Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

daggle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 353 posts

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#251

Post by wpietri »

ErrantX wrote: post #234
kstenerud wrote: post #70

What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI. Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make. All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snow…

Part of the problem here is getting developer time onto fixing up such an issue. a) I don't think the Foundation employs a UI expert and b) the community actually requesting serious feature enhancements has a history of taking. absolutely. forever. :) (although; I agree, improvements to certain processes would be very handy)

Wikipedia does employ UI experts. You can see them here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors

I have met some of them; they are smart and competent.

People's expectations about Wikipedia's development speed are all out of whack. The main problem is that Wikipedia is run on a shoestring compared with any other top site. A major contributing problem is that for much of Wikipedia's history it was run by a handful of people, all of them struggling mightily just to keep up with traffic growth. That means a lot of work has to go into paying down technical debt.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#252

Post by ErrantX »

wpietri wrote: post #251
ErrantX wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem here is getting developer time onto fixing up such an issue. a) I don't think the Foundation employs a UI expert and b) the community actually requesting serious feature enhancements has a history of taking. absolutely. forever. :) (although; I agree, improvements to certain processes would be very handy)

Wikipedia does employ UI experts. You can see them here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors I have met some of them; they are smart and competent. People's expectations about Wikipedia's development speed are all out of whack. The main problem is that Wikipedia is run on a shoestring compared with any other top site. A major contributing problem is that for much of Wikipedia's history it was ru…

Fair enough; I should do better research :)

My comment about taking forever was not really to do with the lack of developer time (which, as a developer myself I totally understand!) but more about the difficulty of meshing two communities of people.

In much the same way that an outsider struggles to understand the Wikipedia system, many Wikipedians have difficulty understanding how development works, and how to interact with developers.

This disconnect means that requests for even simple things can take a while :)

I can highlight this disconnect; the idea given in the GP is smart and sensible and would help make the deletion review process a lot easier for newbies. This would certainly help with editor retention as well as being widely useful.

On the other hand, one dev recently wrote and deployed "WikiLove", which is a script for helping people give each other "Barnstar" awards.

Ok, so perhaps the GP's idea did not come up in discussions of "what should we improve next". But if the WP community proposed something like this it would probably sit gathering dust whilst the next WikiLove would appear on our screens.... :)

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#253

Post by zbowling »

dendory wrote: post #245
tptacek wrote: post #51

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_d…

I've contributed a lot to wikipedia and would say there definitively an elistic attitude among the admins. That page was lucky to even go through a full deletion process, most just get SpeedyDeleted, which is as simple as putting a tag, and as soon as an admin sees it, they delete it, which could be minutes later. I've seen pages deleted this way about major topics, while similar, much lesser topic pages remain. Like…

I'm vandal pratroller myself. Speedy deletions have an extremely strict criteria. Only very clear violations of policy are allowed to be speedy deleted like vandalism or recreating a page that was already AfD'd.

Notability is naturally one of those that is hard to do hastily. In a rew rare cases it's obvious, like if some trying create a page about their dog or local lawn care business, per SNOW (not a snowballs chance in hell) the page can get speedy deleted.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#254

Post by wpietri »

sabat wrote: post #173
gwillen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because 1) There is a policy against Americanizing British spellings for no reason (this is probably a good thing); 2) frequently experienced editors are much too harsh with new contributors and don't explain why (this is definitely a bad thing).

... which is completely ridiculous, for two reasons. One, Wikipedia is based in America, and so naturally its English should be consistently American. Two, modern English as spoken and written in England has grammar problems -- e.g., the insistence on using plurals for singular objects, such as corporations ("Shell Oil have announced ..."). Therefore, American English is obviously preferable.

The thing that really kills me about your comment is that you seem to think that your off-the-top-of-your-head points are somehow novel, as if no Wikipedian has ever mentioned them before.

And that's exactly the mistake Sullivan makes, too. You're both wrong, of course: discussions on these topics go back years, with hundreds or thousands of smart participants.

But at least you haven't done like Sullivan and a million others by following up your naiveté with outrage that you aren't being respected for your genius, insight, and expertise.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#255

Post by moomin »

tptacek wrote: post #51

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_d…

I think you're horribly missing the point here. No-one doubts that many, many people who are heavily active in Wikipedia are doing their best to follow the rules. The objections is that the culture is such that the intersection of subject matter expert and reviewer is nigh on the null set. Moreover, the rules do seem to produce perverse results sufficiently often that perhaps someone ought to re-examine the processes. Unfortunately, the very people able to do so are the very people who think there isn't a problem.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#256

Post by Tichy »

tptacek wrote: post #51

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_d…

Thinking about it, this might be one of the most effective SEO campaigns for her name ever. Now she has become notable for being deleted from Wikipedia.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#257

Post by wpietri »

mmahemoff wrote: post #44

Slight tangent, but I can't understand why MediaWiki/Wikipedia is so resistant to a standard commenting/discussion system. Discussion pages are still just flat text anyone can edit. I get the "simple is better" approach, but by now, there should be enough conventions, and there's certainly enough complexity, to warrant at least a basic structured forum.

Anybody who's a serious Wikipedia editor can happily work the discussion pages. So a standard discussion system wouldn't benefit them at all. Novices who are smart and willing to put in a little time are also fine with it for basic use.

So a standard discussion system really only benefits people who aren't smart or who aren't willing to put in a little time. But in making it easier for clueless noobs to express their opinions, will that help Wikipedia? Or will it hurt it by soaking up the time of people who do know what they're doing?

As an example, consider Danny Sullivan's experience. If it had been easier for him to kick off a deletion review, he would have done it. But that would have been a waste of time, as he didn't have anything to say that would have changed the outcome. And that's true because he wasn't willing to take any time to understand what was going on.

Or as another example, consider YouTube comments. How does it help Wikipedia to make it easier to let those people comment?

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#258

Post by paufernandez »

_delirium wrote: post #190
knowtheory wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two rules you've outline are the primary reason i contribute very little to wikipedia. I can put together a well-sourced piece outlining the importance of a variety of subjects which i am indirectly involved in, and give a dispassionate description of its relevance to the community it serves and the world at large. Wikipedians, instead of saying "do that and have neutral 3rd parties check over your work", instead…

Even though there are cases where it works, I think those two rules are good heuristics that are fairly predictive of article quality/bias. Most articles written by academics and businessmen on themselves, their own research projects, or their companies are just not good articles. On the other hand, articles written by someone on an area they know about but not directly their work tend to be much better. Part of it i…

Thanks for this comment... many thanks.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#260

Post by dhx »

xyzzyz wrote: post #217
nowarninglabel wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your attitude speaks to exactly what is wrong with Wikipedia. You seem to think it should be difficult to participate, such that only the elite who have busted their chops should be able to do so. If you wish to end up with a dead community (which is exactly what is happening, the number contributors is stabilizing not growing), then fine, but if you wish to actually expand the wealth of human knowledge available the…

The difference with Drupal is that there are very clearly defined rules for how to participate, clear instructions for how to do so, and new contributors are helped along in the process to get their code right, rather than being told their contribution is worthless, which is the attitude I get anytime I try to contribute something on Wikipedia. But there are also clearly defined rules for how to participate in Wikipe…

A poor article ("stub") that needs a complete rewrite can be better than no article. The reason is that a poor article encourages a rewrite. An article that doesn't exist will probably remain non-existent.
Post reply on HN