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: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.

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: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.

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: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?