Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Approaches Its Limits
Reservoir Hill writes "The Guardian reports that a study by Ed H Chi demonstrates that the character of Wikipedia has changed significantly since Wikipedia's first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007. While the encyclopedia is still growing overall, the number of articles being added has reduced from an average of 2,200 a day in July 2007 to around 1,300 today while at the same time, the base of highly active editors has remained more or less static. Chi's team discovered that the way the site operates had changed significantly from the early days, when it ran an open-door policy that allowed in anyone with the time and energy to dedicate to the project. Today, they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away. 'We found that if you were an elite editor, the chance of your edit being reverted was something in the order of 1% — and that's been very consistent over time from around 2003 or 2004,' says Chi. 'For editors that make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 all the way up to about 15% by October 2008. And the 'onesies' — people who only make one edit a month — their edits are now being reverted at a 25% rate.' While Chi points out that this does not necessarily imply causation, he suggests it is concrete evidence to back up what many people have been saying: that it is increasingly difficult to enjoy contributing to Wikipedia unless you are part of the site's inner core of editors. Wikipedia's growth pattern suggests that it is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out. 'As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power.'"
Not to knock golf, fishing, spoiling the grandkids or catching the early-bird special, but I could think of worse ways of spending one's retirement time than editing and writing articles for an encyclopedia.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
If you have a 25 percent probability that your edit will be reverted, why bother? Coupled with abuse of the "notability" concept for new articles, Wikipedia has gone from "the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit" to the "encyclopedia of things we like and some people may edit."
--
BMO
[citation needed]
The rate at which new articles has decreased; I would hardly call this surprising. The coverage of Wikipedia is so great that the only place for new articles are more obscure concepts and greater specialization of existing ones.
.
Then add the pile of people doing snow jobs, Steven Colbert stunts, reversion wars, etc, and I don't think its surprising at all.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
An entire article about a british financial journalist and author was deleted recently by some french guy because he'd never heard of her. Well duh, he's from France, she's an english language journalist, why would he have heard of her? Until these sorts of idiots are weeded out I'll keep wikipedia at arms length and double check everything.
I, for one, welcome our Wikipedia Information Nazi overlords.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
FTFA: "...the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power." ...assuming anyone actually _wants_ said power.
What kind of opportunities can arise from certain groups/governments getting their people inside the main editing groups? Articles can be subtlety edited to be bias to certain ideals and points of view that would not be questioned. Every time I hear news about Wikipedia it starts to sound more and more likely.
I've had stuff reverted which I've known to be 100% true (because it was about some software I personally wrote) and yet some muppet halfway across the world who probably knows next to nothing about the software thinks its wrong because theres no other source to verify against. In the end I just kept re-adding it until he gave up but it really pissed me off and I suspect I'm not alone.
I will correct grammar in a rare article now, but that's all. I'm not in the inner circle -- therefore, it's not worth my time to fight for anything.
It's not just numbers of articles. Articles are shrinking. Trivia sections get eliminated if not integrated in the rest of the article in order to conform with "style" (no matter how interesting/surprising the trivia bits are), images that aren't strictly conforming to copyright get purged (even if they probably qualify for fair use -- but someone hasn't made the argument, and bots eventually get the images out), anything controversial gets mired in edit wars or simply deleted, and so on. Some great articles that I've gone back to over time are little more than stubs now. At least the earlier versions are preserved in the edit history.
Success and the desire to make it a more polished product is slowly whittling Wikipedia away and discouraging casual (but knowledgeable) contributors. It's becoming a pain to contribute and more boring to read.
It's more and more like a "real encyclopedia" every day.
I don't see the point in saying the number of new articles has decreased in that last 2 years. It's like saying I'm not satisfied of my 34.347.293 volumes enciclopedia because it grows only 2 volumes per months and not 4. Wikipedia is already the biggest enciclopedia on earth, nothing compare to it, there are articles about things traditional enciclopedias would never dream to cover such as consumer products, software programms, videogames characters, movies, etc..etc.. I think the number of articles has decreased simply because there aren't so many new topics to talk about and general knowledge has already been completely covered. Wikipedia keeps being one of the most valuable assets of the whole Internet.
Because jackasses can't stop making edits about Obama being the antichrist, bears and elephants fighting with robots in the year 2525, or Metamucil and Clorox mixed together being better than cocaine. This is why we can't have nice things on the internet.
Yep - I've stopped bothering. What's the point of correcting mistakes you see or adding updates when you know they'll just be bounced. And notability being tested by 'has this member of the cabal heard of X' isn't entirely sensible I feel. Shame, the quality and range of info on there is bound to suffer as a result of this.
One of the best benefits was that people could correct the entries of information, but when good / correct information is modified with someone elses agenda, it can be come exhausting having to clean up a mess of bad infomation to spin things a specific way.
I can see why colleges will not allow users to utilize Wikipedia as a valid reference. While there is often very useful and helpful information, it's not reliable that the information will be static from one hour to the next.
I think that more people would be willing to help keep it updated if it wasn't so easily corruptable.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
>>Wikipedia has gone from "the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit" to the "encyclopedia of things we like and some people may edit."
Pretty much. Elitism on the part of the core editors combined with a provincial desire to have articles "their way" combined with healthy doses of fucktardery has basically made me give up on contributing to wikipedia.
Case in point:
I went to an article, saw that it was missing ISBN numbers for the books the subject was written.
I looked up the ISBN numbers, and added them to the bibliography.
The core editor who claimed it as part of his domain reverted the edit. Within a matter of seconds; certainly less than a minute. No comment on the revert.
I waited a day, added the ISBN numbers again. He reverted the edit again, again no comment.
I tried it a third time, then left a notice on his user page telling him that he shouldn't be acting like that.
One of his admin friends came onto his user page, reverted out my warning to him, said there was no evidence the editor was rejecting edits arbitrarily (even though I'd linked the reverts in the notice), and that I essentially shouldn't say such things to my betters.
So yeah, I waited a month, did it again, and they were accepted without comment. Because, you know, there's nothing controversial about ISBN numbers. :/
But that was enough for me. Wikipedia is an incestuous cesspool.
I have been saying for some time, the historical significance of Wikipedia will be as an extremely well documented social experiment, rather than as an encyclopedia.
It was a genuine attempt to create a new way of gathering and ordering human knowledge, but ultimately it failed to overcome the problems in the society that it occupied. Petty politics and corruption ate away at the original vision. I am not intellectually lazy enough to just shrug and say 'human nature' - I think there is more to it than that.
Wikipedia, like the rest of the Internet, might appear to be a new cultural space but the fact remains that everyone who contributed to it still occupies a real world cultural space. Real life Democrats are wikipedian democrats. Real life creationists are wikipedian creationists. Technology itself doesn't let you outrun who you are, so ultimately the same conflicts that make real life debate and conflict suck made Wikipedia suck as well.
I'm hoping, for the sake of the web and for the sake of Wikipedia itself (a victim of its own dominance; everyone wants access to the first hit on a Google search of their pet topic) that something else displaces it. Having a single, flawed, starting point for finding out information on the Internet (as many people do with Wikipedia) reduces its utility for research.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
when the pot and kettle mutually deny their own existence.
