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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

#11

Post by alialkhatib »

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 over[2]. Meanwhile, I haven't read anything concluding that the editing environment was a strong deterrent (although I haven't been looking, so I could be willfully blind).

Edit: more articles identifying interpersonal friction as the leading factor deterring would-be editors [3,4]. At this point I'm suspicious of the author's due diligence in studying the problem, making the proposed solution more dubious.

[1] Suh, Bongwon, et al. "The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia." Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. ACM, 2009.

[2] Thom-Santelli, Jennifer, Dan R. Cosley, and Geri Gay. "What's mine is mine: territoriality in collaborative authoring." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2009.

[3] Kittur, Aniket, and Robert E. Kraut. "Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination." Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 2008.

[4] Halfaker, Aaron, Aniket Kittur, and John Riedl. "Don't bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work." Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration. ACM, 2011.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#13

Post by Animats »

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. The periodic maintenance update was a far smaller one.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#16

Post by discreteevent »

So he goes from:

" Thing is, editors hated its bugginess so much that the roll-out was reverted shortly afterwards."

to:

" Their solution to this was a WYSIWYG editor, which failed for the basic reason that it denies the fact that Wikipedia is a program. "

Something tells me he might be making it up as he goes along! I wonder how successful Microsoft Word would have been with markdown editor.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#17

Post by alialkhatib »

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…

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.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#18

Post by hobofan »

nl wrote: post #8

Take a look at the Wikidata project - it's designed for editing structured data. Unfortunately I wouldn't say it is very easy to use - the Wikipedia editor is much easier. It's also completely unclear which parts of Wikidata data are used in Wikipedia, and where. That means the Wikidata data is usually much worse than the Wikipedia data, even if it theoretically easier for machines to use.

At the moment Wikidata isn't used/usable in Wikipedia at all, apart from coordinating the site links across languages.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the editor of Wikidata isn't easy to use, I think its interface is pretty straightforward.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#19

Post by [deleted] »

nl wrote: post #8

Take a look at the Wikidata project - it's designed for editing structured data. Unfortunately I wouldn't say it is very easy to use - the Wikipedia editor is much easier. It's also completely unclear which parts of Wikidata data are used in Wikipedia, and where. That means the Wikidata data is usually much worse than the Wikipedia data, even if it theoretically easier for machines to use.

[deleted]
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