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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."
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BMO
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.
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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.
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.
The "muppet" was right to do so. Information that is not independently verifiable does not belong in an encyclopedia.
Publish the information somewhere else as an authority on the subject, then make the edit and add a citation.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
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.
That's the intended outcome, though. Wikipedia used to be just a collection of information put together by random people, but the goal is increasingly to build a well referenced collection of information put together by random people. If you can't cite any at least halfway-decent source for an addition, it doesn't belong in a Wikipedia article, because there would be no way for a reader to verify for themselves that the information wasn't just made up.
The fact that Wikipedia didn't do this often enough, and was to a large extent a collection of unreliable information put together by people with no credentials, with no way to verify any of it was accurate, was one of the most frequent and strongest criticisms in the early years (and still persists to some extent). So I'd say it's a definite shift in the right direction to require sources more stringently.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
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.
Can you cite your sources?
"The "muppet" was right to do so. Information that is not independently verifiable does not belong in an encyclopedia."
There are two types of "independent verification":
1) citing a different, published source for the information
2) doing it oneself -- as in a scientific experiment that will independently test a claim
It's fine and dandy to cite another published source for information, but we all know that people can and do slap up a web page making whatever wacky claims they want, and then cite that page in Wikipedia as if it is useful. In the scientific realm, citation of other publications only goes so far: those publications could still be wrong. The ultimate independent verification is to do the experiment yourself.
If I make the claim that water is extraordinarily toxic and hazardous to people's health and cite the DHMO website as my source, does that make my claim automatically "independently verified"? Can I go ahead and change the Wikipedia entry on water? Or are people more likely to accept their own personal experience and their ability to test the claims directly?
You and Wikipedia are right to expect a strong level of independent *documentation* for a claim, but there is more than one way to independently verify something, and sometimes personal experience or experimentation should be accepted as a valid approach. Anyone can independently verify that water boils at 100 degrees C at STP. Do I really have to cite a written source in order to say that in Wikipedia? If you have been there or done something that qualifies as first-hand knowledge of the issue, or anyone could verify the claim for themselves (e.g., do X yourself and you will see result Y), why shouldn't you correct an obvious mistake? Slavishly expecting a citation is silly in some circumstances.
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
"Information that is not independently verifiable does not belong in an encyclopedia"
Well he could always have downloaded the software, compiled it up and run it but I guess he couldn't be bothered.
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.
Or as apparently what many people are doing - just give up and don't bother.
:) ).
Sometimes on a whim, I'll just add some info or make a correction. But I rarely bother to see if it stays. If people revert it, it's their or Wikipedia's problem, not mine.
It's not like I'm an avid supporter of wikipedia (esp given the sort of things they and their admins do). So I don't see the point of putting in extra effort for them (unless someone paid me enough
I've seen pages with pretty obvious stuff that's full of "citation needed" tags. I doubt that sort of thing is due to people trying to establish the truth, these sort of occurrences are more due to egos or politics or some astroturfing. Just a google search will provide tons of citations, so why clutter the wikipage with a citation for every other statement?
Anyway , all the guy had to do was download the software and run it to check the veracity of my claims
Which makes your contribution "original research" that should not be in Wikipedia at all.
Look, Wikipedia is, first and foremost, an encyclopedia. It's supposed to be a collection of information from other reliable sources. If you can't provide a reliable source for the material, then it doesn't go in. Period.
Saying "run the software yourself" is not a source. Wikipedia doesn't publish "things that are true", it publishes "things that can be verified by asking other reliable sources".
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
According to policy, citations are not required for information that is not questionable or disputed. I agree, demanding them in such cases is rather silly. DHMO is not a reliable source. And the way you do the experiment yourself is by reading the details of the experiment from the cited source and then replicating it. Peer reviewed science articles are specifically written in a manner than they can be replicated, and doing so is encouraged. But if all you can say is "Rare element that doesn't exist in nature boils at X degrees celcius" and your cite is "I know because I tried it, you can too!" then 1: Who the heck are you, 2: Why should you be trusted, the internet is anonymous, 3: I can't try it without the expenditure of serious resources. I came here to find verified information, not to find fun experiments to try for any level of confidence!
Colleges don't disallow Wikipedia because of it's nature, they disallow Wikipedia because it's an encyclopedia -- you can't legitimately source Britannica or any othher encyclopedia in any academic paper, so why should you be allowed to cite Wikipedia?
"Saying "run the software yourself" is not a source"
No , its a lot better than a source - its seeing it for yourself.
"Wikipedia doesn't publish "things that are true", it publishes "things that can be verified by asking other reliable sources"."
What a load of BS.
And that's one of the insane concepts that many experts hate about Wikipedia.
They say that democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's a simplified metaphor to point out a crucial flaw of majority voting.
In the same way, one could say that Wikipedia is where an anonymous blog posting (which can be linked to) is the more trustworthy authority on spacetime than a direct edit by Stephen Hawking himself.
Protest all you want, reason all you want, the simple truth is that that's how it is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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
What would be the point? Wikipedias problems *are* the people you're entrusting to fix it, the long-term editors and admins. I mean, obvious improvements, like adding a mode to view deleted articles, haven't been made. Why would you expect them to make any more wide-ranging changes?
It's goofy as hell in the first place that wiki keeps a detailed change log of everything ever by anyone-- except deletions. Deletions are holy, beyond reproach.