I stopped contributing to Wikipedia years ago. If you write an article, no matter how well-written, there's a good chance over 9,000 deletionists will pop up and go "HURR HURR NOT NOTABLE" and either speedy delete, prod, AfD, or some combination of the above. Those who cannot create instead focus on destroying.
Compromise, however, is difficult to achieve because everyone has a different perspective of what's a good point of compromise. Wikipedia works that way -- as does my U.S. of A. -- but there's always going to be times when that compromise is being made in favor of one perspective over another for a long enough period of time to alarm the peeps. Hopefully, "balance" will be restored (though nothing is ever truly and completely balanced) to a point that is generally acceptable to the most interested parties.
Harold
The problem with wikipedia is that these regular editors are extremely fussy about changes and take control of articles - I may come along, correct an error in something I know very well and think 'that's my part taken care of' only to have the one guy who's basically taken control of the article revert a few hours later because I didn't add yet another reference to the bottom of the page citing this new information. It may not be more significant than anything else on the page but this page has become that editors article (unless it's a large popular article) and if it doesn't have a reference for each point, they're not accepting it. Also see [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:J.K._Rowling/Archive_06#Pronunciation]this[/url] storm in a teacup.
Wikipedia learns what Everything-2 learned 10 years ago. Details at 11...
It's unfortunate that you made the subject of the comment what you did... Because you're likely to get modded as a Troll even though you speak the truth.
Actually what it really means is that a few editors have amassed all the power (much like a few people amass all the power in the government). This problem has been around for a while. I personally stopped contributing after they kept deleting the the article on the stolen sidekick. Its been reduced down to just a few lines in some other article.
There is of course Deletionpedia, but it looks like their bots aren't always on top of the situation. Several of the articles I've tried to find there weren't saved in time.
It's a shame, since Wikipedia could be so much more that the narrow vision of the deletionists.
I think that when one has good information (backed up with valid sources) I see no reason why it should be reverted, even if you are new to Wikipedia or not. And I see lots of work for the individual languages. I think a lots of pages could be translated (I spend my retirement in translating Wikipedia).
This happens even more on some of the non-English versions of Wikipedia. Especially (in my experience) in the pt one. I gave up contributing on that one a couple years ago because of that.
-- SouNerd.com
So I assumed you wrote an article that was deleted? What was the article about? Articles about your backyard garden are certainly not material to be put into Wikipedia....
wikipedia is still the best model for what it does
criticism is always welcome, but criticism without a better model in mind is empty, nevermind if it vouches for dead models of doing something like an encyclopedia
you see a lot of voices that criticize wikipedia because it supplies an open forum for discussing certain topics that certain groups would like a monopoly on, that goes against their party line or a propagandistic agenda. this is of course further ammunition for their criticism, but criticism that doesn't have fair play or freedom of speech in mind, but in fact, the opposite
its the cathderal versus the bazaar, and the bazaar has been found to have price fixing and collusion between vendors and a powerful union at work, possibly corrupt. and yet the bazaar is still superior to the cathedral and the problems inherent in that model
and if wikipedia worsens, and begins to evolve towards the cathedral model as it ages, a new wikipedia-like replacement will emerge. such is life and death. creative destruction. its all good
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have only made a few contributions to Wikipedia, and the experience of having my changes reverted has killed my interest in contributing again.
I'd like to see a new/competing version of the online encyclopedia which attempts to be more inclusive of all information. Rather than removing information because it is not deemed notable, contributions should be rated for how notable and essential they are. However, the less notable information would still be there - it just wouldn't be the first thing to come up in search results.
This could even apply within specific articles. The main article would contain the most important information, and would look much like an article on Wikipedia today. However, more arcane / tangential information on the topic would be available for those who wanted it. They would just click on a link for "all details" or click to expand certain sections of the article.
There are several explanations of what's going on with wikipedia. There's the perception that, based on the amount of information already there, that there's less to do, so the sense of urgency for contributing likely has dropped among potential contributors. In other words, wikipedia is approaching the point to where it is a victim of its own success.
There's the problems with inaccurate information being cited and then very publicly refuted, which is likely engendering feelings of reluctance to be associated with that sort of public failing by potential contributors. Some of these people probably should be discouraged from contributing, given that's how those errors got there, so this is not entirely a bad thing.
Then there's the reason given in TFA, regarding the core group of editors. There very much appears to be an attitude of exclusivity, if not outright elitism, among some of the more outspoken "regular" editors, to the point where a person such as myself who may have some specific knowledge on a particular topic doesn't feel that the reward is worth the effort to fight the system.
There are several topic that are either woefully incomplete (numismatics) or contain both explicit errors and copious errors of omission, presumably in attempt to present a "neutral point of view" (uss pueblo), that there are many opportunities for contribution to existing articles. However, the perception of the effort required to amend an existing article quickly brings me to the conclusion that it's not worth the time needed to do the research simply to have it removed by some editor for no other reason than because I'm not an accepted authority by virtue of not being part of the elite circle.
Why, oh why, do they have to compare a cultural phenomenon (the emergence of an elite caste (sp.?), viz. the Wikipedia editors, those who are "more equal" among the equals) with natural selection? It makes no sense at all. Darwin would make a double take on this one.
Ob. old geezer lament : where are the social science of yesterday? Do these youngsters even know of "methodology" and "skewed metaphors"? (Actually this exact text was found carved in clay on sumerian tablets. I kid you not.)
Ob. disclosure : I haven't read a word of the actual article. But it goes without saying, this Slashdot after all...
Cheers,
Xavier
Do I make sense? Please report if not.
...as Wikipedia matures and common issues get covered. There are fewer "easy" items to add, and editorial standards rise. In the beginning, everyone was new. Now the more casual, less experienced editors are more likely to be reverted, at least until they rise to a higher bar than was required in the beginning. It could be that it's just becoming an incestuous cesspit, but I think increasing coverage and quality are likely reasons.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
"As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power."
Well that's how evolution works. The trolls and casual editors start to die off early without leaving offspring and the elite editors start to reproduce and breed a new super race!
What? Nerds don't have sex...? oh crap...
I edited Wikipedia because I found significant errors and omissions in areas I was familiar with. The articles are accurate enough now. And, yes, I had an edit reverted. After we discussed it on the talk page, I redid the edit, and it was much better the second time.
So, I'd like to propose a completely innocuous explanation for the figures given: the number of casual contributors has gone down because there's a lot less room to go into an article and be an expert. Also, casual contributors very often haven't learned how to make a good Wikipedia edit, and having it reverted is ultimately a good thing. Moreover, with the lesser need for the casual contributor, the proportion of crackpots and vandals has doubtless increased. This could well account for the large number of reverts.
While Wikipedia has definitely changed, it doesn't look to me like it has changed for the worse.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Excellent study. Lots of people have felt this way for a few years now, but this is what science is for: Replacing "gut feeling" with hard facts.
