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Has Wikipedia Peaked?
An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year with no official statistics, an independent analysis reported Wednesday showed that activity in Wikipedia's community has been declining over the last six months. Editing is down 20% and new account creation is down 30%. After six years of rapid growth and more than 2 million articles, is Wikipedia's development now past its peak? Are Wikipedians simply running out of things to write about, or is the community collapsing under the weight of external vandalism and internal conflicts? A new collection of charts and graphs help to tell the tale."
Thats because there's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!
"is Wikipedia's development now past its peak? Are Wikipedians simply running out of things to write about, or is the community collapsing under the weight of external vandalism and internal conflicts?"
No, no, and no.
Wiki is just running out of things to document. They literally have almost anything you can think of. I'm a computer science major and I've wiki'd some really advanced topics that appear on there but hardly anywhere else on the internet.
Does Netcraft confirm it?
Or should we look it up in Wikipedia?
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
I think the decline of new articles is probably just natural due to 2 million existing articles being a LOT of information. Sure, there's plenty more to write about but I'd have thought the majority of the hobbiest-contributors (i.e. those who aren't die-hard users) simply don't have anything else to write.
Either way, I think this is a little over the top - there's still a million and one things to write about. Hell, if it has peaked - it's not going anywhere!
ilovegeorgebush
I think I'd have a lot to add to Wikipedia, but I don't. Any time I have made any contribution, substantial or minor, someone else comes around and knocks it off. The feeling I've gotten is that people seem to 'own' pieces of territory in Wikipedia. Be it individual articles, or their interpretation, or something else. My contributions have no chance of surviving in the face of these Wiki die-hards. So what is the point? I'm a read-only user now.
Has peaked a long time ago. Before
...
--- PARAGRAPH FOR DEMOCRATS ---
Fox news started to edit it
--- PARAGRAPH FOR REPUBLICANS ---
CNN and BBC started editing it
Right now, a lot of articles are just plain dishonest. Just look up some controversial subjects. Contemporary forced subjugation and kidnapping children into slavery by muslims for example, or look at Bush's page that contains references to falsified news
They've just run out of Star Trek / Star Wars trivia to write new articles about. Turned out very few of the community knew anything else.
Guess we should call it wikipeakia then? Sorry, couldn't help myself.
If the hype dies off then it'll be less of a target towards vandalism and the "die hards" that continue to add to it will do so in a more responsible manner.
I highly doubt it'll become a wasteland...
I for one welcome our new all-knowing encyclopedic overlords!
According to Alexa , Wikipedia has actually grown substantially in terms of traffic and viewership, with reach up 12% in the past 3 months. It's inevitable that with several million articles, the number of "missing" encyclopedic ones drops, and thus fewer new articles are created. You can't judge whether something has "peaked" based on fewer accounts being blocked and soforth. Rather than saying it's peaked, it looks more like it's starting to stabilise in terms of quality, while still growing in terms of readership and reach.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
I used to edit wikipedia a lot. The main reason I left was that many articles I'd helped to write got to the point where every edit was making the article worse, so either someone had to keep an eye on it and remove changes or the articles would slowly rot under bad edits. I'm not specifically thinking of trolls here, just bad editing.
For example, the C++ article was better than it is now a year ago. Looking at the history list, almost every edit is undone by someone else. Can the article be improved? Possibly, but the way to do that is not to allow anyone to edit it, then expect someone to put the time into undoing 95% of the edits... that's soul-destroying.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Anyone who thinks that Wikipedia can run out of things to document has a pretty narrow view of just how much information humans generate (and uncover in the Universe). This is not a matter of finishing the job, or anything nearly so monumental. It's just that for something like Wikipedia to thrive, it needs a lot of volunteers-- and that means a lot of people who think it is *cool* enough to spend their time on. The buzz is fading, and people are moving on to other trends. Nothing more, nothing less.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Oh, there's plenty of things to write about, the community has slowly been taken over by a few who seemingly wish to destroy it from within, or at least shape it into their ideal site. Legitimate and well written articles are constantly deleted or merged because they're "not notable" or they're fancruft. These of course, are okay reasons to delete articles, but when entire projects are basically swept away by one person who twist the guidelines in their favor (or had a corrupt hand in writing them in the first place), it's a great turn off.
People go around touting "Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia" in one discussion, and then in the next want to get rid or some article because "it's not encyclopedic." I guess I see my ideal Wikipedia as a complete collection. If someone writes a decent, complete article on something somewhat obscure, and it's deleted because it's not notable enough, that just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm just bitter and my view of Wikipedia doesn't agree with the majority? Don't know.
I am annoyed about how they're trying to rid of trivia sections. Those are some of the most interesting parts of an article if you ask me.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
That loss of anonymity would cut down a lot of the spurious traffic, as would the reduction in the number and intensity of edit-wars (since there would be less need for editors to re-establish legitimate fact.)
Meta will eat itself
that's a hell of a peak, and it should stay the leader for awhile in what it does: being the default encylcopedia for the world
that's because wikipedia benefits from the network effect far more than say google or yahoo. it is no small effort, but it is doable, to spider the web and compete with google or yahoo, and make a bid at becoming the defacto search standard instead of them. you need a platoon of programmers and a supply depot of big iron servers. but all that is required to do that is have a lot of cash
meanwhile, consider a hypothetical wikipedia competitor. you have to, somehow, remobilize millions of freelance editors and article contributors. cash can't do that, only passion can
all i'm saying is is that it is easier to bomb germany than it is to herd cats, because bombing germany just takes a lot of bombs and planes, but herding cats requires some sort of superhuman level of finesse no amount of money can buy
so if wikipedia is peaking, i think it is because wikipedia is maxing out on not its potential, but maxing out on the entire potential of its market segment. if wikipedia is peaking, it is not because interest is waning or a competitor is in sight, but simply because there is nowhere more to grow to. which is pretty impressive. wikipedia owns its space in the internet, and its not some subtle niche. its a huge and important market space. wikipedia is a massive success, by any measure
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Perhaps like 90% of e-mail is spam, 20% of all wiki edits were vandalism and that's been stamped on now.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
I don't have an entry on Wikipedia yet!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Maybe the edits are down by 20% because there has been increased vigilance over edits made by corporate shills, governmental entities, revisionists, and plain ol' ne-er-do-well vandals and their subsequent exposure by the online community. They're less likely to get away with it, so they refrain from editing wikipedia in fear of generating even more negative publicity about themselves, or the parties they are working for.
As usual, statistics tell what you want them to tell.
:-)
For example, "new user creation is down 30%" means that the number of users is still increasing, but the rate of increase is less. Which also means the rate of the rate of increase is now negative. Hey, how's that for a headline?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The most obvious change in the editorial policy of late has been a campaign to delete stuff that is irrelevant. But the problem is that this is a highly subjective judgement and it creates a sense that it is useless to contribute anything that some junior editor is going to come around and delete. This is especially sad when it limits the development of articles on esoteric technical topics that might not be popular but are certainly valuable forms of knowledge.
This really is a pity because it's not as though there is a legitimate practical reason to make Wikipedia concise in any way. Even if there were, there would certainly be a better way to organize the effort than simply to have people going around deleting things. The biggest problem with self-selecting voluntary enforcers is that they're usually the last people who should be trusted to do such things.
