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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Thing is, dishonest articles and misleading text won't get fixed. I gave up contributing to Wikipedia when I had my editing slammed left and right from "regulars" selectively applying rules in order to shut out the unpopular. "No original research" only applies when your assertions are against consensus, regardless of how accurate, "You don't own the article" only applies if you're outnumbered by a bunch of others that do own the article, "Bias" only when you're striving for uniformity.
I mean, I'm not even talking about abortion or rape or anything... look at the fight over "XOR" vs. "Exclusive-OR". Sheesh.
http://www.wikitruth.info/ has some info... but don't take it's word on it. Give editing Wikipedia a shot and see the shitstorm it can raise.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
It still doesn't know who is in charge of Gundam.
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.
The problem is mostly with the other users. The administrators are a problem in that they help implement many pointless bureaucratic guidelines.
I'm a librarian and professional writer who has contributed to Wikipedia over the years, but have gotten tired of the bullshit created by other users. At this point I'm contributing more to other online open wiki projects. Wikipedia has lots of excellent content, but some pages just can't be changed because some people have staked them out as their turf and refuse to allow any edits. I know of pages that are clearly POV and inaccurate, but if I or anybody else tries to revise them and significantly change them, we'll be baited into violating the "three revert rule" or otherwise be harassed by the resident zealots.
Wikipedia itself has implemented some stupid policies and some unintentionally hilarious policies. The decision this year to start removing images from thousands of pages because of copyright concerns is just insanity to the nth degree. Whoever made this decision doesn't understand current copyright law, because their policy about images is even more draconian than the current draconian copyright law. Many images have been removed from pages that aren't violating any copyrights. But if Wikipedia admins want to piss on their product with stupid decisions like this, then they'll only drive more people away.
My favorite hilarious example of current Wikipedia stupidity is the warning tag attached to many pages that says "Trivia sections are discouraged by Wikipedia." Uh, guys, Wikipedia is primarily an encyclopedia about popular culture. Putting these warnings over trivia sections that won't be removed is just silly. The trivia sections are why people use Wikipedia. Another funny development is the proliferation of tagging of pages for being "stubs" and poorly sourced. Hello? After years of criticism, Wikipedia is just now getting self-conscious about its veracity? Funny!