The next step, of course, will be the most interesting: Research into what one can do, how one has to build a community to avoid these problems, and keep it running along the successful path.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Because, you know, there's nothing controversial about ISBN numbers.
If, however, a story had once run in the National Enquirer that the ISBN numbers were gay, not only would they have been included in the article, but three more paragraphs would have been added about them, with supporting citations from overseas versions of the National Enquirer, and a photograph of the ISBN number with some Dewey Decimal number believed to be it's life partner. ...and don't mod me flamebait until you've read the talk pages for Anderson Cooper, Tom Cruise, et. al.
Agenda? nahhh...
It has nothing to do with the "inner core" and everything do with morons who watch their favored pages and revert anything and everything that undoes the axe they ground in it. Most people's time is more valuable than that of the cultists, conspiracy theorists, fanboys, and ideologues who make up the bulk of the editors.
The inner circle's flaw is that they don't enforce standards of credibility, not just of the editors, but of the sources used to cite information into the encyclopedia.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Good because there's too much shit that no one cares about on Wikipedia as it is...
Pay a journalist or magazine to review it? FFS get real. Anyway , all the guy had to do was download the software and run it to check the veracity of my claims but I guess its easier to google for 10 seconds then just press "revert".
[Thing()]{0,l} -> l; [Novelty()]{l,0} -> 0; [Cliquishness]{0,l} -> n^2
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I wanted to write an article about the Solovetskiy Stone, which is a monument to victims of political persecution in the former USSR erected by former Gulag residents right across the KGB headquarters.
I didn't want to create a user - sorry Jimbo, I just don't want to join your fan club. As a form of punishment, I was tormented with like a 17-step wizard with questions such as whether I am writing about a "MUSICAL GROUP, DJ, ALBUM, or SONG". After I finally got to the part where I write my part, it was unceremoniously deleted by the EarWig robot (eh?), because some of the text - basically the address of the place in Moscow - was copy-pasted from memorial.ru. And this is the site with a 10-page article listing the secondary characters in the Final Fantasy world. Sorry, somebody else would have to create this article instead of me and yes, I was shocked at how bad Wikipedia had got.
As more articles approach a reasonably good state, more changes will have to be reverted because they decrease the quality of the article. It's not a bad thing, it's a positive sign.
...Like saying that brown people are actually (regular) white people whose skin color turned darker?
Same thing for gay people, who are actually straight people who are making conscious choice to be gay (perverts) or are afflicted with a mental illness (sick).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's simple.
Wikipedia's original goal was to get as many articles in the Wikipedia as possible.
This has been done. The English-language Wikipedia, at this point, is a summary of all worthwhile human knowledge.
So, now the goal is to make the information Wikipedia has be more accurate. Or, as per Wikipedia policy, better reflect what reliable sources have to say.
So, the big drive has been to update articles to have all information cited. This way, patent nonsense and what not doesn't get in the articles.
At the same time, since Wikipedia has a very high search engine ranking, the other goal is to make sure spammers do not control the Wikipedia's content.
Is Wikipedia becoming a bureaucracy? Hell yes. In an encyclopedia which covers the full range of human knowledge and over a million articles, that is very frequently the #1 listing when doing a web search, we need a very complicated system of policies and procedures in place to minimize conflicts, protect the Wikipedia from spammers (and pathological liars and trolls and loud-mouthed minorities and so on), and to keep the Wikipedia as accurate as we can.
Are there issues with editors on power trips? Hell yes. Since editing the Wikipedia is a volunteer project, there are a lot of editors whose only reward for editing is being able to enforce authority over other users. Do a lot of people dislike the Wikipedia? Hell yes. With the website in the Alexa top 10, something this popular can't help but have a lot of enemies. Heck, if you don't like the Wiki, you're not alone.
Is the Wikipedia a very valuable resource for finding information? Hell yes.
No. It's the encyclopedia you may edit so long as you have "consensus".
I recently decided to edit out a particularly rambling and circular introduction to the Exponential Function. Needless to say, my excision was not taken too kindly. I found myself in a protracted and frankly, surreal struggle to make the article in some way useful for the people who come to read it.
Long story short, my opinions on how best to present the exponential function were labeled a POINT OF VIEW, a major no-no contrary to the higher WP:PRINCPLES. Having found myself lumped in with Holocaust deniers and cranks of every degree, my chances of making further edits to the article were in fact pretty slim. What debate there once again was petered out without any "consensus", which meant I couldn't alter the status quo.
This is at least the fourth time this has happened to me on Wikipedia.
The usual routine is that someone who "owns" the article with throw up a mountain of WP:RULES and WP:TRADITIONS, each more underhanded in intent than the last, in an effort to stonewall you for as long as they can. They can keep this up for months. Any "debates" with the aim to achieve consensus are farcical to begin with, as everyone involved knows that they never, ever reach consensus on anything. Good men get frustrated, demoralised and bored, and leave, letting evil triumph. I do not use evil in a rhetorical way. I firmly believe that the great majority of wiki-lawyers have petty malice and megalomania as their primary motivations rather than concern for the quality of articles.
The Wikipedia page for World War 2 had the start date for the conflict as "Late 1930s" for over 5 months. Five months with a totally incorrect date for one of the most important events of human history because one editor felt things needed to be more "inclusive". I'm all for inclusivity, but stupidity is where I draw the line. The usual farce ensued. The editors set up a Mediation Cabal to reach "consensus" on the issue(Their discussion once again petered out impotently), all while the the obscenity of a start date sat, unmolested for 5 months on one of the most visited pages on the site, no, on the internet. The thought of how its precence may have shifted general human knowledge and understanding of the conflict saddens me.
There is a deep and by now, inoperable rot and the centre of how things are run and done at Wikipedia. The rot began with Jimbo Wales and his simple inability and unwillingness to properly run a project of this scope and importance. As time went by, only the most devious, duplicitous and underhanded of editors prospered and gained control. Now, as the site enters its consolidation phase, the altruism and effort of millions of honest editors has been crushed under the weight of one of the most corrupt and intransigent bureaucracies in the world today.
Wikipedia is rotten from the Top to the Bottom and cannot be trusted for anything, by anyone, for any reason. Even as a reference section. Not even the chemistry and astronomy pages can be relied upon these days,. Things will only get worse as the Wikicrats, Wikilawyers and Wikiticians assume total oligarchical control.
May the Maths Be with you!
I am one of those who edits a page once a month. I have a few pages and topics a like and have added to my watch-list. Most of the reverts I see and do myself are plain vandalism. The remainder are punctuation and a bit of grammar.
I have had few cases of something I thought to be good being reverted. Recently on a page I added a few new facts that had been reported in the news, with citations. They where reverted by a moderator without a comment (I call that rude). After confronting him on his personal page, he argued that he could not read Spanish, therefore could not confirm my citation. Oddly, as I pointed out, the topic was a topic for which you absolutely need to be fluent in Spanish to read primary and secondary sources. Well, after a bit he got a moderator who could read Spanish to check my citations. But did not revert his revert, I had to do it myself.
Did this make me stop contributing to the Wikipedia. NO! It is our duty to confront such morons until they give in.