People contribute voluntarily to spread knowledge and they may be biased or misleading but people who volunteer to delete others words are far more circumspect.
Personally, I stopped adding contribution when two articles I wrote(about 2 comic books series that where published by Dark Horse years ago)where marked for deletion. When I asked why, the validator answered that he did a google search and found nothing on the subject, so it was not worthy of being there. So there you have it, if it's not on google, it does not exist and has no business being in an encyclopedia where knowledge is supposed to be kept. With such an attitude, I saw no reason to continue adding stuff there.
many of wikipedia's attempts to limit "abuse" actually discouraged input from well intentioned individuals
as well, there are just a lot of greedy people who can't stand the truth and work hard to maintain their evil justifications
personally I say, please, leave wikipedia alone, let it grow naturally
These days, it's hard to find an important, legitimate topic on which Wikipedia doesn't already have fairly good coverage.
The days when e.g. you could discover that there was no article at all about the author Jessamyn West ("The Friendly Persuasion") and quickly throw in three paragraphs off the top of your head with a little bit of cross-checking, totally confident that you were improving Wikipedia, are gone.
Now, improving Wikipedia is hard work, and it's less fun, and it goes slowly.
In other words, it's now about quality, not quantity... and that's a Good Thing.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
As far as Wikipedia - it was a great idea by Larry Sanger, a "Web 2.0" encyclopedia built on wiki technology. This little R&D project by Sanger then gets taken over by the boss of the company, Jimbo Wales, who takes all the credit, and nowadays is concentrating on Wikia, while the project is being run by a mostly incompetent and increasingly nasty cabal. In a lot of ways, Wikipedia has survived despite the management due to Sanger's great idea and the normal user base. Right now it is successful because it is the only game in town, but I am quite sure that it will be knocked off the block by a competitor in the future.
n/t
you had me at #!
It just amazes me how business has evolved into such an immediate, short-termed process. One year, admittedly a long time from a technology perspective, really isn't that long. Anyone with a brain can surely see that all of the world's relevant knowledge has NOT been captured in Wikipedia. Just because the rate of additions and editing has declined does not mean its peak or demise. Give it some time. Sheese!!
Anyone that has ever edited any article on anything even remotely political is likely to have had their material completely removed within minutes, whether sourced or not and possibly their accounts banned. The extremist Administrator Jayjg is known to internally release your hidden IP address to other "Administrators" (when he is not spending literally years editing the article on circumcision) One of the highest Administrators, Slimvirgin was actually revealed to be a former intelligence agent named Linda Mack that spends nearly 24/7 on there with multiple sock puppets abusing editors.
:-)
It's not surprise to me that people are fed up with the likes of these and the duplicitous "Jimbo" Wales who claims to have an open encyclopedia. The problem is it only is only open to a few political extremists that have managed to get a foothold in the highest levels of adminstration and change phrases like "extrajudicial killing" or "assasination" to "targeted killing" or sex-trafficking to "human trafficking" to completely removed.
The "Human Rights in Israel" Article actually devotes a good part of its space to talking about why Amnesty International is actually anti-semitic for documenting violations Israel has made, and uses the lawyer that got OJ Simpson off a murder charge as the source!! I can't imagine why people would be fleeing this burning building in droves
Citizendium has some features intended (& designed) to address several of the concerns that Wikipedia has raised. Obviously it will have a long way to go before it encompasses Wikipedia's breadth, though it's depth should be as good or better from the start. Citizendium starts here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
I'm a computer science major and I've wiki'd some really advanced topics that appear on there but hardly anywhere else on the internet.
Are you saying that because a computerized knowledge base, owned, operated, and edited by people with computers, has a lot of stuff about computers in it, that it must therefore have a lot of stuff about everything in it? What about needlepoint? String collecting? Mayan hunting techniques? No, my friend, there's a lot more stuff to wiki about.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So long as there are new episodes of The Simpsons, new Gundam shows, so long as they keep making new Pokemon games and "reality" TV shows, Wikipedians will always have source material from which to write new articles, and motivation to maintain them.
Bow-ties are cool.
I recently made a 3rd party add-on for a game. Trolls used wikipedia to try and smear my reputation. They also used it to make cheap insults about me and my project. I wrote to wikipedia to get any references to my project removed and they haven't got back to me. I also tried deleting the article and the people who were being abusive just reposted it. Now I could spend a lot of time checking wikipedia for slander and changing it every few days but why the hell should I have to. Surely the people at wikipedia need to take more responsibility for the contents of their site.
Reaching a peak is quite natural. I imagine Wikipedia probably has pretty much peaked. I imagine Google has similarly peaked. When almost everyone in the potential audience uses it, how could it be possible to get new users?
So, Radiohead's new album was announced about 10 days ago, and the In Rainbows article makes Wikipedia look pretty "alive," if you ask me!
Has anyone asked Wikipedia?
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
All I know is, I did some drunken vandalism in August of 2005 and the gross misinformation I posted is still there, despite lots of subsequent activity on the article. It's like they just don't care.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
We all know that moderators on most forums are abusive, and most blogs tend toward being personal reflections instead of informative. Why are we surprised Wiki followed the same path?
Wiki's great strength and great weakness has been its model. Anyone can contribute, but that then requires cops to police the anyones. Then who watches the watchers?
I read Wikipedia for articles regarding computer technologies and video games. On any other subject, it's often an inferior resource. Even further, I've found that most articles (which take the #1 Google spot) are plagiarized from the articles at Google spots 3-7.
For many topics, there are better specialized sources written by actual experts in the field, and not bitter grad students, and these are overshadowed by Wikipedia's prominence. This "decline" was long in the making.
technical writing / development
...is making it easier for people to start helping out. Decent discussion pages for starters. Right now they are plain wiki pages, relying on users to indent themselves to indicate whom they are replying to. They need proper methods for quoting and linking to individual posts. What is now called "archiving" (i.e., moving old comments to a separate page) wouldn't be so cumbersome anymore. As it is, you do it manually or with a program that parses the page. Silly.
A lot of other things confuse a newcomer as well. There are 9 policies and 23 guidelines, each with a loong page of its own.
Uploading files isn't too simple either. (A lot of instructional text that would put anyone off.) Here is also one of many examples of poor separation between content and presentation. You specify a license by including the appropriate box on the description page of the file. It should be a flag, people!
Want to discuss something? First, you need to find out whether it should go on the Village pump or the Request for comment.
Dispute? Gotta read up on negotiation, mediation and arbitration. I know I would sooner give up.
If you click on "Editing help", you are greeted with one rudimentary page which probably don't cover what you want and tons of links to similar pages with overlapping content.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
All you have to do is compare the entries for "Klingon Language" or "Jedi" or "Pokemon" with "Albania" or "Australia" or "Shakespeare", then ask yourself why?
What crap.
Neil
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Sorry, but even Slashdot is a better use of my time.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
To say, wikipedia has peaked is silly. The set of authors working on wikipedia are generally restricted to their own language. While there might be fewer new english language articles in the last year, the growth of chinese language articles, korean language articles, etc has been huge over the last 3 years.
Does anyone have statistics on the growth of wikipedia articles, by article language?
