What a coincidence that a story about the decline of WP comes out right after they delete a bunch of PR agency accounts!
In the spirit of Wikipedia, can you provide a citation? :-)
I hope here we have the right to original thinking.
The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
61–70 of 140 posts
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#62Look 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
I think you won. I see 90.7.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#63Earlier 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…
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 a…
If that's true, then incumbent Wikipedians need to take it upon themselves to communicate that to newcomers directly, and not in a random comment in Hacker News.
Probably the easiest way to do that: If someone makes a substantive edit that isn't obviously vandalism, but doesn't quite meet Wikipedia's standards, then don't just undo it wholesale. Instead, temporarily pull it off the main page and into a back-end discussion. And then immediately contact the author with an explanation of what's going on and what they can do to get the changes reinstated.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#64Earlier 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".
What you can do is first start a section on the talk page about the topic and which sentences/sections could be changed. Then go ahead and make the intended edit on the article and then link to the section on the talk page in your edit comment. Then any editor who may potentially revert or have an issue with the edit will see that link and can go directly to that talk section that you started.
The markup used for the linking in the edit comment is the same as the wikitext markup. For example, an edit comment like this:
... see talk page for discussion.
would be marked up:
... [[Talk:Article name#Section heading|see talk page]] for discussion.
This might help start discussions about low-traffic article topics that would otherwise languish at the bottom of the talk page for weeks if not months.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Oh, that's another association for sewer that I wasn't thinking of. I didn't actually mean that the comments are crap or nasty, though they sometimes are. I just meant that it's a big backlog of comments that people would probably not read through.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#66Is 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…
100,000 is an admirable goal, but I do not envy that "most important" selection process. Excluding episode and character articles (even the Good Article-ranked ones) may be a good start, but the worst bloat may be elsewhere.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#67I'd don't know why, but I haven't seen a single visual editor for wiki markup or HTML that actually works.
I was really impressed with MailChimp, for instance, until I got to the visual HTML editor where I could never figure out how to not get my whole message screaming in
#fail
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#68Earlier 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.
And we don't have trade secrets, that's why ISL followed it up with this:
> want to know some of our most-clever trade secrets? Just read our papers, where we detail everything we do so you can replicate it
ISL was pointing out that many other professions have a lot of field specific knowledge with which they can charge people money to access. Academics print all of the information for basically free. So we already give it away for free, we don't have the time or patience to give it away free to somewhere that's not going to keep our work.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#69Earlier 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…
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 a…
Frankly, I'd rather not have the Talk page or the "editors", and a lot more actual data input.
The barrier for entry to writing articles has to be way, way lower than it is; it shouldn't require a negotiation with a bunch of self-important petty bureaucrats.
What those self-important guys (they're mostly guys) miss is that the best is the enemy of the good. Their misguided approach to quality actively prevents improvement.
Outside the high-edit-count word-shufflers, I'd classify contributions to WP in four buckets: (a) substantial contributors who know a lot about a little and are able to significantly add or improve content; (b) trivial fixers, who fix grammar / spelling mistakes, or otherwise make tiny casual edits; (c) mindless vandals, who work some adolescent scrawl somewhere in the text, with varying degrees of visibility; and (d) the really sneaky stuff; well-written fakes, PR companies, reputation massaging, etc.
The guys in (a) need to be preserved at all costs. I think the editors are concerned about (d), but the trouble is that they're doing it in a rules-bound way, but because knowing the rules and right WP:INCANTATIONS is a source of power, the rules become a thing in themselves, rather than a last resort for eliminating (d).
I'd much rather have a more complete, comprehensive WP than one that's even 90% correct.
Re: The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
#70What a coincidence that a story about the decline of WP comes out right after they delete a bunch of PR agency accounts!
Although I don't see PR interests having any effect on the creation and publishing of these studies, those interests could certainly have an effect on the widespread link proliferation and blogging about them. After this spike in coverage tapers off, we could certainly do a study of how this particular story proliferated.