This is the natural progression of any organization run primarily by leftists.
First you champion free speech when you are in the minority.
Then when you are in the majority you clamp down hard on any dissent.
You justify it by saying you are "in the right" and that contrary "misinformation" will just "confuse" the people.
Just look at any organization that is run by the left and show me the diversity of thought there and how it is tolerated.
In my experience, they come down on no one harder than one of their own flock that has gone astray.
The best example of this is the moderation system on slashdot.
Instead of a well-worded reply to a well worded (but contrary) opinion, it is modded down in a cowardly way (overrated). The goal is to suppress contrary ideas.
This does not speak well for the confidence of the majority - does it?
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
or maybe a remake of an obscure 70s tv show.
If you have a 25 percent probability that your edit will be reverted, why bother?
Well, that means a 75% probability that your edit will not be reverted.
This seems plausible, and in fact expected, for an encyclopedia. To start with, people will be adding articles, and will be adding new material to articles that already exist. As it approaches maturity, there will be fewer new articles to add, and the edits will be disagreeing with things that somebody else wrote.
Further, after the article has been fine-tuned with many edits, there's not going to be much new value to add... but the trolls and graffiti are still going to continue at a roughly constant rate, so the ratio of graffiti-edits to content-edits will go up. So it's not unsurprising that the revert percentage will go up.
I'm not sure that there's anything in the original article that's not obvious.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
because once it became apparent some years ago that wikipedia was emerging as "trusted" source, heaving referenced as independent, neutral, and the like, it became a target to be co-opted. Face it, outside the trivia Wikipedia is very lopsided. I would venture to say that it the article referenced the political leanings of edits it would have been more revealing.
I gave up on Wikipedia over anything but trivia and scientific numbers not subject to change. The majority of it is too slanted in areas of politics, environment, and religion.
Like anything else, opposition exist until it determine how it can best use what it was opposed to to support its agenda. Just like how big energy companies didn't like wind or solar until they were in position to profit. Similar to health care, insurance companies lining up after realizing how much money they could flip in the short term as all the young people not paying for care they don't want suddenly will be paying for care they don't want.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Talk about cherry-picking. In July 2007, China had access to Wikipedia. In June and August , it did not. It would be nice to know how those other months compare.
it plagues each strata/group of the society nomatter what. neither is the internet crowd immune, despite all the openness and equality.
frigging disgusting.
well. if some 20-30 elite fucktards want to kill a huge project, let them do that. someone will 'fork' another online encyclopedia and we will all use that, instead of elitist jerks.
Read radical news here
It's STILL the largest reliable source of free information out there.
There's loads of good new topics which aren't covered in Wikipedia yet. The problem is people don't seem to be interested in writing them up, instead they compete on what everybody else is interested in. I'm not sure when I last had a revert so I guess I must be one of that 'elite'. And yes I do do a fair amount of reverting too. Mainly vandals writing their girlfriends names or parts of their anatomy. Plus there are a fair number of loons. I'm afraid yes I quote wikipedia policy at them, in particular no original research and notability. I say yes what you've written may be true, it's not up to me to judge, but you've got to convince others first by getting it published and people talking about it as wikipedia can't publish your original discoveries. What am I supposed to say, you're cracked - go talk to a lamppost? I don't bother with the current biography articles but editors on them have to be especially careful not to report things without evidence and there are a lot of people trying writing up the latest thing they heard on twitter or whatever. If you want to write on wikipedia think of something a little boring to start with where you're not fighting over Islam or what some movie star did or some pacman character first appeared. There is a truly monstrous list of 'Requested articles' plus an enormous number of stub articles that need developing.
thou discernest my thoughts from afar
Wales is himself, a professed objectivist, and Wikipedia is his society. Ayn Rand fanboys should take note.
Underneath the exterior, its a complete hash of bickering, factionalism, vicious territorial disputes and power struggles. Its policed by a secretive clique that tolerates neither criticism nor dissent. Were it a real life territory of any kind, it would be a hell hole. What is now done with harsh words and moderator privileges would be done with truncheons and bullets. There would be a cult of personality surrounding Wales himself, backed by force, and no personal freedom.
This is how your world would turn out, Randroids. It doesn't matter one iota what you say, or even what you believe, about liberty; the simple fact that you believe you have access to a perfect, immutable truth means your world would be doomed to look like this - because people disagree with you and you think such disagreement is evil.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It should be an absolute defense against an edit if you are matching the information to another authoritative source (ie you can provide the link to the article in say the EB on the item or better yet give 2 sources with the same data)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
wouldn't the rate of addition to any encyclopedic system slow down?
Human knowledge isn't static, but it seems to increase at a lower rate than compiling all that is known into a database.
A mad rush to enter everything that is known, followed by a period of thumb twiddling waiting for new knowledge seems like a pretty natural course of events in the life of an encyclopedia.
First of all, let me surmise that the days where one might replace an entire, well-written article with "lololol these guyse r fagguts" and have it last for more then a matter of milliseconds before being reverted is over, thank goodness for that!
Now allow me to elaborate on that...
I've seen a lot of "The Ever Over-dramatised Wiki Wars!" and there is the odd corrupt editor, it's true, but the real nature of the Wikipedia editor is that they're so afraid of giving into any kind of bias that they've become pedantic, and it's the kind of pedantry one might find in an Accountant. I actually think this is a Good Thingâ.
There are many places where it's easier to simply revert an edit than spend time examining every edit that might or might not be hostile, and I think it's reasonable to revert an edit that hasn't been discussed or even requested first on those grounds, due to the hostile editors out there.
One poster above mentioned adding ISBN numbers to an article, and apparently an evil, faceless editor reverted his edits, making him /sadface. What was not mentioned was whether they actually asked in the discussion page first if they may add these numbers in order to enrich the article, which would make the motives behind the edit known (and the account/IP for the comment and edit are the same, therefore anyone conducting an edit review can known the motivation for the edit).
There are some articles on Wikipedia that I absolutely love because of this pedantry. One such article is one pertaining to the Furry Fandom, and as you can likely imagine there have been people trying to defame that with all manner of ill-considered edits designed to show the fandom in a poor light. These tend to get removed, but every once in a while, someone with a negative view of the fandom will actually come up with verifiable sources, and a properly written edit. They'll ask if they can include such an edit, and whether or not the editors like it personally, they'd include and defend it as though it was one of their own edits.
So I don't think there's any evil or corruption in Wikipedia at all, just a lot of pedantry, and book-keeping, it helps to keep in mind that a lot of Wikipedia editors are like librarians, they like things done by the numbers, and everything kept in order. If you can work within the rules and present your changes to them, then they'll get in. It's no different than a peer review for any written work.
And, in my opinion at least, Wikipedia is better for this pedantry.
For those who wish to spread slander that isn't at all quantifiable, then there's always Uncyclopedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica for their kind. And that's what Wikipedia would have been if the editors didn't give a damn about doing things properly and having a respectable resource.
He ll ow to every one !!!
