The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia

>So much pettiness for nothing.

well as the saying goes, 'the fights are so fierce because the stakes are so low', or slightly more technically 'In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake'. Wikipedia is like a breeding ground for Girardian terror with people who tend to be very homogenous all competing for very similar things which often are only relevant because someone else wants to exercise control over them. Only place worse might be reddit moderation.

From the abstract:

> a major concern for not only the future of this platform but also for several industry-scale information retrieval systems such as Siri, Alexa which depend on Wikipedia as knowledge store.

That doesn't imply that the paper is advocating for it, but given that Apple and Amazon now have built products on top Wikipedia, their bottom line depends on it. It's entirely reasonable to wonder if they would prefer to have more influence and control over it. Whether or not it was ever a good idea for Alexa and Siri to have a dependency on Wikipedia is a moot point. They do now, and it wouldn't surprise me to see them wanting to take an active part in keeping Wikipedia fresh.

Of course, because their revenue depends on it, they probably would want more control. In the same way the Amazon is working to exercise more control over the Rust language, Apple or Amazon could decide that taking over Wikipedia is the right move to protect profits.

As a long time, low volume contributor, I see 2 explanations for what happens:

1. There is not a lot to contribute as a lot of matters are already covered. This is not a bad thing at all.

2. Moderators do a very bad job. Last year I created an entire article about a popular vehicle, it took 6 months to be published and it was just about a page long with solid references. At one time it was rejected because it had "not enough external links", so I added half a dozen links to the dealers selling that vehicle, on top of the original manufacturer page. This discourages contributors and it is a serios problem.

Part of the problem is that philosophically, Wikipedia wants to pretend that contributors are "thin" interfaces for pure knowledge. That there is a well-defined set of "reliable sources" and all contributors have to do is summarize and create hyperlinks to them.

Not surprising given the ~Objectivist philosophies of its creators.

Not to defend Wikipedia at all (and they certainly should not get your money), but, the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it. That also means that the publications are under your control and yours alone and nobody can come in and delete them.

It's pretty great that Wikipedia is a centralized source of information, but I do sort of lament the decline of personal web sites on GeoCities or university web hosts or whatever.