Are you saying that because a computerized knowledge base, owned, operated, and edited by people with computers, has a lot of stuff about computers in it, that it must therefore have a lot of stuff about everything in it? What about needlepoint? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needlepoint
Seems pretty well researched. Huh, lookadat... didn't know they had an "embroidery" category
You can't take the sky from me...
Since Balmer praised wikipedia as better than Encarta, I knew that this would happen.
Our best bet is to ask Netcraft about it.
____
nico
Nico-Live
It's simple. The creative energy that many had applied towards Wikipedia has been tempered because there are groups of people who are determined to stamp out any "non-free" information (as opposed to information which is publicly useable but 'non-free').
First of all, and most obviously, the trivial matters are taken care of. Common knowledge is now pretty much documented, what's left is knowledge and information that requires a lot of specialized knowledge. And that in turn means that fewer people can actually add information, simply because they themselves have no access to the information or could not put it online in a meaningful way. While we generate more knowledge (and at a more increasing speed) than ever before, it's also true that that knowledge is no longer common knowledge. We don't discover easily understandable concepts like gravity or simple chemicals anymore, today generating knowledge means that you have to have deep insight in the special field you're researching in.
Then, there's the wikibickering. People who deem certain articles their "turf" and don't "allow" any Joe Random to edit them. Partly sensibly so, because vandalism has become a problem, partly out of the view that they, and only they, are right on the subject. That doesn't necessarily encourage people to join the project.
Then again various companies trying to gain influence and avoid bad press through Wikipedia, which in turn means that Wikipedia, which was once actually a quite good way to get directions for further reading on a subject (don't laugh, when I look for good links to a certain subject, I ask Wikipedia instead of Google. The chance to get meaningful links is heaps higher!), has become a battleground of PR agencies. Also not necessarily what increases trust in the project.
I don't think it peaked. But it is almost certainly the moment of consolidation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, no, and yes.
Much like Slashdot's draconian restrictions on AC posting due to abusive behaviour, Wikipedia vandalism is a problem where the cure has proven more destructive than the disease. As with all web communities, Wikipedia's domination by a clique of elites who achieved that status due to frequency of contribution and longevity rather than quality of contribution has driven away scores of amateur users.
The steady move away from the original idea of what Wikipedia should be in response to abuses has made it a much less friendly and appealing medium for an average person to contribute to. As with Microsoft or eBay, once Wikipedia's popularity established a "moat," it did peak, and began degenerating, on the assumption that its extant level of popularity would act as a buffer against negative reaction to increasingly more stringent rules and monitoring.
The goal of a Wikipedia user who wants to contribute is now based primarily on social standing rather than accuracy or verifiability of knowledge.
Yes, too many people want to delete perfectly fine articles from Wikipedia because they're "not notable". For example, people keep trying to delete the late Rob Levin, who ran the Freenode IRC channel. Poor guy dies and they immediately want to delete him!
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Write a wikipedia article about it, if wikipedians can spend enough time writing about document editing patterns then maybe they can lift the editing rate back to its former glories
Up for it.
On the one hand I agree with you: we often give experts more credit than they're worth. But on the other, many experts (certainly most academic ones) are surely quite used to providing citations - more so than most people.
There's a risk that this kind of stereotype about experts turns into a bias against expertise, of the "We're not that stupid up here in Duluth" kind. I've run across a number of claims that there's an anti-expert sentiment on Wikipedia, and while I have no personal experience, many of the anecdotes on in this discussion point in the same direction.
1. It's probably expected that there'd be a slowdown, as the major subjects are already covered well.
2. They need to stop deleting "non-notable" entries. It's not like storage space is expensive these days.
In my (limited) Wikipedia experience, the problem isn't knowledgeable contributors being unwilling to cite, it's the Wiki-philes who consider themselves both page "owners" and "experts" who revert anything that they think isn't correct, sourced or not. Wikipedia is the ultimate in distastefully mashed-up petty politics and provincialism.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
every article will soon have an addition like:
Caribou
The Caribou is a large North American reindeer.
Trivia: a reindeer is seen in the third scene of the fifth episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Looking for stubs is a great way to find articles that need more information. Wiki keeps list of stub by categories. Find something you might be good at, and add a little bit of info to that. For the Slashdot crowd, here's a couple of stubs that might be relevant:
Computer Engineering stubs
Mathematical Logic stubs
Linux distribution stubs
Human-to-Human Interfacing stubs
Science Fiction stubs
Enjoy!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
It's gotten so bad that someone created a song about it:
Wikipirates
And while granted that was about the singer's entry in Wikipedia there are plenty of more examples on the Internet.
This sort of attitude is what keeps otherwise knowledgeable people from contributing. IIRC that's not what Wikipedia has said they've wanted in the past.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
For about 3 years, I've been manually keeping track of some statistics that are important to me here.
Some of Dragonfly's (the person who created those graphs) observations are fairly easy to explain, others require some knowledge of the site. Since I've been at Wikipedia (starting back in mid 2003) new article production has gone through 3 phases: (1) First it was super-linear. That is, each month, we produced slightly more new article than the previous month. Many people predicted that this would ultimately become exponential, and (2) eventually exponential growth is what we got. However, since last August, (3) that has mostly flattened out, to a relatively constant 40k-60k new article per month. I think the answer why is pretty obvious - all of the low-hanging fruit is long gone. When I started editing, there were lots of red links (links to articles that don't exist) that any non-expert might be able to churn out in 2 minutes. Many of the new articles I create nowadays are highly esoteric, some of which I created after seeing them mentioned in journal papers I was peer reviewing. (Examples: Gustafson's law, Antigenic escape).
As far as new account registration, that's a bit more complex to explain. First and most obviously, Wikipedia is not new anymore. We're not going to see the kind of new-user account registrations that we used to. But there's another, more complicated factor at work. For about 9 months (March to December 2006), there existed a technique to vandalize Wikipedia with impunity. You register lots of accounts, and then use each one to vandlize exactly once, log out, log back in with another accout and vandalize, etc. Mediawiki did not block your IP unless you attempted to register from a blocked account, so by editing with each one exactly once you avoided ever having your IP blocked. The only effective way to combat this was to have checkuser access (which I have, but I'm one of only about 10 people on the English Wikipedia who do) I filed a bug report, which was fixed in December 2006. I suspect that a lot of the drop-off in user account registration has to do with this bug being fixed. Registering 100 throw-away accounts was no longer effective, so people did not do it, therefore - I suspect- account registration went down.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It's the internal conflicts, navel-gazing and meta editing that is killing Wikipedia.
In other words - the abusive administrators and longstanding POV groups are finally driving so many people off of the project that they get to make it what they want to make it, nothing but a propaganda disaster.
Then again, they've shown how it goes time and again. I even had an experience in a Wiki administrator on Slashdot claiming he'd "look into" any reasonable issues - instead, he did exactly jack crap, kept whining about how the issues I brought were "old" or "nobody else would look at them." He eventually bailed from wikipedia completely because of all the stupid bullshit that's involved in wikipedia.
If you look at the history of railroaded users who tried to fix wikipedia from within the system, and instead were tarred as "trolls" and worse by the established assholes and POV pushers of the admin "community", you get an idea of what wikipedia really is.