^_^
I tried to contribute an article about a local person of note, and I had to fight with an editor for a week who kept deleting the article. Not flagging it, not posting messages about how it could be altered to improve content, but outright deleting it. After a few experiences like that, I gave up on contributing to Wikipedia at all.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It's good that Wikipedia's growth is slowing. That's an indication that the job is approaching completion.
Most of the important articles were in the first 500,000. New articles at this point tend to be marginal or unwanted. Here are the last five articles added to Wikipedia:
That's what's coming in right now. Most of the articles being added to Wikipedia at this point are either junk like that, or on very obscure topics. That's why growth is slowing. This is a good thing. Throwing out the trash is a hassle for everyone involved.
You need a whole lot more than that to show whether it's a useful comparison to make. Memetics is not an established field. I have never encountered a reference to memes in my study of Communication, even by students. I have only been aware of them as a pop-scientific phenomenon, the sort of thing that shows up in the pages of Wired.
Looking at (gulp) Wikipedia, I find a link to an article by Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, where he writes:
Lots of metaphors that look nice on the surface break down when applied in depth (infringement=theft anyone?). It is easy to find some similarities between ideas and genes. To be of any value, however, the comparison needs to be done in detail, and the differences between the two phenomena need to be taken into account. Maybe that can be done, and memetics can establish itself as a useful framework alongside semiotics, critical theory, and so on - and show that it has explanatory power in areas the others lack. At this point, it does not appear to me that this has happened.
Then fork it.
"that it is increasingly difficult to enjoy contributing to Wikipedia unless you are part of the site's inner core of editors."
While i have seen errors and places in Wikipedia that i could improve i have never edited it myself, mostly because i have been told stories about how if you post anything you will be emailed in a few minutes by some guy telling you all that you did wrong while adding content.
While i would be more then willing to help improve Wikipedia (one of the best sites on the web in my opinion) their does seem to be a aura or fear and not understanding how one is supposed to do that, that has grown around the site.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
There is nothing "Funny" about The Evangelical War On Science Look the Wikipedia gestapo may step in and stop me from explaining my very serious awareness of things like 'the back of my hand' but at least they aren't mixing pictures of Adolf Hitler and Charles Darwin as if they'd planned the Holocaust together! Conservapedia - The Trustworthy Encyclopedia must in some way just be a sick joke, a flexing of freedom of speech muscles, or as someone else said here already if a scientific person makes a non-scientific person feel silly of less informed the just might go insane and band together into an army of the living undead. Which is GREAT NEWS because we need Christian soldiers to go to Iran and get blasted to pieces thus avoiding the spread of their seed to the general god fearing population. You see people Evolution in action! (Darwin rolls in grave next to Dinosaur bones)
sense of security, like pockets jingling...
Could there not be sort of a sub divisions of this "click" per se, so that scientific stuff does not get mixed in with movies, and someone being able to decide the input on gaming, would not have a say in what the dictation would be for something to do with latin?
I'm surprised that nobody brought this up, although someone did mention that wp will probably be notable in hindsight as a social experiment.
To reference another social experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment (wp, why not ?)
A closed society, given absolute power, discards any moral obligations towards other individuals that are categorized as 'others'. We see this time & time again throughout human history. Is this exclusionary behaviour really a surprise to anyone ?
Every couple months I make a trivial change to an article to correct a serious error. Basically that's the only kind of change that motivates me to contribute - one where a few minutes of my time can help the world at large.
I have about a 50% revert rate. Usually it's for not citing sources. I fully support and agree with the rationale for preferring well-cited works. But when I'm replacing misinformation with what is correct, and the misinformation had no citation either, I can't see how that is a legitimate complaint.
I've edited articles as an anonymous nobody, and haven't had the content revoked. Granted, I haven't started new articles. But, 25% reject isn't so bad, considering the average human's writing capability. People have an inflated opinion of their own ability. Experienced users have less rejects because they are more skilled at formatting articles and are more knowledgeable about the wikipedia point of view. What, do you really expect the average Joe's contribution to be as reliable as a seasoned wiki editor?
The problem with Wikipedia is, that it ignores basic physics for some pipe dream of pseudo-morality.
The core thing is, that there is no such thing as a global truth. Everything and all that we prove with our most rigid mathematical logic, has some axioms at its core, that are still not proven. And below that lies the ultimate "why", that we will never be able to find, because it must have happened "before" the big bang. So some make up stuff like a god. (Which still is no solution, because who created this god then, and where does he live in? Oh, that question is "forbidden"? How convenient. ;)
But it must be clear, that we need to make up some self-lie, or else this open question would drive us crazy. Literally.
Additionally, it's next to impossible, to prove complex things with rigid mathematical logic, based on basic axioms like those of quantum physics.
So we are left with big open holes, with assumptions to plug into them.
And this creates the problem: Those assumptions, because they must be made up, are not the same for all of us. They are relative to the person/group.
First of all, we all have slightly different senses, and therefore, all of our input is by definition hugely biased.
Then, because our brain is a huge accumulator with everything being in interference, those biases are the basis of our "knowledge" that creates our expectations/predictions, and our reasoning.
So while we know that in physical reality, there is only one "truth",
in our own realities, we are unable to prove it, and have to accept that our reality is relative.
This of course makes it impossible, to create *one* article in a global encyclopedia, that is even remotely acceptable by all of us.
But usually, some people just assume their reality to be the absolute and only one, and their views not to be biased. Usually these are very doctrine-based people with a strong self-confidence, most likely massive arrogance, and the expectation that everyone around them hat so accept their reality.
Now if you imagine such a person, sitting in his basement, half-naked, and having nothing else to do but tho live out that delusional reality, to relieve the frustration of being proven wrong every five minutes in their real life, you got the typical Wikipedia admin / chief editor.
And you wonder why everything is locked down now? ^^
What we need is a cascading hierarchy of trust relationship over reality sets, much like in CSS, forming articles that are a set of overlaying edits based on them, and therefore are always fitting. Of course for everyone there will be tons of nutjobs, subscribing to realities that are actually proven bullshit in our own very physics-close reality. But you can not ever force them in something else anyway. You can only invite them into something better, while being able to keep their self-respect, to get them to change their views.
Imagine your personal Wikipedia being made by the edits of the people that you think are the greatest minds ever, and by those of people that they approved of with a specific level of trust.
Done right, this would not even be more work, but actually less. (Try some simulation models with agents of different realities, creating such a knowledge base, and you will see that I am right.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No comment on the revert.
WP:BRD tells what to do whenever you get reverted without comment or if you don't understand the reason given in the edit summary: start a new section in the article's talk page asking for clarification, and then make the edit again a week later if nobody objects. This works because anybody who watches an article also watches its talk page.
I barley look at Wikipedia anymore they have paired down so many articles that it is just boring now. There used to be so many interesting little nuggets of info on Wiki about Warhammer, anime, etc but now their is ntohing. It like the life has been leeched out of it..
Your comment made me curious, and I went looking for some sort of mission statement, the official "this is what Wikipedia is supposed to be" and couldn't find it, which strikes me as odd.
I'm sure it exists somewhere, but it shouldn't be hard to find...
