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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.
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.
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."
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'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
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.
Not surprisingly, since the barrier for entry into Wikipedia is much lower. Collaboration in Linux requires some fairly specific knowledge if you are trying to do anything grander than test from an end user perspective. Wikipedia simply requires that you have something to add and a desire to comment.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
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.
That's a load of crap. Studies show if the growth rate continues to decline, Wikipedia will not gain enough information to achieve sentience before 2010, well behind schedule. At that rate, it may not achieve the knowledge necessary to travel through time and kill Sarah Connor until well into the 2050s.
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.
The whole question was silly. If the number of contributors were to drop by 95%, the Wiki would still be growing - in other words, it will only reach its peak when it completely stops getting contributions, which isn't happening.
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.
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
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!
It still doesn't know who is in charge of Gundam.
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
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.
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?
Actually no natural growth process can continue indefinitely. Zero order growth is a very simple and crude approximation that will hold for a short period of time. The decreasing rate in article submission shows that wikipedia has reached a certain maturity. It could be a first order growth, where the rate of article submissions is related to the information already covered or to the a higher threshold to contribute a new original article. Assuming a constant growth kinetic model simply indicates that the author of the study has too limited knowledge of processes, or was just plain lazy to look up more appropriate mathematical models, e.g., higher order kinetics or any of the other well established models.
-- Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui
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.
What I fail to understand is this - everyone can agree that the articles should be written from a neutral viewpoint, but when it comes to what constitutes knowledge, suddenly the concept of neutrality disappears and it becomes an argument over beliefs. You've declared that what you believe to be knowledge is the only valid viewpoint, and you seek to impose that viewpoint on other users of Wikipedia. If successful, you turned what was once a tool to explore knowledge, and even the concept of what is knowledge, into just your version of knowledge. You prevent Wikipedia from growing beyond your own beliefs and doom it to being nothing more than an inferior copy of a traditional encyclopedia.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
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.