Best quote ever:
Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.
Has Wikipedia reached the bottom yet, or will it keep getting worse. Because every time I think it can't get worse, more petty, or provincial, it does.
Do a Google search on innumerable topics and Wikipedia shows up as the first link. This is Wikipedia's biggest problem. Anyone with an interest in how their topic of interest (themselves, their company, product, or service, something they're involved with, etc. etc. etc.) is seen on the Internet is therefore going to have a vested interest in what Wikipedia says about that topic. And then ... oh look! The entry on Wikipedia is editable! No wonder Wikipedia is a magnet for PR and turf wars.
I lost my taste for Wikipedia when some people who have a personal axe to grind with me located a Wikipedia entry for a scene I was involved with years ago, and began spamming it with lies -- well written, but revisionist history nonetheless. Then when I reverted their edits they accused me of "vandalism" and it sparked an edit war. After the Wikipedia "management" got involved, we were forced to reach a "compromise" that still isn't 100% truth. How does a supposedly encyclopedic writing claim accuracy when you have to compromise with people who write complete falsehoods?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
After 18 months of flat-out wiki-madness involving an effort to organize and improve hundreds of articles, I quite working on the project last month following a dispute. My critics were a couple of people who had contributed next to nothing to the project, but they had an opinion ("You're violating the guidelines!") and they had a vote equal to mine. True, I was working mostly on my own and had developed a few unique solutions to some common problems, but no matter how hard I tried to explain, it was just no use. Eventually, it came to a vote that I won with the help of a few friends I had made, but by that time I could see the writing on the wall.
It's not the first time I had been frustrated with Wikipedia. Earlier, I had tried working at Citizendium, hoping to escape the endless vandalism and find some more reasonable people to deal with. At first things seemed promising, but then it was decided that all of the old Wikipedia articles would be deleted, which felt a lot like throwing out the baby with the bathwater (so much for being a fork), and then Larry Sanger turned out to be a little too much of a micro-manager for my taste. So, it was back to Wikipedia.
As I see it now, however, Wikipedia's main problem is not so much the vandalism, but that it is too much of a democracy. In such an environment, the average article can only be improved so far before it begins to degrade. It's not that too many cooks spoil the broth, but that's what happens when many (or most) of the cooks don't know what they're doing (or talking about). The problem becomes even more acute when hundreds of articles are involved that need to be organized into a coherent whole. You can see to it personally that the quality of one or more article is maintained, but as soon as you stop, then things start to slide downhill again.
If, on the other hand, Wikipedia were to become more of a meritocracy, then I have no doubt that things would improve considerably. I'm sure many Slashdotters can imagine ways to do that, but I think they would also agree that such measures would leave the project looking quite different. In fact, it would probably take all the fun out of it for most people. But then, what do we want Wikipedia to be: fun, or a place to find good articles with accurate information?
In Soviet Russia, Wikipedia kills YOU!
Seriously. Ever goddamn serious article has some boil on the ass in the form of the Trivia section.
Because you HAVE to know when looking up some building that this cartoon blew is up in issue 1314, or that that celebrity once got a nude photo in the internet.
Most of it was crap, nearly everything urban legend or unsourced, and a majority just anti-knowledge.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
But you know what? A lot of this junk just doesn't belong there. An encyclopedia isn't the place for a list of M*A*S*H episodes, it's not the place for an exhaustive list of all the times They Killed Kenny, and it's not the place to host a database of all the Pokemon. People have to focus, here, that's the thing.
Putting the word "fictional" into your article doesn't make it automatically OK. Asserting its relevance does not justify a steaming mass of imaginary drivel inserted into an encyclopedia. Think something fictional really is worth writing about? Fine, write about it - and remain grounded in reality. Warp Drive isn't a manipulation of sub-space, it's a plot device.
If what you want is a place for your fansite, quit your bitching and go find a web host. It's not Wikipedia's job to be the home for your pet project.
Bow-ties are cool.
I was the first to wiki about facebook's new 3rd party applications and how they represented a major increase in the value of the site, but it was removed because it was "written like an advertisement." But that's what the section was about, advertisement!
I'm a casual Wikipedia editor -- I edit Wikipedia on and off, semi-regularly but certainly not enough to be part of any incrowd. I have never run into any shitstorms. In my impression, most of the people who keep running into conflicts are actively looking for them. The site you cite is a nice case in point -- the whole tone of it screams extreme, borderline-psychotic hostility. It seems designed to create problems rather than solve them.
If you're civil, respect established community consensus without accepting it as gospel, familiarize yourself with rules and traditions so that you can follow them or break them wisely, offer constructive and well-argumented criticism, and generally avoid behaving like a bull in a china shop, you should be allright. In the rare cases in which you get nowhere, just edit something else for a while, or take it to the arbitration committee if you feel that strongly about it. Yes, Wikipedia has mechanisms for conflict resolution -- funny how the critics never seem to try those!
Even if it's true that some articles are guarded by people with a sense of ownership or control over them (and it probably is true), the only difference between them and those bitter critics is that the former managed to gain control, and the latter tried and failed. Both categories of people have control issues, otherwise the critics wouldn't be so bitter over their lack of control over Wikipedia. Non-control freaks, on the other hand, don't generally have a problem reaching consensus, even on Wikipedia.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people lack an essential life skill: the ability to accept that not everyone everywhere is always going to agree with you. Wikipedia seems to attract such people by the bucketload for some reason. It's actually possible to learn to let go of a silly conflict without taking your ball and going home. But some people seem so blinded by spite and bitterness they can't seem to see that anymore. Sad.
Wiki, as with any other source of information, must be used in combination with critical thought. I use Wiki all the time but I also click all relevant links, do other searches from other trusted sources to gain corroboration, just as you should with all information. Wiki is a great starting point IMO, but using it as a sole source of information flies in the face of critical thought. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica has errors in it, for which Wiki is considered nearly as accurate.
At some point, just as with all other encyclopedia's, information will change, evolve, and even grow, but it will slow down after the initial "job" is done. Be sure, it's still growing, just at a slower pace. This seems logically normal.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
I think people have figured out that Wikipedia has too many users looking for any excuse at all to delete content contributed by normal people. The people who roam Wikipedia deleting stuff have a set of reasons for nuking almost anything you type in. If you wrote it, it's original research and deleted; if you didn't write it, you're copying copyrighted material and it's deleted; sometimes someone will come along and erase a page for no particular reason; etc. I got so disgusted with the deletions that I quit contributing anything. I mean, deleting a 20 year old promotional photograph for a recording artist released by a record company that no longer exists?
Alexa confirms it, wikipedia is growing substantially. Traffic and viewershipis up 12% the last 3 months.
I lost my sig.
According to the http://www.wikindex.com/, The English Wikipedia is still waaay above any other wiki out there. I have been tracking wikis for a while, and just like other blogs and websites, the bulk of them focus on pop culture, and wikis are increasingly splitting into niche fields. So, if you assume that really only 1% of readers out there actually contribute, and that 1% are fanatic about something but have limited time, then they would more likely contribute to a topic-specific wiki rather than the general encyclopedia.
