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.'"

Comments

How many editors are retirees?

[RevWaldo]

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.

Re:How many editors are retirees?

[gnick]

Taking pride in doing the work is great. That's what keeps them coming back and doing good work. That's not the problem - You neglected this (very important) piece of that post:

...the new pack of cyber nerds is defending it's territory.

That's really bad. You want to dig a well for orphans? Great! Want to brag about how you donated your time to help them? Cool. But if you get so excited about being the honored 'orphan-well-digger' that you deny others the opportunity to pitch in, and you've got the clout due to your good history to maintain your charity-monopoly, that's bad for everyone.

Re:How many editors are retirees?

[Moryath]

That, in a nutshell, is wikipedia's problem.

Look at the "top echelon" - the elites, the "friends of jimbo" clique. Most of them have been around forever (in relative terms to wikipedia's age).
Look at the next level - the bureaucrats and laughably corrupt "Arbitration Committee". Same thing.
Look at the ranks of the admins. What do you have? For the most part, a circle-jerk of backslapping nerds who congratulate each other on being abusive and rude in the exercise of their powers.
Look at the next rank down - the "longtime respected users." How do they get there? By having admin friends to protect them during disputes. Why are they not on the next rank? Well, they're either just sockpuppet accounts for the admins, or they're the "enforcers" of one of the various cliques, designated to wade in and be as disruptive as possible to newcomers in order to provoke "ban-worthy" conduct while their friend the admin keeps them from getting banned.

How do you get to be an admin? Not by proving you can handle a job of watching for legitimate disruption. No, you prove it by "level grinding" using automated tools on the "Recent Changes Patrol", looking for "vandalism" and amassing an edit count that rises higher and higher. You prove it by keeping your personal head down and letting someone else from whatever clique you connect with do the dirty work of "enforcing", so that your name is not connected with a block or ban. You get it by brown-nosing your way around certain known-quantity administrators and agreeing with whatever they do, especially when they're involved in clique behavior. You get it by submitting your RFA at the right time, so that people who would have something to say against your POV-pushing ways "happen" to not be around because they have a real life to work on.

Wikipedia is illegitimate. Someone else pointed out that Wikipedia is like a game - most of the people who have admin bits or better have "leveled up". People who don't make RFA routinely are told it's because they haven't passed a certain edit-count threshold, whether or not they can keep a level head and use their tools sparingly as they should. It's a game, nothing more, and the behavior we see from them is "cyber nerds is defending it's territory" in the worst way.

Re:How many editors are retirees?

[gad_zuki!]

>But is this different from any other movement, organization, business or community in history?

Its not, but here on slashdot a lot of mom's basement nerds are experiencing this for the first time. I mean, how mature could the GP be? Using terms like "circle jerk" to describe an editing process is very much over the top. I just picture a lot of these guys as incredibly immature and having childish temper tantrums when they dont get what they want. Sadly, a lot of IT people just dont have good social or emotional skills, and we see this manifest itself on slashdot frequently. Immature mods mod them up, and every whiny complaint is suddenly +5 insightful while your excellent comment will go unnoticed or tagged as trolling.

Re:How many editors are retirees?

[Moryath]

Using terms like "circle jerk" to describe an editing process is very much over the top.

You've obviously never been on wikipedia. Describing that "editing process" as a sequence in which a bunch of self-congratulatory dolts compare penis sizes is about right.

It's their own fault

[bmo]

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

Re:It's their own fault

[suso]

Precisely. But that's fine, I mean there are wikis for many other subjects so that you can delve into those subjects in much more detail. On these subject specific wikis, as long as its related to the subject, its ok.

Re:It's their own fault

[mdda]

Even non-core contributors have a 75% chance of getting their changes accepted - and my guess is that the probability is even higher if the changes make sense...

And rather than being a story about 'scarcity of resources', isn't it more one of Wikipedia approaching perfection?