I think the reason why is pretty obvious, but I have no evidence to back it up (except for the fact that I'm a semi-regular editor, like 2-10 edits a month).
Many articles on Wikipedia have become "stable". This means several people have spent years fine-tuning the articles to the point that a large change better be damn good to warrant inclusion. On these stable articles, most changes will be minor edits or vandalism related. We are starting to see the law of diminishing returns in effect - each edit does far less, so casual people have less interest in making edits. There are still plenty of important articles that need work, but the number is fewer than it was a couple of years ago, which drives down the number of edits for everyone.
One reason why regular editors are still making a lot of edits is vandalism. This also explains why the one-off edits are reverted at a high rate. I'd like to see statistics on the number of edits VS the number of reverts for these groups of people.
One poster above mentioned adding ISBN numbers to an article, and apparently an evil, faceless editor reverted his edits, making him /sadface. What was not mentioned was whether they actually asked in the discussion page first if they may add these numbers in order to enrich the article, which would make the motives behind the edit known (and the account/IP for the comment and edit are the same, therefore anyone conducting an edit review can known the motivation for the edit).
How exactly would adding ISBN to an article be anything but an improvement? Are they violating NPoV or something? Is this defending Dewey Decimal against the evil ISBN virus? Or does the page have an alpha:numeric ratio quota they're violating?
This has been done. The English-language Wikipedia, at this point, is a summary of all worthwhile human knowledge.
At least all worthwhile human knowledge of interest to SF fans, Warcraft guild leaders, and antique computer collectors.
If you're looking for information on an Apple II clone from 1984, you're good to go... you got details on slots and card cages and everything. If you're looking for information about a hot air balloon from 2005, you're not going to be so lucky.
"end of sentence.Start of sentence"
Added a single space. And it was reverted.
Fuck Wikipedia.
http://threepanelsoul.com/view.php?date=2007-09-03
In most cases I have encountered it was used in the "it was printed on paper" sense, it didn't matter if the source was trustworthy, a press release or any other incorrect crap, as long as it was paper.
Amen to that. I have encountered this very problem. If I wished to make something citeable, and (therefore true?), all i need to do is cough up the cost of a vanity press print run. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
i'm just looking at the history of this article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DarwiniusDarwinius
it's incredible how much work is being done here to correct vandalism.
Wikipedia is great for big topics, but it is still woefully incomplete at the local/reional level. I've added articles on state and county parks, local (but nationally recognized) museums, and never had much fuss. Maybe because I always make sure there is at least one citation - never hard when you live in the shadow of the mighty NY Times.
... so I don't see this as the end of some kind of fad. In the beginning it was easy for anybody to find articles on popular subjects that still needed lots of work (if they existed at all). However, as time passed and people continued to contribute, it naturally became increasingly likely that any particular subject would already have an article that was relatively complete. Consequently, it will become increasingly unlikely that the average person will be able to continue making as many meaningful contributions.
On the other hand, I spent about three years at WP and have witnessed a lot of impolite, petty and downright childish behavior among some of the most active contributors and administrators. As a result, overall quality is not what it could be. For instance, regarding scientific subjects -- especially biology -- I found it very frustrating that so many people regarded article format and personal interest to be more important than content and accuracy. Once this changes, though, WP will definitely become more valuable, but it will also become even more difficult for the average person to edit without being reverted.
I'd like to see a new/competing version of the online encyclopedia which attempts to be more inclusive of all information.
It exists. It's called Wikia. Wikia has the Star [Trek|Craft|Gate|Wars] wikis, where the fanboys can publish the details of every item ever mentioned in any spinoff comic book. Go there and post away.
In almost no way does it resemble what an actual English-speaking person would write on almost any given subject, even with the qualifier of a neutral point of view.
It uses citations for things like Barack Obama's wedding date.
It has sentences like "The exponential function is written as an exponentiation of the mathematical constant [[e (mathematical constant)|e]] because it is equal to ''e'' when applied to 1 and obeys the basic [[exponentiation]] identity, that is ..."
It has whole paragraphs about the use of incidental pop songs in Smallville.
It's littered with trivia ("On the June 17, 2009, episode of The Adam Carolla Podcast, Lange revealed that he had been sober for two and a half months, had lost 45 pounds and hoped to lose 45 more" -- [[Artie Lange]]) , thinly disguised self-promotion (go read [[Mink Deville]], which simply uses a bunch of fawning quotes to hide its sycophantic POV), fifth-grade compositional say-nothing blather ("The structure known as Ronald Reagan's Birthplace is most notable for being the place where Ronald Reagan was born on February 6, 1911." from the article titled [[Birthplace of Ronald Reagan]]!), and more.
It definitely favors current events over the past, often bizarrely so (the combined articles of [[Death of Michael Jackson]] and [[Michael Jackson memorial service]] are nearly as long as the [[Michael Jackson]] article) and of course, the articles about 17th century playwrights and royalty are inevitably better-written and researched than articles about 21st century entertainers and politicians (ironic in that most of the general research done and text presented for those pieces comes from dead-tree encyclopedias.)
The rules are byzantine, the administration petty and aloof, the slogan inaccurate, the prose awkward, the site inexplicably shallow.
It is the strangest beast on the Internet (yes, even stranger than 4chan.)
Okay, how can you falsify my beliefs : prove a solution, which satisfies these 2 conditions, to the economics information problem, in a world with woefully incomplete information. The 2 conditions are :
1) every individual must act in his/her own intrest at all times.
2) Not only that but those actions must benefit BOTH the individual and society as a whole.
Remember, you must do it in a world with incomplete information. You do NOT know what mines will yield, you do NOT know if the harvest will fail in any given year, and while you do have some control over this, you must survive a total failure of prediction.
(or of course you can prove that you can perfectly predict the world, in that case, I'll take next week's lotto numbers as proof. Surely predicting those is peanuts compared to predicting worldwide economic output with any accuracy)
Now how do I falsify your beliefs ? Because if the answer to that is to prove that this problem is unsolvable for the socialist assumptions (even for welfare states it's unsolveable), then I'm done already.
So since proving that socialism, or things like national health care cannot work, not now, and not ever, is done (and it's ancient history at that) in an economy where wealth is produced and consumed by the same entities (e.g. communism can work in a slavery-based society, or at least it can work better than it has in the last century, it doesn't exactly create a utopia, certainly not for the slaves). Historical "proof" is not proof in the pure sense, but given the ample supply of genocides caused by socialism, it seems relevant because just how wrong socialism goes in practice. What exactly would it take to convince you ?
That's of course the advantage of your beliefs : you do not believe in objective reality. You think like the muslims : you believe that the soviet massacres are a conspiracy against socialism, and by extention, against you personally. You don't believe that what math says has any validity in the real world, for thinking like that would make you that most evil of things : a capitalist. It would show you the sense of work, of creating, of having original ideas and to depend on them. That's positively scary. It's an easy way out to think like you do. The problem, however, is simple : it's destructive. For you personally, and for everyone touched by you.