This makes sense-- would you rather read about Ubuntu updates on the general encyclopedia, or a ubuntu-specific wiki? On a lighter note, one can almost see which TV shows have greater loyalty based on their wiki sites.
davejenkins.com |
As a tenured professor of Religious Studies, I can give you my expert opinion on the state of Wikipedia. Seriously though, there is still a lot missing from wikipedia. I've done lots of searches and come up with nothing. The things were pretty obscure, I I think they're worth an article.
The seekers do no need truth, the seekers do find truth and the finding do be painful
In the past year, many Wikipedia articles have been tagged for issues such as needing to cite sources and correct biased viewpoints. Wikipedia is not growing in size at this point, it is growing in quality.
So its number of users is growing, its number of articles is growing, and it has "peaked?" You can't sustain exponential growth forever, you know. This is just the tail end of the S-curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-curve) where Wikipedia will eventually level out at a certain number of active users and a certain edit rate. This is a normal curve for technology adoption. This is not a bad thing. This does not indicate that Wikipedia has peaked or is less popular, it's more a sign that Wikipedia is reaching the point of maturity. So the only thing that has peaked is its growth rate.
Look at this quote I just pulled: The Arab slave trade from East Africa is one of the oldest slave trades, predating the European transatlantic slave trade by hundreds of years. What a classic piece of Leopoldian propaganda! Logically, feet existed before boats, and boats existed before ships; so, obviously, local slave trading occurred before long distance slave trading, and Mediterranean slave trading occurred before transatlantic slave trading. The only reason to make the quoted statement is to demonize Arabs... although actually, members of every race on the planet have indubitably been guilty of slave trading from time immemorial, and the most notable atrocities in Africa were mostly performed by Africans subjugated by Europeans, with little or no involvement by Arabs at all.
These days, in wikipeda political posturing and religious propaganda frequently replaces fact, and the person who is the most insane usually wins, because sane people eventually STOP banging their heads against walls. And that, in a nutshell, explains everything about Wikipedia's current decline - the insane people and the paid shills are driving out the (relatively) normal folks that used to provide all the input.
Anything with US Politics.
Anything related to Global Warming (just try and keep a page dedicated to expanding glaciers - really go for it)
Anything dealing Terrorism and the US (terroism and rest of world is okay)
Anything dealing with US based elections (similar to politics but a bit different)
Anything documenting talk radio
Anything documenting Murdoch owned properties.
Oil (though alternative fuels stuff is really good)
going anon as I do edit there and when you criticize Wiki and have the same name on both pages...
Maybe someone should start Wikitrivia, where every topic can have an unlimited amount of inane blather...
That's what Wikia really is. They have the Star Wars wiki, the Halo wiki, the Bioshock wiki, the Marvel Database, etc. It's all about monetizing fancruft.
Wikipedia is transforming in something like an Elite of administrators that believe that they know more than the others. They live for the Wikipedia and can edit articles from 'How to cook a fish' to 'Quantum computing'. Other people first encouraged to write articles, now become tired to discuss content with this elite that in most cases don't know how to tie their shoes.
Only because something exists does not mean you need to cram it into Wikipedia. And certainly not anything so obscure that even google comes up empty. You seem to think Wikipedia should provide free web hosting for any topic, but that is not the case.
I lost my sig.
So you'd enjoy the same restrictions on posting on your account, then?
Argument over.
Then there's the campaign by WP admins who delete all pages on 9/11 truth. This should be disturbing whether or not you're one of these "truthers."
Bottom line is WP cannot be trusted to give you a true democratic viewpoint as they claim. It may be the encyclopedia "anyone can edit," but only on approved topics.
How much credence can I give to someone who doesn't know how (and how not) to use an apostrophe?
Oh wait, this is slashdot - news for illiterate nerds, stuff that mutters. Like this guy.
Here's a hint, fellows:
he's there
she's there
it's there
they're his
they're hers
they're its
Yuo flail it. Have you heard about the D.A.M.? Mothers Against Dyslyxia
I'm an undergrad in a robotics-oriented engineering program. Most of the topics that I learn are *not* wiki'ed, and I myself don't feel nearly qualified enough to start an article. There is a LOT of information that's still not wiki'ed.
Most of the important stuff was in the first 100,000 articles. Look at new articles coming in. They're mostly articles about bands nobody has heard of, forgotten politicians, ordinary shopping malls, "State Route 73" articles, and similar dreck. There's been some progress in that area. The fancruft flood has to some extent been stemmed; for a while there were people adding articles for every minor character in every story in every Star Wars comic book. Now that Wikia is up, the fans can be sent over there. But still, most of what's coming in now doesn't add much to Wikipedia. Every article added takes up attention from the community. Somebody has to look at it; it may need cleanup, it probably needs linking to other articles, and the references may need work. That's wearing editors out.
Articles don't improve over time. They churn. This is the fundamental problem of Wikipedia. The concept was that articles would be polished until they became bright jewels. What actually happens is that most articles with many editors make it to about 75% of "good", then churn. Edits continue, but the overall quality does not improve. Take a look at "Horse". That article is totally rewritten about every six months, but it's not better for it.
The fanatics. There's an ongoing push from the Christian right to make the "Dark Ages" seem less dark. There's an ongoing push from the Jewish right to eliminate material which makes Israel look bad. Some articles critical of companies experience repeated "whitewashing" from unregistered users. Much Wikipedia dispute resolution activity comes from such problems.
There are lesser technical problems. The system is too labor-intensive. There are classes of articles for which a wiki is the wrong tool. Musical recordings and movies need a more structured database; GraceNote and IMDB do a better job on that data than Wikipedia, because they have more structure. IMDB can show all the films in which an actor appeared; Wikipedia can't, unless someone manually entered that data into the actor's article and got it right. Atlas information ("State Route 93" articles) belongs in a map-based system, not a text-based one. Wikipedia doesn't even have spell check.
Part of this issue here is that we are viewing Bismarck's observation "people who enjoy sausage and respect the law should not watch either being made" as applied to Encyclopedia. With most everyday (non wiki) documentation, we are simply handed a final product with little insight into the details of what went into it. It appears as a "static" object with dry, systematic, minor adjustments in time. For example, for a fascinating look into how the OED was created (brace yourself: are you sure you really want to know?), check out the book "The Professor and the Madman." With Wikipedia, because of its very nature, we are seeing the process unfold before us and the picture doesn't jive with expectation. Should the number of entries and participation scale forever? Shouldn't it be a clean and civil affair? I'm fairly sure the answer is "no" to both questions. I'm pretty sure that as a "-pedia" of any sort, this saturation effect is exactly the behavior one expects: a rapid growth as bread-and-butter topics get filled up, more expansion as obscuria information is added, then saturation as the knowledge-base reaches some intermediate steady state with details filling in constantly. There will be gradual growth as new topics are added, but this will be a small percentage of what already exists. I'm pretty sure the same things happen to any documentation, especially "-pedias" which are simply trying to outline existing knowledge (which is large, but finite). For example, if you plot the number of entries in Encyclopedia Britannica versus time, it also probably displays the same trend. Basically, the measure to determine if a "-pedia" has "peaked" isn't growth but completeness and accuracy.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Just yesterday I was looking for a list of USA people who have been killed after found guilty with the death penalty. I found a lot of interesting people in other pages but could not find everyone of them. Also one interesting thing I found in pages other than Wikipedia was the last words of several of those people.