Re:It's their own fault

[RiotingPacifist]

Why should i have to go wandering round multiple sites of unknown reliability when wikipedia could at least serve up the basics!
It wouldn't piss my off so much if wikipedia had always aimed to be an "encyclopedia of things we like and some people may edit.", but it didn't it was meant to be "the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit", and it pretty much was until a ruling clique formed!

Re:It's their own fault

[timeOday]

I'll go further, it would be a disaster if wikipedia didn't converge. Established facts are not in constant turmoil, neither should be an encyclopedia.

Re:It's their own fault

[Hal_Porter]

> So why not have a mechanism for moving articles to the relevant specialised wiki and adding a stub page in Wikipedia (or a redirect to an index page) with a link to that specialised wiki, rather than just delete someone else's work?

Because deleting someone's article is about power - it's about showing them that you have it and they don't. All the rhetoric about notability and "reaching a consensus" is just a cover for demonstrating that you can shaft them. Moving the article to a specialised Wiki wouldn't achieve this.

In fact articles about specialised Wikis keep getting deleted as "non notable", because the people that run Wiki don't have any power of them.

Everyone likes to think that we're an evolved species interested in knowledge but actually everything is about hierarchies, chimp style. Actually if wikipedia stopped being about consensus and switched to voting a lot of these problems would disappear.

Re:It's their own fault

[massysett]

"the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit", and it pretty much was until a ruling clique formed!

I think they are trying to keep it from degenerating into a blog, or a chat space, or an encyclopedia of trivial things like the Star Wars universe. Some wikis, like Wookiepedia, started out because Wikipedia kept kicking out certain stuff, like exhaustive detail of the Star Wars universe.

This article makes the change in Wikipedia sound nefarious, like there is some elitist cabal that wants to accrue power. Sure that is true in part. But as the site has grown it is more important to keep things out than it is to add things. The alternative is that every article about a politician will include nasty, defamatory, and useless content and that vociferous fans of various fantasy genres and celebrities will take over all coverage of things related to their realms.

Wikipedia needs people who say "no", and if those people are a bunch of elitist editors, then fine.

Re:It's their own fault

[Darkness404]

So? Usually getting published in an academic journal I'm not going to do during my free time, I had better get paid, use it to gain name recognition or use it for a class in order for me to even bother. No one cares if you have 20,000 edits accepted in Wikipedia other than you. I'm not going to use my free time attempting to make Wikipedia better if my edits are going to be rejected without much cause.

Honestly, I'd like Wikipedia to have even more articles, the notability guidelines are honestly quite pointless and lead to many -great- articles being deleted. It doesn't benefit the community if you delete them, sure, Wikipedia might not be the place but this isn't a paper encyclopedia, space is for all practical purposes infinite for text.

Re:It's their own fault

[Ex-Linux-Fanboy]

Tv Tropes is the most fun Wiki I've found in a while. While a little more serious than the Unencyclopedia, it looks at media (Video games, role playing games, movies, TV, comics, etc.) with a more fun and lighthearted approach than the Wikipedia.

Re:It's their own fault

[ari_j]

I've corrected spelling and had my changes reverted. I've reworded paragraphs so that they are coherent English and had the changes reverted. I've split a 2-page run-on sentence into proper sentences and paragraphs and been reverted. It's not about whether a change makes sense. Much more often, it's about someone having a pet article that only he can touch, no matter how poor of a writer he may be. That's why I quit editing Wikipedia. I got too sick of people not wanting their articles to be improved.

Perfection has two basic meanings. It can mean 'done' or it can mean 'flawless.' Wikipedia is definitely approaching the former, but will never attain the latter.

Re:It's their own fault

[Fujisawa Sensei]

"the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit", and it pretty much was until a ruling clique formed!

I think they are trying to keep it from degenerating into a blog, or a chat space, or an encyclopedia of trivial things like the Star Wars universe. Some wikis, like Wookiepedia, started out because Wikipedia kept kicking out certain stuff, like exhaustive detail of the Star Wars universe.

