE for other programming languages.

Interesting, I didn't know about mediawiki-mode. Something like that does sound like the right way to go for a certain class of "power users" who want an IDE: build on top of an existing IDE, with interaction to Wikipedia itself done via the MediaWiki API.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#33

Post by _delirium »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #7
tottenhm wrote: post #6

"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago." To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn't have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make…

As you say, dealing with the UI is fine. Dealing with the bureaucrats isn't. Having your account banned and your new article marked for spam by a very abrasive person, when trying to add legitimate content, rather than being supported through the maze of rules, as happened to a colleague the other day. That is a problem which stops meaningful content being added.

I think false positives on spam are a significant problem for Wikipedia, but false negatives are also a significant problem (maybe a bigger one), which is part of what makes it tough. If you hit "random article" a bunch of times, look for biographies on currently living people of relatively low levels of importance. I would estimate about 20% of those are clearly puff pieces, either written by a PR agency, a university/company publicity department, the person themselves, someone they know well, etc. It's not the end of the world since those articles also tend to be not that frequently read (articles on high-profile people are much harder for a PR agency to control the content of), but it does make me take Wikipedia somewhat less seriously when such a large proportion of random pages I land on are obviously written by a PR hack, using the kind of diction you expect to find in a press release or an official university bio, rather than language you would expect to find in a respectable encyclopedia.

While bios are the biggest area, there's a bunch of other areas where I've learned not to pay attention to Wikipedia because it's too spammy: anything to do with tourism (full of booster and hotel spam), any company except very high-profile ones, many non-profit organizations, etc. It's good when writing about people/things that no longer exist, though; the articles about 19th-century French companies don't read like they were written by a PR agency.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#34

Post by EdiX »

jamesfisher wrote: post #27
gwicke wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing beats being told that what you just did is in fact not feasible ;) Check out this page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid This is the bidirectional conversion engine between wikitext and HTML+RDFa that powers VisualEditor and several other tools. It tracks source range to DOM structure correspondence as proposed in the post. At this point, the IDE is basically a user interface and performance problem. Th…

Hello! OP here. I'm totally ignorant of Parsoid but I respectfully suggest that bidirectional lossless conversion is not possible in general. First, it relies on the function Wikitext->HTML being injective. But isn't it trivial to create two different Wikitexts that compile to the same HTML? Whitespace is just the start of this story. Second, apparently the template language is Turing-complete. Let's say I write a pr…

>Second, apparently the template language is Turing-complete. Let's say I write a prime sieve in order to generate a page that lists the first 100 prime numbers

You can't. Using recursion (even primitive) is discouraged, there are even automated safeguards that make it hard (but I don't remember what they are exactly).

But I agree with you in general, I think making a visual editor that deals with templates correctly is not an easy task.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#35

Post by Tomte »

alialkhatib wrote: post #11
tottenhm wrote: post #6

"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago." To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn't have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make…

I was also somewhat skeptical of the author's claim that the barrier to entry for Wikipedia editors was the editor itself. I've read a few papers concluding that Wikipedia contributions are declining because of the community pushing out people who don't understand the many rules that have been developed[1], or in other cases because editors have gotten into turf wars over articles they feel some sense of ownership ov…

> editors have gotten into turf wars over articles they feel some sense of ownership over

That's exactly what killed my one and only attempt to substantially improve an article (not just typo-fixing and stuff):

The two guys with a lot of edits on that page couldn't stand someone else editing "their" article.

Sure, they tried to bring up superficial disagreements about the content, but that could have been resolved trivially. It was very obvious that they didn't want someone else on their lawn.

Unless Wikipedia fixes exactly that ownership problem, specifically, I doubt they can improve their attraction and retention rate of contributors.

And that is a social problem. I bet it will never be fixed.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#36

Post by Aardwolf »

return0 wrote: post #26

"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago." Oh, the arbitrary causation!

Yeah, I also don't get it, a few years ago it was the same method of editing so why would they leave now?

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#37

Post by danmaz74 »

tottenhm wrote: post #6

"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago." To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn't have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make…

I also think that, as the wikipedia becomes more complete, it's natural that there are fewer edits.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#38

Post by bjelkeman-again »

ErrantX wrote: post #25
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you say, dealing with the UI is fine. Dealing with the bureaucrats isn't. Having your account banned and your new article marked for spam by a very abrasive person, when trying to add legitimate content, rather than being supported through the maze of rules, as happened to a colleague the other day. That is a problem which stops meaningful content being added.

Link? I can probably help :)

Thanks. I am sitting down with Wikimedia Sweden next week to take a serious look at how we can add some of our rather good content without tripping all the wrong triggers. If it doesn't work I'll ping you. No need to agonise over it until this doesn't work, but appreciate the offer.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#39

Post by dingaling »

Animats wrote: post #13
tottenhm wrote: post #6

"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago." To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn't have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make…

The basic reason that Wikipedia editing is down is that most of the job is done. The goal was to produce a reasonably comprehensive encyclopedia. Mission accomplished. Most of the important articles were written years ago. Take a look at new articles being created. They are mostly about very minor subjects. This was typical of the paper encyclopedias. The initial creation of the Encyclopedia Brittanica was a huge job…

> Mission accomplished. Most of the important articles were written years ago.

I would contend that should be leading to more edits. Few people have the depth of knowledge of expertise to contribute to 'US Foreign Policy' article, but masses can contribute to an article about their home town.

For example, the article on my town doesn't even explain its unusal name. At least half of its residents could make that particular edit... but have no incentive to do so.

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