IMHO there's still a looooong way to go until they can say they have most of the knowledge. A lot of that also is dude to the language barrier, as there are some really good articles in Spanish (my main language) which in the English Wikipedia does not exist or are very lacking.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
In keeping with ISO-approved spelling mistakes, please resubmit or amend this article under the title "Has Wikipedia peeked".
Thankyou.
... And you shouldn't either. Far to often new articles are deleted (or worse, Speedy Deleted with no discussion at all), and the records of the page are only accessable to admins. I used to keep a local copy myself just to protect against this abuse, but gave up on it. I have found the best strategy is to just add content to existing articles until they get so bloated you can split a section off into an article of its own. At least then if they delete the new article, you can revert the old one to keep your work. The deletion system favors article mitosis.
Come on, there's work to be done yet!
There's always translating the Marvel character Juggernaut's page into Klingon...
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I agree.
Personally, I think Wikipedia suffers from being too limited in scope. Yeah, creating a free encyclopedia is great and all, but I'm not entirely convinced that's what the world really needs. It's good in that it provided some competition to Britannica, and forced them to open up some of their content, but where Wikipedia is most useful is where it goes well beyond any traditional "encyclopedia." Sadly, these tend to be the areas where Wikipedia bureaucrats and administrators are most likely to delete content.
Wikipedia has the potential to blow away the entire concept of an 'encyclopedia,' but it's held back by narrow-minded ideas of what 'encyclopedic' content is.
You see this "emulation complex" in a lot of projects. Bottom line: you can never be better than a thing you are trying to imitate. If you want to be better than it, you have to stop trying to be it. This goes for some parts of Linux desktops trying to emulate Windows, it goes for OpenOffice trying to be Microsoft Office, and it goes for Wikipedia trying to be a traditional encyclopedia.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yeah, its been heavily exposed, especially over the last couple years, in even the mainstream media. Most people that would be interested in joining have joined, and the low-hanging fruit as far as obvious articles have been written, editted, and polished up to the point where improvements are hard.
The rate of growth has slowed. Shouldn't be a surprise. Most things that succeed at all take off with what looks, at first, like an exponential growth curve but turns out to be more like a logistic curve.
...isn't a Pokémon?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
...it can't be stopped.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Wikipedia only works if there are multiple competent editors interested enough in the subject to corrects each others mistakes. Without that, it just becomes a soapbox / blog representing one persons opinion.
I see the "notability" criteria as an effort to make it likely the articles will be cross checked.
The REAL news has been missed here. Look at the graph about halfway down Dragons_flight's Log analysis. BOTS are making 91% "normal edits", and 8% reverts. See, bots are making NORMAL edits. The Turing test has been passed on Wikipedia! I for one welcome... never mind :-)
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
I've been contributing to Wikipedia since 2003, and my contributions have been tapering off over the last six months, too.
;-)
I suddenly found myself involved in several really nasty disputes at the same type, with really stubborn people who wouldn't give in to community consensus, dragging on the argument for months or escalating the dispute in personal ways, to the point where I spent most of my time defending myself instead of working on the article under dispute. My stress level went up, and I backed off to salvage my own sanity and not have a detrimental effect on my real life.
It might be interesting to graph the number of instances of each wikistress level image over time to see if there's any correlation. They're not used uniformly or anything, but a glaring change over time would indicate something.
If so, I wonder if this can be traced back to some major change in policy or Wikimedia Foundation activities. Of course everyone will cite their own personal pet peeves, but the Wikimedia Foundation's decision to prohibit all images that aren't "free enough" happened six months ago, and every time I see a busybody deleting a legal, useful image, it certainly contributes to my wikistress level.
Or maybe it's a campaign by Britannica to destroy our community from the inside out...
I think the problem might be that some Wikipedians have become to settled into bad editing habits, that drive casual and new users away.
Pages on contentious issues tend to have regulars who have been editing the article for some time, generally because they have an opinion on the subject and are consciously or unconsciously introducing it, and they feel the need to 'defend' the article
The result is a factionalised community that is resistant to change. Such a community cannot realistically be expected to keep a large and evolving encyclopaedia together. Having participated in the creation of pages for both the 2006 Lebanon war and the Darfur conflict, I've seen a decline in both quality and quantity of efforts. This may be a result of western bias, but its not like Darfur is obscure; it is mentioned regularly in the western media.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I tried "Albania" and "Pokemon", both seemed pretty good to my ignorant eyes.
Sowhat is the problem?
Are you one of those kids trying to masquerade as adults by being pretentious about which subjects are considered "worthy" by some ill-defined criteria? Your selection of topics to try out could indicate that. If so, I suggest you grow up.
A "worthy" topic for an encyclopedia is a topic readers seek information about.
I don't know about the statistics, but if you look at how much of the World has Internet access and how big the non-English versions are, you'd have to be fairly ignorant to say that Wikipedia has peaked. The most you can say is that it has plateaued. There are billions of people out that that could become Wikipedia editors and add content either in their language, or in English about their corner of the World. It will just take time for them to get to a point where they have Internet access and they discover Wikipedia. The discovery part is not going to be too difficult judging by how prevalent Wikipedia entries are in search results. The Internet part will take longer but it will happen as market forces demand it.
No.
The test of notability in Wikipedia is "if it has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject" (Source: WP:N). This definition is not only not something rashly invented "in [a] blind rush to become a 'real' encyclopedia", it is central to the way Wikipedia works.
You see, Wikipedia is a compendium of existing knowledge, not original research, or unpublished facts, arguments, or concepts. Material must be verifiable, with citation in reliable, third-party published sources. If there *is* no information on reliable sources independent of the subject available -- our definition of "notable" above, remember -- then there is nothing of which an encyclopedia article can be comprised.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
> I am annoyed about how they're trying to rid of trivia sections.
The actual guidelines say (or said last I checked) that the information in trivia sections are better rewritten in the main body text, but that trivia sections can be a good way to get started.
But a lot of editors seem to think trivia is bad, and doesn't belong in an encyclopedia. Which is madness, the main use of encyclopedias are as sources of trivia.
There are plenty of things that are barely touched on wikipedia and are still full of stubs. Literature. History. Geography. All its done is compiled everything easy to google, and of interest to computer enthusiasts...
The stats are misleading because in so, so many cases someone created a stub and left it out to die. I'm guessing there are 100 stubs for every real article, and the stubs are just google bait.
More and more people start to realize that wikipedia is not a repository of global knowledge but restricted subset of it.Original research and non-notable articles are excluded.Alot of material is deleted.
Plus the policies are keeping the users at check.
All it creates an impression that Wikipedia is not
what the editors(not users) want,and they leave.
Wikipedia will remain useful for number of years before the inevitable decline.
All it requires is clone of their database and
better policies,attracting enough active editors.Wikipedia content will outlive the site for quite some time.
No it doesn't. Almost all numbers related to wikipedia are very power-law ish. Most of the edits (by count) are done by the top few of the users. If they sleep in the editing rate drops like a rock. If everyone but the top 2000 or so quit at once that probably wouldn't result in a 20% reduction.
