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The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

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Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#41

Post by rhizome »

ISL wrote: post #36
brianpgordon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that your professor tried to write content from his own knowledge rather than strictly from published sources. The problem is that anyone can claim to be a math professor with expertise on graph theory. For this reason, everyone - even experts - need to cite sources in order to add content to Wikipedia.

Physicist here: I stopped making contributions to Wikipedia after a few edits and reversions, I stopped too. Furthermore, the danger that something I'd put a lot of time into could be replaced meant that it's not worth sinking a lot of time into it. The citation policy makes a ton of pragmatic sense, and I understand why it's there. It's an unfriendly way to meet the Wikipedia community. (an alternative way to addres…

(an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation)

You mean, "hey, I wrote it, you go look it up if you don't believe me?" Down that path lies madness. And Fox News.

Academics aren't supposed to have "trade secrets" by definition, because that impedes the teacher and researcher's motivation. Historically, anyway, by my understanding.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#42

Post by fluxon »

ISL wrote: post #36
brianpgordon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that your professor tried to write content from his own knowledge rather than strictly from published sources. The problem is that anyone can claim to be a math professor with expertise on graph theory. For this reason, everyone - even experts - need to cite sources in order to add content to Wikipedia.

Physicist here: I stopped making contributions to Wikipedia after a few edits and reversions, I stopped too. Furthermore, the danger that something I'd put a lot of time into could be replaced meant that it's not worth sinking a lot of time into it. The citation policy makes a ton of pragmatic sense, and I understand why it's there. It's an unfriendly way to meet the Wikipedia community. (an alternative way to addres…

Please come back and make suggestions on Talk pages, rather than directly edit. There, you can actively discuss, cite sources (your own and hopefully others), and make real contributions which will last. Experts have a special kind of conflict of interest: their possible bias when directly editing. Discussing will moderate and ameliorate that bias, before it gets into the article. This approach will help as science advances and understanding deepens and changes: recent advances in physics prove this. We need your help; just not in direct editing. Your contributions in Talk will be real and welcomed (and maybe disputed, but never deleted) by our more experienced, sane, editors. (typo corrected)

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#43

Post by DanBC »

hyperpape wrote: post #29
cldr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this the other day and I came to think that Wikipedia's rule about citations is this: Wikipedia does not want to be a source of information. It wants to be a collection/aggregation of other sources of information, and those other sources have to be accessible to others for all time (i.e. not a human being but a book written by a human being). What I mean to say is that Wikipedia's system is one t…

I agree that Wikipedia's goal is to be the collection of things that we know that we know. So we do need citations. But when an article is wrong and doesn't already have thorough citations for every claim, should we demand citations for every new contribution? My point is really about process: when someone comes to us with a bit of knowledge, but no citations and limited understanding of the Wikipedia process, how do…

> But when an article is wrong and doesn't already have thorough citations for every claim, should we demand citations for every new contribution?

Ideally, you'd go through the article. You'd remove anything that is "wrong"[1], and find citations for everything else. Then, when someone wants to add anything, you can find a cite for it, or ask them to find a cite for it, and remove it if there is no cite.

This demonstrates why WP can be horrible - anyone doing this to any article would soon find themselves skewered in horrible WP processes. Good cites are mocked as POV pushing, hopeless cites are forced in by people with more time than you.

> I come to Wikipedia, and dump a ton of graph theory on some page. An editor says "look, this isn't quite how it works, but it looks like you're trying to improve the page. Is this stuff you have citations for? Do you know what textbooks would cover it?

Sometimes that's how it works. There are people on WP who are great at helping that style of new editor; finding them mentors or whatnot to help them with the process. it's hit and miss, sometimes it fails badly.

> where they just get reverted by some guy spouting WP:STQ!

WP has made some effort to prevent the over active 14 year old using tools to auto-revert hundreds (thousands) of edits per day.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#45

Post by hyperpape »

rcthompson wrote: post #38

Whenever I hear warnings about the pace of change slowing down on Wikipedia, I have to wonder to what extent this is explained simply by (parts of) Wikipedia being "finished", in the sense that it is now only updating to keep up with current events as they happen, and not working on filling in gaps on subjects that are relatively static. For example, the articles on most well-known laws of physics are effectively "do…

I don't know how it differs by field, but in the field I know best (philosophy), it's pretty hit or miss. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism. That's a pretty fundamental topic, and it has cleanup tags that are four years old.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#46

Post by Jtsummers »

justincormack wrote: post #37
smoyer wrote: post #17

Well ... there was always a limited amount of information in printed encyclopedia's, and since printing included incremental costs, the editors were careful to make sure each article had enough value to be included. Is it possible that all the important articles have been written and are, at this point, well vetted? Perhaps there aren't enough topics left for all the people that would be writing articles? Or perhaps…

Thats not true at all, but the interests of the editors do not cover everything. Also you need reference books for most stuff, online sources are not that great. eg loads of historical subjects are not covered at all well.

Another issue with online sources is the impermanence of URLs. Unlike the original concept, things change over time. Domain names are bought and sold or allowed to expire, site maintainers stop (other work or health), maintainers change and decide on a new schema. Even if there were a valid URL for every citation today (that is, every book, magazine, newspaper, etc was made available online), in a year half of them could be 404'd or simply contain different content.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#47

Post by DanBC »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #3

Is it me, or could we use a new wikipedia-- maybe even use git to push changes, and track changes a gitopedia if you will.

If I had the money I'd fork WP. I'd take the 100,000 most important articles and get those vetted, corrected, written nicely, with better (and more consistent) open source graphics, and with multiple good quality cites.

It'd go on the line, and people would be able to suggest edits and that page would ask them to provide a citation.

This version would be suitable for children to use.

The ledes would be re-written to give an ELI5 intro to the topic for people with little to no knowledge of it.

There'd be torrent downloads of it, so people could run it locally offline.

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#48

Post by fluxon »

hyperpape wrote: post #30
fluxon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that many articles lack sufficient reliable sources. Only college or postgrad textbooks are considered reliable sources, but not great ones, unless written by noted and/or frequently cited authors. In my opinion, experts should be sincerely welcomed to kibbitz on talk pages - not directly in editing articles - with a strong invitation to cite sources other than themselves. This approach, optimistically, will…

Yeah, but the talk pages are basically just sewers for a lot of articles. I look at a talk page and my thought is "god, no one will ever read what I write here".

It takes a cool head to continue sometimes when discussions head toward the sewer. But we strive to stay exactly so cool, and lots of us even take a bit of guidance from Paul Graham's "How to Disagree" http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html and the pyramid diagram based on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Di...

Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It

#50

Post by bane »

owenmarshall wrote: post #7

Interesting read, and it reminds me of a really annoying experience I once had with one of the StackExchange sites. There was a question about Emacs, and the answer was a chunk of elisp that was wrong - one of the closing parens was in the wrong place, so it caused an error. OK, easy fix! But I don't have enough karma to edit answers on StackExchange and have them submit cleanly, so I submitted an 'edit suggestion' o…

It's said that the best way to be a primary source for wikipedia is to write a webpage that posits the change you want to make to a WP article, then cite that page when you make the change.
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