The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by fusiongyro » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:44 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #33

The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to st…

Unfortunately, bureaucracy is the only way we know to synthesize a kind of homogeneous, approximately unbiased store of knowledge like Wikipedia wants to present. Stack Overflow's gamification seems to work well--or at least better compared to Wikipedia's--so it makes sense they would try it. I bet few people can write in an unbiased way about topics they're passionate about and have achieved a great depth of knowledge in. Are you going to get a higher quality encyclopedia by taking raw, highly biased, unsourced, "bad" content and coaxing it into shape through a very contributor-affirming hand-holding process, or by simply turning away the "bad" content and the people who created it? I don't think anybody knows which method works better, but it's clear that Wikipedia's method falls into the second camp and its shortcomings are only becoming more obvious as time goes on.

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

#52

Post by nerfhammer » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:45 PM UTC

fluxon wrote: post #31

mathattack wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the challenge is how do you identify experts? Does a Professor have to earn it over time? Are some professorships worth more than others?

The set of experts I'd like to invite to Talk page discussions would be published, widely cited authors, including professors, engineers, scientists, and non-degreed practitioners with a good reputation in their field. Publications can be academic, professional, and/or popular, IMHO. Peer review, of course, helps. Longevity helps. Professors who have published, and been cited, would certainly become seen to be establ…

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page

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

#53

Post by bane » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:49 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #45

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.

It doesn't help that when you try and fix obviously broken stuff, or even provide desperately needed citations, the majority of the time you'll get insta-reverted and flagged as a vandal.

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

#54

Post by fragsworth » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:50 PM UTC

I'm not worried - if this becomes a problem, it's easy enough for them to promote editing just like they promote donations.

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

#55

Post by mike_esspe » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:51 PM UTC

vlasev wrote: post #34

Look at the Wikipedia article on the Russian Armed Forces[1]. Look at the budget of 907 billion dollars (44% GDP) for 2013. That's ridiculous isn't it? I tried changing it to the proper 90.7 billion (4.4% of GDP) but it reverted back. I tried again and same thing happened. I rest my case. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces

It seems to be some evil bot or human, coming from different IPv6 addresses and changing the magnitude order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Polish_Armed_Forc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Armed_For...

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

#56

Post by bane » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:51 PM UTC

Contero wrote: post #27

What I think wikipedia needs more than anything is a new way to propose an edit without actually committing it, and to be able to solicit feedback or have others fix it for you before having it finally approved and submitted. It needs to be something where an inexperienced editor can make a good edit proposal without having to be completely versed in wikipedia's editing policies. Talk pages are a horrendous way to im…

This is a fabulous idea. More experienced WPedians could then offer advice as to what would make the change acceptable (must be cited to an actual policy) and the person doing the edit could keep working until they fulfilled the requirements, automatically completing a valid edit. There would be no possibility for immediate revert and any edit made this way would have to persist for some time.

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

#57

Post by owenmarshall » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:52 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #41

ISL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's what is meant by "go looking for the citation."

I read it more as "by being an expert in this subject I know this is true; by being an expert in this subject I also probably don't have time to find the journal that has the article in question, cite it per Wikipedia's rules, and put it in the article."

Frankly that sounds like a great task for editors that aren't subject experts. Maybe the expert can say "this is missing knowledge, this is where I think a citation should be or what to look for" and the non-expert can do that.

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

#58

Post by ag80 » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:52 PM UTC

Is anyone surprised that an organization which created user classes called "Bureaucrat" and "Oversight" has become difficult to manage?

To the extent that reform is possible, they'll have to figure out a way to attract new, inexperienced editors who either don't care about or don't know the organizational structure and technical requirements (will all due respect to the software engineer quoted, wikitext is significantly more complex than # or @ symbols, and is most definitely not user friendly).

Maintaining a complicated language of policies and procedures is not an effective way to do this. It's all too easily used as a weapon by those who understand it best.

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

#59

Post by fluxon » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:53 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #46

justincormack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

There's a bit of a movement to encourage going back to Real Books(tm) for sourcing. But lots of wikipedians know about and lament linkrot, site death, and robots.txt hijacking (which can "disappear" an entire dead site from the Wayback Machine behind a domain squatter's temp page). So we soldier on with archive.org, WebCite, archive.is (new, and under indictment for bot spamming at the moment), and several other archivers to save our citations. Still, properly filled out references (author, title, publication, date, page) will always be verifiable even if its link rots, and one must take a trip to the library.

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

#60

Post by Jtsummers » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 6:54 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #33

The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed. Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to st…

I used to try fixing grammatical and typographical mistakes, and most of my changes got reverted. This was perhaps 4 years back. It was frustrating seeing ok/good content written by what seemed to be a non-native english speaker that could have been good/great content if it were cleaned up, but instead was left to rot.