Wikipedia is a case study example of the inverse of Tycho's xbox live hypothesis. While internet + anonymity + microphone = idiot, it turns out that internet + hits + glimmer of respectability = gigantic ego.
:(
The net wikiresult is that the things that a lot of us used to look at wikipedia for have either been deleted or are facing deletion because of people who are doing SOMETHING IMPORTANT on the wikinet, we foolish mortals who just want an extra three paragraphs in plot summaries or the release date of some obscure game simply can't understand the wikigreatness of what wikipedia is.
In some places trimming is badly needed. I've seen articles with whole paragraphs repeated word for word.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Wikipedia has Jumped the Shark ..
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Wikipedia is in dynamic equalibribium. There are spammers, messers, advertisers, and people using it as a soapbox. The damage from these people can only be kept acceptably low if there are thousands of people who care enough about the content to keep fixing and improving the pages.
BTW, slashdotters wanting to contribute might be interested in the Free Software Wikiproject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Free_Software
Or the Free software portal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Free_software
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
What's your wikipedia user name, so we can stalk down every single change you've made and make absolutely sure that none of them remain, you whiny little punk who dares question the inner circle.
Also, we'd like to leave uncouth suggestions about the marital status of your mother on your user's Talk page.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
OK, I'm a big fan of wikipedia, though I've never edited it. So I've been concerned with a lot of the stuff I hear about allegations of clique-ish behavior, and abuse of power, and the like on the part of cliques or cabals of admins.
I've read a lot on David Brandt's wikipedia watch, looked at wikitruth.info, and just spend the last half-hour or so skimming through Parker Peters' LJ, and here's the thing: I notice a lot of broad generalizations, a lot of references or links to stuff that seems like very, very, ambiguous information, and a shortage of facts. What I'm consistently looking for, and not finding, is a timeline of point-by-point, "just the facts, Ma'am" type of description of bad behavior on the part of wikipedians.
For example, on Parkerpeters.livejournal.com, we have this:
"Lie #1: "It's the message, not the messenger."
This is often quoted by administrators claiming they are "fair" on a given topic.
Unfortunately, the opposite is shown by the evidence at hand. If the message was to be dealt with fairly, administrators would not be in such a rush to hunt down "suspected sockpuppets" constantly, vandalizing user pages and terrorizing new users while claiming they are "sockpuppets" of some long-lost grudge."
Um, why the vague generalizations? If it is in fact the case that people are being targeted for unpopular messages or unpopular points of views, why not cite specific cases of "I suspect that editor X disagreed with my point of view on topic Y (George Bush, climate change, the validity of postmodern literary criticism) and that lead to A, B, and C bad behaviors, which I suspect is why I'm banned"?
Am I missing something, or am I seeing the tail end of a personality conflict that some people are trying to confuse with inherent flaws with Wikipedia?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Wikipedia needs to build out tiers of content:
Top-tier: notable, professional, encyclopedic, widely desired content
mid
mid
low
low
minutia
basically, have articles start at the bottom, and work their way up the tiers by community consent, edit history, and most importantly: internal consistentcy. This will allow a resurgence in interest in the concept. Each person on the planet can have their own minutia page on themselves, each and every party that happened, each and every minute detail of life can be cataloged - and those that become interesting, they go up the chain and eventually become Wikipedia articles.
to a population curve. Very slow growth at first, becoming exponential, and finally curving to a gentle more-or-less linear slope. The derivative looks like a bell curve. The graphs provided by Wikipedia appear to fit what I would expect as the derivative of a highly neurotic population curve. I bet if you graph the numbers that the graphs are supposed to represent (i.e. edits, articles, etc), as opposed to the increase thereof, you get a population curve.
tl;dr: Wikipedia is not dying. It's just becoming mature.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Another downward trend on the english wikipedia seems to be that the overall article review system is suffering from several issues, including a general lack of reviewers to review articles for Good & Featured status, an almost total absence of reviewers at the peer review stage (except for the automated reviews by bots, which are pretty much useless), not to mention a constant state of bickering and infighting between reviewers of FA & GA articles. There is some current discussion to try and work on many of these issues; but it's too early to tell if it's making a difference.
A number of people have commented on the Pokemon articles as an example of how Wikipedia devotes extensive coverage to every conceivable subject, however, the recent trend seems to be to merge them all into giant lists with only a paragraph each, and all of the Pokemon featured/front page articles have since been de-featured, e.g. Bulbasaur. One of the things I've really enjoyed about Wikipedia is that you can look up information on TV show episodes, characters from fictional universes, and anything topic that people would be interested tends to have some decently organized content. The fact that they're trying to cut down on that is a shame, they may not be able to scholarly research on Wikipedia but they can do trivia better than anyone.
I only half-believe this and have not done the detailed digging needed to really validate it. But I'll throw it out there for discussion:
Wikia is a service that allows any niche group to create their own sort of "wikipedia" for their topic. And unlike Wikipedia, it is for-profit, and clearly belongs to Jimmy Wales.
Wales seeded the admin system on Wikipedia and continues to be influential in its direction. It is in his direct interest if Wikipedia takes the "notability" route to its logical conclusion--pushing out all sub-topics or verticals that are not popularly or widely known. The associated interest groups are then welcome to come to Wikia to set up their knowledge base. Only now it will generate profit and fame for Jimmy Wales, instead of the Wikipedia Foundation. Plus, these types of small, focused, not-widely-known areas of knowledge are ideal points of attack against Google's search results. Getting them into the Wikia fold helps feed the new "Google killer" search engine project.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think this is the best idea I ever read on how to improve Wikipedia. Their struggle for "verifiability" is only harming their coverage without being truly reliable. I had a paragraph removed once, because all the reference I could cite was a very rare paper book and an editor was unable to locate a copy of that book.
Perhaps articles could be labelled with a number indicating its degree of reliability. In the top tier, only acknowledged experts in the field would be allowed to rate the articles. In the lowest field anybody would be able to do it. "Yes, I know Jack Brown, the lead singer of the band 'The Nobodies', and I was present when he stumbled on the microphone cable".
I see what you mean, but it sounds very complicated. The internets needs to work more semantically, like, to balance for the stupid people.
Trying to write for wikipedia is like having a lobotomy while working in an office filled with squabbling lawyers shouting at you.
If I'm going to take the trouble to write something, I'd rather not have to deal with it being ripped apart by a bunch of programmer's who think "neutrality" means it sounds like Spock wrote it.
On the other hand, if you I need to know something about anime, mathematics, or the current drift of the Republican spin machine, wikipedia is the first place I check.
Wikipedia will always be famous as the first application of wiki technology to make wikis popular, but as time has gone by, the ridiculous behavior of users and administrators has exposed not only flaws in the technology, but also how those flaws make a straightforward wiki unsuitable for such things as an encyclopedia.
I have nothing against wikis, nor against Jimbo Wales, and indeed, I believe there's a strong chance whatever service succeeds Wikipedia might actually come out of Wikia, but the site itself will eventually pass into obscurity the way others such as Yahoo and Geocities have.