Preventing it from becoming a chat space or blog is fine.

But the so-called trivial elements like Star Wars universe make wikipedia a one stop shop for information. I know that I've looked up stuff and someone has flagged the article for deletion because it was supposedly trivial. If it were actually trivial, why am I as an end user looking at it?

Re:It's their own fault

[damburger]

Why think up a rational argument when you can just call someone a stoner?

A government is just a form of monopoly. Why should a corporate monopoly be exempt from the same criticism as a government monopoly?

Re:It's their own fault

[Achromatic1978]

I think they are trying to keep it from degenerating into a blog, or a chat space, or an encyclopedia of trivial things like the Star Wars universe. Some wikis, like Wookiepedia, started out because Wikipedia kept kicking out certain stuff, like exhaustive detail of the Star Wars universe.

Perhaps. But they used to be quite happy to be so. Then, perhaps entirely by coincidence, the co-founder, Jimmy Wales, started a for profit Wiki business on the side, Wikia. Devoid of content, it needed ad revenue, and lo, there came forth an edict, moving huge swathes, 100s of thousands of pages, to Wikia, which also became, completely coincidentally, the only external (and "independent") site that was able to get past the spam filters.

Surprising?

[Helios1182]

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.

Quality standards

[ePhil_One]

Personally, the drive for higher quality standards has driven this more than anything else I imagine. Add something that you don't have documentation for, and its likely to get reverted.

.

Then add the pile of people doing snow jobs, Steven Colbert stunts, reversion wars, etc, and I don't think its surprising at all.

Re:Amen to that

[characterZer0]

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.

Fuck Wikipedia.

[snarfies]

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.

Re:Fuck Wikipedia.

[Tom]

Most importantly: You can't write about anything that the deletionist crowd doesn't know about. They're like republicans: "Please, oh mighty god, let there not be a world outside my windows".

I've had quite a few articles deleted on subjects that are considerably more notable - but less geeky or important to the in-crowd - than lots of the articles that remain.

I've taken to sarcasm since. Every minor porn starlet has her own wikipedia page, but lots of non-porn movies, games, books that were seen by a lot more people don't. What does that tell you about wikipedia and the people that run it? :-)

Re:Amen to that

[Trepidity]

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.

Why I edited

[david_thornley]

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.

Re:Why I edited

[DerekLyons]

the number of casual contributors has gone down because there's a lot less room to go into an article and be an expert

You don't need to be an expert on the topic, just having a reasonable grasp of the English language and (roughly) a high school level of knowledge on how to write a report... Too many Wikipedia articles are confusing masses, with facts all over the place, repetitive and redundant bits, and confusing and inconsistent organization.
 
And even when you are an expert - you're often judged not on the facts, but on the opinions of the soi-disant 'experts' who have appointed themselves guardians of the article. (Which you, unwittingly, admit in the following sentence.)
 
 

Also, casual contributors very often haven't learned how to make a good Wikipedia edit, and having it reverted is ultimately a good thing.

"Them darkies love being slaves, a bit of the lash is good for them".
 
Seriously, when you start using phrases like "a good Wikipedia edit" you starkly display just how deeply the rot has spread. It's no longer about facts, clarity, and organization - it's about being a good little Wikipedian who defers to his elders and the convoluted and often bizarre rituals and fetishes of their culture.

Re:Amen to that

[Viol8]

"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.

Re:Amen to that

[TheLink]

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?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Amen to that

[Tom]

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.

Re:Amen to that

[steelfood]

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.

Re:Time for a new take on Wikipedia?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:wikipedia, the 'open' encyclopedia?

[StellarFury]

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.

Re:wikipedia, the 'open' encyclopedia?

[MickyTheIdiot]

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.

Re:My bad Wikipedia experience

[HonestButCurious]

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.

Um, what?

[argent]

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?

Re:Consensus

[jeffhoy]

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.