Comment of the year
That kind of mindset is exactly the problem.
It's the dichotomy of reality and truth. In the beginning, Wikipedia was pretty good about mixing reality and truth. There was a little bit of both. Most articles contained reality, and when there were disputes on what was reality, truth was substituted.
At some point, the mindset started to skew towards truth. People with a stake in it started trying to make it respectable. At around that time, there were a large volume of articles online and off about how Wikipedia can't be sourced in research or considered a good source of information and whatnot. Looking back, it's pretty apparent the truth movement was a result of all the publicity.
What has happened to Wikipedia is that it has grown too popular too fast, and got lost somewhere along the way. It has lost its direction. The higher ups are trying to make it what it wasn't, isn't, and shouldn't be. They are trying to force Wikipedia to become an encyclopedia like Britannica or World Book when it's really a wikipedia.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Wikipedia could introduce quality modes. In the highest mode you'd just see the most notable articles with tons of citations, and in the lowest mode anything that remotely looks like information could be included.
But if they were interested in improving their system, they would have done this a long time ago.
This shit bugs me.
Just like TFA said, the deletionists have won. And to me, "to become a respected, citable encyclopedia" was never the purpose of Wikipedia. Seriously, academia just isn't going to consider Wikipedia a valid source, no matter how much they clean up their act. Besides - who the fuck cites encyclopedias in their work? They're all full of general knowledge stuff anyway.
The goal, I thought, was to catalog the sum total of human knowledge - which would include local people, places, sights, and even those things considered "trivial" by most people - and present it in a readable, non-biased manner. I've long given up on creating or editing articles for exactly the same reasons.
I've had several experiences like this as well with one editor deciding the he was the end all and be all of what was significant and worthy of note. I had other bad experiences as well. As a matter of fact every time I've tried to contribute I've had a bad experience. So no more for me... they have people on power trips that are out of control. It's sad because the idea behind Wikipedia is so good and solid as long as it's kept OPEN and FAIR. I don't think it's either at the moment.
I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but still. I'm not a Russian dissident and I don't really know any. However, I stumbled upon the story of this monument (and of Putin's attempts to tear it down) and I thought it was more worthy of a Wikipedia article than Mudkips, although I heard quite a few people like them. It's a known fact that people feel much easier with editing an article than with creating a new one (Wikipedia's editing policy only make a natural phenomenon worse), and I hoped that a few of the many people online who can tell us more about the subject will take advantage of the venue and improve on the article.
If this isn't something that should work on Wikipedia, perhaps we should change Wikipedia.
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.
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.... 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.
Well isn't the great thing about it, the thing which sets it apart from many other encyclopedias (and other similar sources of information) is that it's open source (Creative Commons license)? So not only can it be displaced if someone creates a better site with better rules and better editors, but that other site has the option to use as much of the Wikipedia's information as it wants.
So I think in that sense, you can't think of the Wikipedia alone as the thing we're talking about. We're talking about a collection of human knowledge that can't really be taken away by commercial interest or commercial failure. That set of knowledge is an achievement that can live on even if the Wikipedia turns out terribly.
You forgot to mention the fact the its the largest, most reliable, most widely-used encyclopedia out there.
Right Mr "I wipe my arse with the Mathematics manual of style!!". It was because of a cabal that you got tossed.
I don't know jack shit about the exponential function. But I know how to interact with other humans. That ain't it.
May the Maths Be with you!
It's clear from your post that you're passionate about math, and with the name ObsessiveMathsFreak I dare say obsessed. It seems editing Wikipedia on any topic that we're passionate about is a recipe for disaster. No offense intended, but your experience and many other similar posts about fighting for your edit make you sound almost as rabid as the editors that refuse your change.
I've updated a few hundred articles over the years, usually minor changes in topics where I'm no expert. If, as others have mentioned, 25% of my edits have been reverted then I wouldn't give a damn. I've never gone back to check. If I made a good change then others will make similar edits someday and hopefully the article will improve over time.
Religion, politics, business criticism, censored history: I wouldn't rely on Wikipedia for any topic that has a passionate following. I never would have guessed that exponential functions have a passionate following, but maybe it's best that experts refrain from updating articles in their area. After all, the articles will never be flawless or complete. Wikipedia is just a great starting point to satisfy curiosity.
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.)
You've said that twice now. I don't see it, myself. It's pretty good for basic unchallenged facts like geography, for example. But as soon as you get into anything that even remotely touches on politics and ideologies it turns into a rat's nest of disinformation and dissent. Look at any Wikipedia entry involving the paranormal, UFOs, etc. and you'll see, inevitably, the 'psedoscience' label applied to people or ideas. It's a very clear bias and makes it feel like you're watching a Larry King show where the 'opposing point of view' is brought in to provide 'fair and balanced' reporting, with the effect that the idea is ridiculed and shut down. Maybe it deserves to be, but the point is, it's biased.
In academic circles, Wikipedia is not well thought of--even to the point of banning using Wikipedia as a source. Is this academic elitism? Oh, probably, just like Will Durant is not considered a 'real' historian, but if you sneak in his ideas without citing him, history professors think you are brilliant. I realize that has its own problems, but my point is that the reputation counts.
I am quite aware that 'studies have shown' that Wikipedia is as or more accurate than more standard works such as Britannica, but, IMO, if you are using Wikipedia for anything but a quick look-me-up to get an idea of the issue, then, just like a /. poll, you're insane.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.