I'm definitely in total agreement. There are just too many processes. It's not fun to work on Wikipedia any more. Newer and less clueful editors are signing up, but I don't see articles getting improved.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm afraid, however, that those who deal with background politics will remain, and good contributors will leave. Thus Wikipedia will die a slow and painful death, and leave the world poorer for it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But then, I am a hardcore inclusionist.
Good job. Deletionists do more harm than good. Please continue.
That would mean that it wasn't trivia then.
We don't need quantity. We need quality.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The number of edits to Wikipedia has actually tripled in the last six months!
The number of such references can quite quickly reach the point of diminishing returns, but I consider a sane amount of such to be useful, especially for people from the outside of the given popular-culture subset (e.g. non-Americans).
We need a reasonable compromise between quality and quantity. Either alone is not sufficient without the other.
I don't disagree. See my [[Exploding whale]] article. I don't believe that what you refer to is trivia though, that is useful information about a cultural phenomenon.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I did look at the actual stats, and I see no trend that the growth "stopped" or is "declined". Instead I see it soars in August and return to a more normal growth in September. E.g., edits in the month is 7.40M (May), 7.68M (June), 7.90M (July), 8.80M (Aug) and 8.20M (Sep). September figure is growing quite normally if we neglect the August figure. I believe there is nothing bad going on, students just go on with their life after their summer vacations.
I've made substantial contributions on a variety of fronts, both technical and idiosyncratic, and I would say 75% of my contributions remain largely unscathed.
I think there is a need to delete stuff, but they go about it the wrong way. There needs to be a place you can go to find out what was previously deleted, so you don't make the mistake of adding it again, and then having it immediately deleted again. It's a preposterous system as it now stands. Every article needs to maintain a permanent record of material decreed non-notable, or not yet sufficiently notable. A lot of the pre-babble could accumulate there.
This material would not be searched by search engines, or by default from the Wikipedia search bar, but it needs to be searchable by anyone desiring to contribute material not found on the "front page" of an article.
I have to wonder if this downtick in Wikipedia activity corresponds with the end of the Sopranos. It could be just the pop-culture where there isn't much left to add.
For technical content, every third article I visit strikes me as having major holes, usually because the article was written from a single vantage point. For example, Wikipedia contains extensive information on prescription medications, but the vast majority of the pages don't provide even the date of discovery or commercial introduction. Historical information is far too thin in most articles. I also think that additional intellectual property status should be incorporated in the majority of pages where the subject matter intersects with commercial interests.
Most of my contributions tend to be better referenced than the existing text of the article I modify. Sometimes I wonder if anyone ever checks those references. Of the material that I've had immediately deleted, there have been two situations. The first is that the page is "owned" by someone who thinks the page should be a certain way. With those people, you often find yourself in and edit conflict within the first half hour. Early on I learned to pack up my bags and edit elsewhere at the first sign of territoriality.
The more interesting case is where I go to the trouble to improve the exposition so that someone with less expertise in the subject area can put things into a proper perspective. This is similar to the problem with obviousness in the patent system. Some things have no documented prior art, because everyone in the field considers the matter beneath mention. My querulous other experienced a similar frustration doing a research project on government resources in the area of ecology and the environment. Once a program runs out of money, the government web site becomes instantly frozen in electronic amber, with no edit since the previously elected government. If you are in the industry (of helping the government waste taxpayer money), you know which programs have lived and died. If you are a random citizen searching with Google, you don't, and you waste a lot of time navigating the deadwood before the penny drops.
There are plenty of Wikipedia pages with a lot of formal content about computer buzzwords and architectural classifications from past eras that have entirely outlived their usefulness now that computers are 1000 times faster, give or take a few Cheerios, but the article fails to point this out. Show up at a job interview within the IT industry, you would come across as a clueless dust bunny spouting some of that terminology. Yet I've had several efforts to add text to the effect that the industry no longer thinks in these terms instantly deleted as unspeakable POV. But hey, the patent office granted the "one click" patent because apparently no one got around to writing down that this was bloody obvious, so why should the average Wikipedian be any smarter?
One thing people consistently fail to recognize is that the growth of content has vastly outstripped the ability of the MediaWiki software to evolve in pace. Many of the political problems that now exist in Wikipedia c
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
A lot of people have expressed frustration[weasel words]. With the brow-beating of a few Wikipedians insisting on burdening articles with improvement requirements when they don't like using reversions, deletions, and abuse of the rules.[citation needed] Making the whole collaborative process a flame war in which he who has the most free time wins.[who said this?]
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The data in the linked Wikipedia user subpage aren't necessarily showing an accurate view of the situation; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis#More_data for some more data that was generated by me (and in the section below, data by another user) to try to corroborate or raise doubts about the data used to make the claims. My data shows that edit rate was dropping off from about April to August, but is possibly picking up again (although there isn't really enough data since August to tell for certain) - note that my data takes into account all edits, even reverted edits, deleted edits, and edits not to articles. The data (due to Wikipedia user Gmaxwell) in the section below that take only edits to articles (which the software thinks of as 'namespace 0', to explain the title of that section) into account show much the same pattern. Gmaxwell has also raised doubts about the sampling method that Dragons flight used. So although the current edit rate is lower than the record edit rate, it's certainly reasonable to believe that new records may be set in the future.
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It was the cover story of Fast Company in April. Also an interesting profile of Jimmy Wales, who apparently would like to be considered among the top innovative tycoons like Jobs, Gates, Branson, Sergei and Larry, etc.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I contributed some articles to Wikipedia back in the day. Nowadays they would be rejected, or some jackass would add [citation needed] to every third sentence and say that original content is inappropriate.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
remember odp? dmoz? They were an free and open directory started back in the day when yahoo wanted money for listings. However, category editors have egos, some had no ethics, and it turned into a game. Some editors charged money for a link to be added. Some blocked competing web sites from being listed. And many ignored the backlog of submitted links. Meanwhile, google came along, yahoo stopped charging, and dmoz lost influence.
Today, I received a vandalism warning from wikipedia for a defamatory comments. It was the first one I've ever received, and evidently it will be the last one since the next time my ip will be banned. Now, I like to first post goatse links on slashdot as much as anyone, and if it was defamatory, I'd be the first to acknowledge it, but my edit was factual, documented, on-topic, and not controversial. If people are banned for trying to improve wikipedia, then something is wrong.
And if that's happening, then it's no surprise they're dying. Why should I bother correcting or improving an article if an ego-driven editor gets his kick by blocking ip ranges?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The site you cite
Have I told you lately that I love yooooouuu?
=S
The time came to end the open content revolution which was driven by participation common people's soviet. It's right time for the party to nominate the members of the review board for the each projects.
The board members have to be experts on the subjects and have to probe the specialty. The duty of the members are to keep the quality of the articles and to expand the coverage of the project. We have to collect honors to the members of the board of wiki projects.
Wikipedia has followed the trajectory of all such inspired movements, from Christianity to the counterculture to skateboarding: First, an inspired group of exceptional people, each of whom can see the final goal and guide their actions thereby; then, their accomplishments catch the imagination of the vast majority who don't quite "get it", so that their contributions have to be managed and coordinated, and bureaucracy sets in; then the final stage, when incompetents, people whose thought processes are disordered for one reason or another, and outright criminals and sociopaths see new, relatively undefended territory to move into.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.