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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.
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.
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.
>>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?
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.
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.
Do you speak of the prophecy of the one who will bring balance to Wikipedia?
Interesting.
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
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
"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.
While I marvel at your debating skills, I think you are missing the point. Encyclopedias are never the primary source of information. They merely compile and reference other works. This is not a wikipedia thing. This is an encyclopedia thing.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Submission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Solovetskiy_Stone Copyright review: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:EarwigBot_II/Logs&oldid=302572823#Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation.2FSolovetskiy_Stone So you copied a full sentence verbatim in a one paragraph article. That's not writing. However I agree, that it might be nice if experienced editors "fixed" submission problems, instead of just ignoring the content. P.S. you are still welcomed to correct this and ask for a 2nd review.
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.