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Plenty of articles I come across have "drive by additions" of some length that are unreadable, repetitive and disturbingly worded. There are contributors whose sole purpose is to go round and copyedit that content, which they may do in a number of edits... but change (by comparison) very few words. It can still take hours of effort.
A Wiki article is the sum of all those edits.
As a moderator of a wiki-project, I can confirm Aaron Swartz's results. After we had gained enough popularity, most of the articles were written by outsiders and core community was there only to maintain -- categorize, wikify, create interlinks here and there, delete garbage and, last but not least, have flamewars in the discussion pages.
It's only logical- the people best suited to write articles are people who are well-versed in the subject, and the core community can't possibly contain experts on every subject.
For most topics it is possible to do so without expert knowledge. Of course; some areas have always needed experts to write. I'd never touch a medical article, or macro-biology, for example as it is all double dutch to me :) But, say, history is often easy to write if you have the source material.
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They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases". Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal. Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git re…
how would they distribute the thing, if not through the dumps? I mean, using an scm to distribute it (I asked the freebase guys the same thing) would save time/bandwidth but it's not a conceptual improvement. Also, how would forking be useful in any way? It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right? Could you explain the advantages ?
What I mean is that Wikipedia could learn from GitHub how a lot of forks plus easy pull requests can exponentially increase participation and generation of new content while still being able to retain quality.
It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right?
Why not? You could extend an article or contribute some new articles for a topic, publish the content yourself, and try to get it into the main project. Then on the main site there could be a list of forks, and even a network graph exactly like on GitHub.
The article's dismissal of an editor by complaining that "[his] edits were all deleting things and moving things around" is a perfect illustration of why "bytes added" is just as bad a contribution metric as "edit count". We're not in 2001 anymore. The Internet is not short of bytes about Alan Alda or Anacondas, and nor is Wikipedia short of people who add bytes about them. Newly-added bytes may be true or false. The…
Correct. But not just long-tail topics, but any topic that can only be properly treated by deep immersion in the subject, and especially any topic that is controversial. A lot of point-of-view pushers on Wikipedia do a lot of their POV-pushing by "framing," just making sure that some wikilinks to articles they like persist, while others are deleted, or that navigation templates or article categories play up the articles that best represent their point of view. And that's before we even get to the issue of deleting reliable sources.
Felipe Ortega wrote a Ph.D. thesis devoted to this topic. "Wikipedia: A Quantiative Analysis", available at http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/phd-thesis His conclusions were featured on a Washington Post article, "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages", discussed here http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10403467-93.html and here http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-...
http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/new-editors-are-joining-e... (addendum: http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/why-i-changed-the-title-o...)
Out of curiosity, how many HNers write on Wikipedia? I do it every so once in awhile, but only only on a few topics I'm intimately familiar with, or to fix obvious vandalism.
About two years ago I went through about a six month period where I spent pretty much every day in a revert war with various people who definitely didn't know anything about the field/area I was trying to provide some information on.
I happen to have a fair amount of expertise and experience in a certain area (Music Trackers) and at the time thought I would lend a hand to flesh out the still woefully inadequate content to that part of Wikipedia and started or fleshed out dozens of pages of content. I probably spent north of 100 hours on content creation even going so far as to setup emulated environments in other OSs so I could get screen captures of some of the software. I spent dozens more cleaning up missing or outright incorrect information.
Every time I did something, the change was reverted. To this day, not a single edit I did ever stayed on Wikipedia longer than a week. Eventually, tired of endless arguing with editors who just wholesale reverted entire sections of material rather than edit or augment what I put in there, I just gave up.
Particularly egregious were the endless arguments over notoriety of this or that. Responses to the editors demonstrating conformance to Wikipedia's notoriety guidelines were met with silence and further reverts. One in particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sega, actually has a page now anyways -- but it's not mine. Fascinatingly, I think that two of the editors causing most of the problems didn't even know what the demoscene was! In a bizarre argument from one of the editors, I was called unqualified to write about the demoscene since I myself was a 'scener!
I think I'd still be contributing if the editors had...I don't know..."edited", instead of reverted. I would have happily participated in ensuring things like objectivity and article organization were well followed, but wholesale deleting information? Nah, I'm done with participating in Wikipedia as a contributor.
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That is rather disturbing. Well, as PG says, there's still room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.
I don't find it disturbing. I think it's very much in Wales' character; starting out in soft porn, co-founding Wikipedia, and then passing himself off as founder, rather than co-founder. Every time I see his face at the top of a Wikipedia page, it sickens me, and similarly every time I see him described as "founder". Thus, the Wikipedia banner sickens me twice. AdBlockPlus element hiding rule: wikipedia.org###siteNot…
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I started doing so, until I realized the only way you could really contribute an article was to enlist for a lifetime of janitorial duty. Otherwise, whatever work you did quickly degenerates into run-on sentences and trivia. The article's point resonated with me, because it seems that the whole process is based on the assumption that you're a no-lifer who spends all day patrolling Wikipedia. They advertised themselve…
They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases". Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal. Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git re…
(It's interesting to think about, but Wikipedia could never conceptualize distributed branching when they are currently doing the equivalent of developing right on the production server.)
This idea has been discussed many times over the years, but never adopted for whatever reason. My suspicion is the active Wikipedians have this system of scoring Wikipoints for quickly reverting vandalism and bad edits, and don't want a system which encourages actual editing.
The article's dismissal of an editor by complaining that "[his] edits were all deleting things and moving things around" is a perfect illustration of why "bytes added" is just as bad a contribution metric as "edit count". We're not in 2001 anymore. The Internet is not short of bytes about Alan Alda or Anacondas, and nor is Wikipedia short of people who add bytes about them. Newly-added bytes may be true or false. The…