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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."
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
Actually, the answer is slightly more complex than that. A year ago, I would have left to Wikipedia's defense, and I would have been right to do so. However, while there are a lot of things to write about, people aren't really doing this. What would really be interesting would be the amount of edits to the Wikipedia namespace, as opposed to the main article namespace. It's the internal conflicts, navel-gazing and meta editing that is killing Wikipedia.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
Wikipedia has already hit a decline. Basically, it's too much of a pain-in-the-ass to work on the darn thing. There's tons of rules and regulations. Talk pages aren't fun. The articles are routinely turned into crack-pot crap in a misguided effort to be fair. There is too much emphasis on being factually correct and not enough on being timely. The get 'er done attitude that used to pervade is gone, replaced with a fear about lawsuits because some knucklehead or other is not actually dead yet.
Like an large organization, wikipedians who used to contribute have been replaced by web-bureaucrats. Like bureaucrats everywhere, efficiency and style is replaced by pointless efforts at standardization and supporting documents. Certainly, these are important, but they have reached the point where they are stifling ideas.
It's fine for me to say all this, but what's the solution? It's easy to condemn but hard to fix.
If Wikipedia wishes to fix all this, it must slash the number of those with administrator power. It should remove the focus on formulas and documentation. Let Wikipedia revert back to the "wild west" anything goes culture that first made it special. Wikipedia is not a reference, it's a starting point. Treating it like a genuine reference kills what makes it special.
And if it contains more pages about Simpsons episodes than social sciences, so what? It'll eventually work itself out like any open market. Jimbo and crew should just take their hands off, lean back, and see what happens.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
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.
If no articles are added or updated, then that may increase pressure on a reader to contribute and bring up the rate of contribution.
When people read a wiki article and find that it's gone out of date or need new additions that person can potentially be the one to rectify the situation. If they read it and find that it knows as much or more than them, they of course won't have anything to add and won't contribute.
If people get tired of background politics and excess bureaucracy in wikipedia, they'll leave...which frees up the landscape, correcting the situation and so on and so forth.
There's a potential equilibrium here and a decline in contributions does not necessarily represent a fundamental change to the forces that maintain it, it's probably just normal fluctuation. I don't see anything replacing wikipedia or eliminating the benefit that is gained from its existence. I don't believe wikipedia has run out of money yet.
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.
### 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.
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.