And if you must think like that and destroy yourself, knock yourself out, it's a free country. But please keep it to yourself and don't push ideologies in America that killed so many millions of Europeans, Asians and Latino's just last century.
Wow, that is something shocking really...
I have seen internet changing revolutions happened right on IRC networks, way smaller (hideouts) than the DALNet with 20-30 users at most. In fact, it is real sad that there is no archive.org for IRC and it will never be because of paranoia and risk of severe abuse which is a very valid reason for it.
Also note the "God tone" in that page you link. "While I am fan of IRC", who the hell are you to decide? There, if you go nuts that way, you will be banned. So... Why bother?
If you dig deeper, it is the stupid elitism which always hurt DALnet. "He" may not like DALnet but thousands (or hundreds of thousands) used it, it is real people, real history, real happenings.
--'As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power.'"--
This seems to happen to every open site when they become popular. If you don't write a lot, then your specialized knowledge on a subject might be lost forever. Then again, here nothing goes away, but hoe do you go about finding it? If you can crack that nut, you would have power beyond belief. Google seems to get the closet to being able to sort the 1% good from the 99% bad even so the user must do a lot of work to get there.
I abandoned trying to edit Wikipedia years ago when I read a Wikipedia article dealing with the ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. It made aberrant claims about all Pharaohs being black, citing afrocentrist "historians" as sole sources, without a single instance of the word Copt.
Turns out however that despite the ridiculousness of the claims in the article and the obvious bias, this couldn't be challenged, as it was the pet article of an afrocentrist but otherwise reputable contributor. See, while the person in question was a valuable contributor, they used Wikipedia as a platform to push their agenda. That gave them a sort of immunity, it's like a reward, you contribute a lot, so you get to have some propaganda real estate. I'm sure that most contributors don't actually use it to push their agenda, but every once in a while you can catch one doing just that, and it's hard to challenge them because their reputation outweighs the qualities of their work.
You just got troll'd!
People who style themselves as "Objectivists," are as you say. They believe in the idea of logic and reason... But they believe that logic and reason can only lead to the conclusion that they are correct. They aren't interested in hearing contradictory data since they've already decided they are right and they believe they have logic on their side.
People who truly seem interested in logical exploration of the world more often seem to call themselves empiricists or scientists or the like. The idea here being that you believe strongly in the scientific method as the way for discovering the way the world works. They are not convinced they know everything or they are always right, they are just convinced in their method from separating truth from fiction.
Just like Slashdot!
I registered once. I made one post that expressed my views on a topic (nothing outrageous - not one of those weird trolls or anything). I just wanted to put my two cents in. Another user disagreed with my opinion, and gave me one negative karma point, thus banning me from posting again for 24 hours, in any topic, not just that one. Thus I post AC so that I can at least post freely, though mostly never get noticed at all. (this post will probably not even be noticed - and should a registered user who is part of the "in" clique disagree, it will get modded down, further reducing its chance of being noticed, acknowledged or discussed)
This is very nearly the same thing. Slashdot, unfortunately has set the standard for this sort of thing. I doubt any other website contribution models will change until Slashdot finally changes its moderation system that allows "in" users to freely censor views, facts, opinions they disagree with or thoughts that disturb them.
A contributor to any participatory website should be allowed to post at least a few times before being banned. Obviously, clearly offensive or illegal material should be removed immediately, but here is the catch: it requires ACTIVE administration. You can't abdicate responsibility for content solely to the users. There is work involved, that is just the way it is.
So Slashdot, step up to the plate, "be a man", take responsibility for your content, for when left to the users, a biased clique with some agenda or other will inevitably take over and stifle free and creative communication.
On the related subject in another article of virtual property: all property is virtual.
When accumulating large amounts of information and carefully written material from thousands of contributors, you have an obligation to preserve the integrity of the content, assuming responsibility for it does exactly that.
Sorry, there is no free lunch.
See also: Bomis
It seems if Mr. Knuth himself found spare time to make corrections to Tex article and actually cared, some jerk would popup and add "original research?" with their own cultural weird WP: things on talk page.
Of course, there is no way to prove it but you can be almost sure.
It has became something like Microsoft. Even if they rm -rf'ed whole windows source, formulated a new kernel, new method of doing things, been really genuinely friendly to open source tomorrow, it would take years (if not decade) to fix their image and you would be still hesitant to run Windows.If Wiki changes tomorrow, it will take a very long time too.
If they ever decide to change, I suggest to use their extensive English knowledge to change "citation needed" to something else to begin with.
An interesting visualization on wikipedia edits.
https://www.clarifiednetworks.com/Blog/2009-06-15%2010%3A52
The video shows how the English, German and Spanish edits are distributed geographically over time, indicated by color.
2 seconds in the video represent roughly one month of Wikipedia history.
Wikipedia has always (yes, since its' inception) suffered from two major problems.
a) Its' policy is terrible.
b) The people running it are a serious problem.
The policy is a continually moving target, with flavour-of-the-month, entirely subjective and arbitrary fads dictating editing style. Edits get rejected because of such vague and ridiculous notions as, "weasel words," or "peacock phrases." One of my edits, to the character bio of John MacClaine from the Die Hard movies, was rejected because it sounded "too much like a magazine article." WTF does that mean?
Another problem is overwhelming bias, particularly in the direction of materialistic/scientistic atheistic bias. The biographical article for Richard Stallman is a good case in point; it's a blatant, totally unrepentant whitewash. Stallman is a lot more controversial than that article makes him out to be; it's not NPOV at all. There were a number of people who for some time were trying to add information about the other side of that particular story, but the article's self-appointed keeper is an individual of the alias Gronky, whose slavish, utterly single-minded worship of Stallman would simply induce pity if it wasn't so disturbing. He has continually deflected every attempt to add links to any material that is in any way critical of Stallman at all, to the point where the people who were trying to add said links have apparently given up.
This type of scenario is also deeply typical for Wikipedia. It's very common for a single individual or small group of individuals to use a particular article as a podium for expressing their view, and only their view, about the given topic, and any attempts to make edits contrary to their perspective will be continually reverted.
The claim that it is "an encyclopedia which anyone can edit," is thus, in practice, a complete lie. You can make an edit, sure; but good luck having it last for more then thirty seconds before one the army of pedantic atheistic fanatics reverts it for some entirely arbitrary reason, that generally makes sense to them alone. A lot of the time they don't even bother citing a reason, now; there's no point. That more than anything else, is the reason why I haven't bothered trying to edit on a regular basis for probably nine months now.
