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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."
"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.
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.
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...
Yes, the scratch the itch factor is starting to go down. It's quite impressive to note the way that Wikipedia now does genuinely contain a reasonable % of all topics (and yes, even Pokemon).
I'd actually say that Wikipedia has been far more successful as an example of a collaborative Free product than Linux has. Wikipedia actually dominates the market now.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
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
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.
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.
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
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!
On a serious note, maybe a sub-page of trivia for an article where the main article page randomly displays one trivia factoid, and if you're REALLY interested you can go to the trivia page?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
...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
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...
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.
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.
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.
Of course there are, many things. However, the Wikipedia editors have, in their blind rush to become a "real" encyclopedia, put up barriers of "notability". In practice this means that articles often get deleted if the editor doesn't consider them important ("notable").
Dead-tree encyclopedias have a bar of notability because they have limited size and primitive searching facilities (alphapetical order), so a non-notable article takes space which could be better used on something more important, while increasing the size makes the whole thing more expensive and harder to search. Wikipedia has in practice limitless size and advanced searching facilities (internal links and full text search), so adding an article always adds value.
There is the fundamental difference between online and dead-tree encyclopedias; it is a pity Wikipedia hasn't quite grasped this.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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."
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.
Consider if Wikipedia contained a page on every sucky band ever formed by three teenagers in dad's garage. So now you have 300 articles titled some variance on "Rock Pwnage (band)". Who's every going to ever look them up? Answer; no-one. And even if they did, how would you ever know which one is the one you're interested in reading about? And say, god forbid, one Rock Pwnage makes it big and people actually do want to look their page up. They have to find their way through 299 other near-identically titled pages full of non-entities. You think people are going to continue using Wikipedia if every search produces results that are 99% garbage about people who no-one, other than their mothers, would ever be interested in?? That's what myspace is for! There is the fundamental difference between online and dead-tree encyclopedias; it is a pity Wikipedia hasn't quite grasped this. So why do they have a policy that says exactly that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia
The problem with that is their definition of "sources that are independent of the subject". They don't count blogs, even well-known and respected blogs (for example, Joystiq), as valid sources so things like Fanboys Online (a webcomic) or The Noob (another one) are deleted, even though they shouldn't be.
Personally, I used to be a frequent contributor to Wikipedia, but having to justify every article I was really interested in editing to some powerhungry asshole out for an ego boost got really tiresome, so I stopped. I know other people with the same experience, and would be willing to bet that this experience represents a large chunk of Wikipedia's decline.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
### Notability is just another spam filter.
The problem is that notability is far to often used as a wildcard to delete articles over topics the admin simply no clue about. I have seen this happening with a lot of articles on open source games, a whole bunch of them got deleted or threatened to be deleted, sometimes even with the topic locked afterwards (hint: if an article exists in many different languages and people are continually trying to recreate it, there might actually people interested in the topic). Now some month later the idiot admins seem to have been overturned and all the articles are back again. But doing uphill battles against admins just isn't fun. When a random idiot is doing vandalism that can be annoying enough, but when the admins turn out to be the bigger problem, something is fundamentally wrong.
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".
You're wrong. Notability is a very important restriction. And it will very rarely remove something that is actually important. In order to meet notability, somebody reliable needs to write something about the subject. That's an incredibly small hurdle to jump over. And it there to prevent any idiot from spreading lies. What's to stop someone from setting up a website and just randomly making up falsehoods?
Furthermore, to claim that Wikipedia is of unlimited size is incorrect. Oh, technically, a vast number of articles could be created. But there are only so many good editors, and they need to spread across articles. If Wikipedia had 100 times as many articles, and the same number of active editors, each article would get massively less attention. That would result in an encyclopedia that is, overall, much lower quality.
And the articles that get deleted are generally of no real importance. Small organizations, neologisms, unimportant people. These aren't the kind of things that people are going to be looking for in an encyclopedia.
I assure you, a great many people on Wikipedia "grasp" your point of view; they just disagree with it.
Let me guess, your band's article got deleted?
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
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.