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Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

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Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#71

Post by nl »

hobofan wrote: post #18
nl wrote: post #8

Take a look at the Wikidata project - it's designed for editing structured data. Unfortunately I wouldn't say it is very easy to use - the Wikipedia editor is much easier. It's also completely unclear which parts of Wikidata data are used in Wikipedia, and where. That means the Wikidata data is usually much worse than the Wikipedia data, even if it theoretically easier for machines to use.

At the moment Wikidata isn't used/usable in Wikipedia at all, apart from coordinating the site links across languages. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the editor of Wikidata isn't easy to use, I think its interface is pretty straightforward.

A specific example: Try adding a timezone to a city. That's something that make complete sense to do, and yet Wikidata gives almost no affordances on how to do it. To get even more specific, it doesn't give a suggestion on appropriate types of data (UTC +/-?, TZ Names?) and it's completely opaque how to deal with summer time (probably via a refinement, but it's not clear what it should be called).

I agree it's pretty easy to add a Freebase ID to a Wikidata ID. Unfortunately this isn't really that valuable, because it's easy to a machine to work it out too.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#72

Post by nl »

MatmaRex wrote: post #50
hobofan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment Wikidata isn't used/usable in Wikipedia at all, apart from coordinating the site links across languages. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the editor of Wikidata isn't easy to use, I think its interface is pretty straightforward.

You can embed statements from a Wikidata item in the corresponding article on Wikipedia using the {{#property:…}} parser function. This is largely unused on the English Wikipedia, but some language versions already use this for their infoboxes – for example the infobox on this page is partially generated from Wikidata: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankara

Do you know why the English Wikipedia doesn't use it? It is simply because the English Wikipedia information is generally better than the corresponding Wikidata information?

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#73

Post by MatmaRex »

nl wrote: post #72
MatmaRex wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can embed statements from a Wikidata item in the corresponding article on Wikipedia using the {{#property:…}} parser function. This is largely unused on the English Wikipedia, but some language versions already use this for their infoboxes – for example the infobox on this page is partially generated from Wikidata: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankara

Do you know why the English Wikipedia doesn't use it? It is simply because the English Wikipedia information is generally better than the corresponding Wikidata information?

I believe it's simply because no one has yet put in the effort necessary to start using it. It might be a conscious decision, but if it was discussed anywhere, I completely missed that.

(English Wikipedians in general are very "territorial" in my experience, so to speak, and rarely appreciate efforts that put some piece of "their" articles beyond their "jurisdiction", like Wikidata does. Editors from other language versions are a lot more welcoming.)

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#74

Post by bigbugbag »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #7
tottenhm wrote: post #6

"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago." To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn't have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make…

As you say, dealing with the UI is fine. Dealing with the bureaucrats isn't. Having your account banned and your new article marked for spam by a very abrasive person, when trying to add legitimate content, rather than being supported through the maze of rules, as happened to a colleague the other day. That is a problem which stops meaningful content being added.

This is nothing new, something similar happened to me 9 years ago.

I had just started contributing to wikipedia, a couple hours daily, then after about one week an admin decided one of my article title was typographically wrong, after a couple silent reverts from him I got to his personal discussion page to ask why and he brandished some arcane internal rules. I checked and he was wrong so I told him so but he refused to acknowledge this and suddenly I was faced with a bunch of people picking on me. I was followed everywhere i contributed and all my edits were reverted by seemingly fans of said admin who also showed up to gang vote against me in all attempt at resolving conflict.

So I went to the public wikipedia space to ask for help and discovered said admin had silently modified the internal global wikipedia policy to reflect his view and it's all downhill from there. I started receiving threats and at this point I was spending 4 hours daily on wikipedia but barely contributed a thing to the content anymore. After a bunch of ineffective bans I worked around, all my contribution were deleted on ground that I had no right to add content while banned.

Then came the messages from people experiencing the same situation who supported me because I stood up, I got tipped that a bunch of admins were discussing me on a secret page and escalated the issue until it reached jimbo wales himself who dismissed the whole thing as he said he fully trusted his admins. Then I discovered that other people went through the same process before me, I wrote an article on the importance of newcomers for a healthy wikipedia long term and the bias of the power structure and a weakness of wikipedia that would allow a few individuals to ruin the whole project. For this I received a permanent ban from all wikimedia project and a request from the top of the power structure to delete all my contribution to wikipedia side projects, wikitravel just deleted everything no question asked.

So i did the same thing others did before me I replaced a key article of wikipedia with this very story that happened to and reverted my change so now this story would live hidden in a page history inside wikipedia and stopped contributing to wikipedia to do something worthy of my time instead.

back then wikipedia was already a totally different thing that what it pretended to be and imho the problem wikipedia has cannot be solved with a better editor.

Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor

#75

Post by sitkack »

tottenhm wrote: post #6

"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago." To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn't have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make…

Editing != Writing. Sometimes it way hard to change something than it is to create.
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