I may be missing something, but this is probably a very GOOD thing for wikipedia. The best place for information in any given field is professional peer reviewed journals in that field. The publication rates in the most prestigious journals are demoralizingly low; some journal rejection rates for 1st submissions are upwards of 95%. Manuscripts that are eventually published often go through several rounds of detailed revision between the authors, editors, and reviewers. And once the article is published it's wide open to be scrutinized by other professionals who can then publish critiques and in some cases even necessitate corrections or retractions of the original publication. Again, these are all good things; it's no where near perfect, but things that humans do, and perfect don't belong in the same sentence. Over time this is a relatively good filtering device for archiving information. A rough estimate of how many people successfully publish in these journals would probably be less than the percentage of the population that have PhD's, MD's or other professional degrees usually possessed by at least one of the authors of a peer reviewed publication. Someone is more than welcome to go get the stats and get a good estimate; my point is simply that it's a small number of people. This is also a very good thing. The less likely some idiot is to post things like Ted Kennedy is dead; or the fewer Scientologists......well, never-mind I won't go there ;) As far as I can tell; the basic structure of wikipedia still allows any one to contribute. Hopefully, over a relatively short period of time; if you contribute somethings stupid, it should be gone, and replaced with referenced material by the smaller number of people who have the integrity to research and think before they have the audacity to say something to millions of people.
End of (my first ever) rant; go ahead, tear me apart ;)
Elitism?
In a group that spends all day reading and editing encyclopedias?
I'm shocked, to say the least.
BINGO!!! (*snort* huh?) ... I mean: "FIRST POST!!!" ... now back to my nap.
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
I think it's more and more about power, not content. Wikipedia is a hierarchy that is still relatively permeable if you invest time into it. But people who care about content will rather contribute content than engage in wikiintrigues and attack others in order to be perceived as "important". The hierarchy attracts only the power-hungry. The easiest way to display power is to delete and revert other people's stuff, so that's what they do.
The point of Wikipedia was that it was a user-edited online book of knowledge, and the fun of it was looking up information at your own peril. It was a good starting point for general knowledge, links to specific information, and opposing viewpoints, not some valid educational source. Now, Wikipedia is trying to be a valid educational source, which is hysterical [citation needed].
Call me a troll call me whatever, but I've said it in the past and I say it again, Wikipedia is run by Wiki Nazis!
...And wannabes.
I am a subject matter expert on a particular area of optical physics...
I very much doubt that. But hey, keep reading those Omni magazine articles and "I-Never-Went-To-School-But-I'm-Still-A-Real-Physicist!"-blog entries.
I think a perfect example of this phenomena is the article on Linux. No, it's not about a kernel but instead about an operating system! And people are trying to change it but the cabal is holding onto this misinformation currently presented.
I present to you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
Be sure to check out the latest history of the article.
Wikipedia has became a mob. Information is not important any more, instead policy and process are. I'm saddened.
Both linked articles talk of exponential growth. Any statistician knows that nothing we can measure is exponential except as an approximation in the early stages. Sooner or later limiting factors will turn it into an S curve. A classic example is rabbit populations. When first introduced they have little or no limits and breed 'like rabbits'. Then as the population builds up the number of predators also builds up (more rabbits means more food for foxes which means more baby foxes) and the food supply is no longer enough. More predators and not enough food limits the number of rabbits.
Same with Wikipedia. In the beginning there was nothing and a lot of people with only 2 facts to their credit. They added those facts and were left with nothing more to contribute. Late comers have found their own 2 facts have already been added by someone else. Hence the S curve shown in the pretty graph in the second link.
In the early days WP was criticised for being amateurish. So they tried to clean up their act by requiring verifiability from a respected source instead of a truth that can't be verified by anyone else. Sadly this gives the cold shoulder to true experts unless they happen to have something in a respected publication.
Also, they now try to be more professional in the style used. In the early days it was an uncritical rush to add information without worrying about grammar, consistency, neatness, etc. Now they try to organise things better. It takes time to learn this style. You may have contributed articles to a school newspaper but it takes a lot more professionalism to submit something to a prestigious science magazine (which may reject articles based on spelling mistakes). I personally see many edits on WP that look like they were written by a second grader - spelling mistakes, awful grammar, basic facts wrong. Some I patch up with better grammar and some I revert if they are beyond help. It takes time to learn how to write at a semi-professional level - time that many people are not prepared to spend. Of course, WP still needs to clean up a lot articles written during the land grab of the early years.
Any club has people who want to dominate and have the time to make it their life crusade. A single dominator easily swamps the effects of 10 or more reasonable contributors because they don't want to make it their own life crusade to topple that dominator. We also get people who insist on doing things their way - like leaving out the 'u' in 'colour' or using model year for cars (which is the only way to talk about cars for Americans but confuses everybody else). This is human nature. I've seen it in every club and church I've been in. It's a way of feeling important without all the hard work of being a real expert. But it's only bad if it's used to exclude others. For myself, my passion is old Toyota cars. I fell important when I can confidently answer questions to help someone fix their 30/40/50 year old car. But as soon as I deny someone else the opportunity to provide that help then I have abused my knowledge. Sadly, that too is human nature.
See above
Wikipedia has way to many rules & guidelines, to get full knowledge of them & keep up to date as they are altered is too much commitment for the casual contributor. And if you violate one even slightly, the pompous hard-core will revert your edit in seconds, and most likely make a snide comment about you not knowing something or another published somewhere deep in their guidelines. Its become to cliquey, run by self righteous nerds. I used to make regular contributions, but its not for me any more.
I've ran into this problem before. Even when marking an article as a stub from the outset because more info was still needed for completion. After a while it gets to the point where it's like "what's the point?"
I find after a certain point, if you want to make certain information publicly available - it's just easier to release the same exact content to your own blog or website. Then you can do more productive things involving that information than just fighting to keep it in place. If the information is good enough to stand on its own, people will link and then search engines will start indexing it.
The only advantage information on wikipedia has is that it doesn't have to compete against linkfarmer bullshit spam pages when starting out. If there were some way to better score relevancy of information on search engine indexes, wikipedia would be a lot less prominent than it is. As it is now, wikipedia does tend to stay on track with information relevant to the subject. (So in some regards the deletionist are good at keeping crap out, even if they dump the baby with the bathwater more often than not.)
Another alternative to wikipedia is to move to another member of the wiki-family, wikibooks. That way you get all the advantages of public and open format of wiki, but with a much looser set of rules. There seems to be a lot less discrepancy involving the content of books. So you can make your article as a chapter in a standalone book on the topic or you can append a pre-existing book. (If you want to add to an existing book, etiquitte is read first and see whether it is subject is open or directed by a team or author. If the work is a looser open collection, go ahead and add. If it's a directed project, the polite thing to do is ask first.) The nice thing about books is that there is less sweating over "subject importance", sources, and bibliography work. (Not that the later two should be ignored, plagarism is still plagarism. If you're using other sources at least say that much until you find the citations.) Releasing content as a WIP is a lot easier if the background work is not an immediate and pressing concern as the encyclopedia folks make it. It means you have a lot more freedom concerning time available corrections and revisions. Also "books" is the way to go with information in emergent technology where there are few available sources or in cases where you provide all new original content. (And because it's wiki, people can still edit or review or add dialog in the discussion section. But since it's books, most people tend to respect the intent of the initial authors a bit more and avoid acts of deletionism.)
Since Wikiapedia limits the amount of content, a lot of people are moving their edits to a topic specific wiki at other open wikis like wikia.com
Well, if you want to freely contribute to a site that has plenty of room to grow, try Debatepedia.org. It's like the Wikipedia of Debate and has academic arguments for both sides of some of the most popular debates.