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Contributors Leaving Wikipedia In Record Numbers
Hugh Pickens writes "CNET reports that the volunteers who create Wikipedia's pages, check facts and adapt the site are abandoning Wikipedia in unprecedented numbers, with tens of thousands of editors going 'dead' — no longer actively contributing and updating the site — a trend many experts believe could threaten Wikipedia's future. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language version of Wikipedia suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period in 2008. 'If you don't have enough people to take care of the project it could vanish quickly,' says Felipe Ortega at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, who created a computer system to analyze the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages. 'We're not in that situation yet. But eventually, if the negative trends follow, we could be in that situation.' Contributors are becoming disenchanted with the process of adding to the site, which is becoming increasingly difficult says Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality and a regular editor of the site. 'There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. Wikipedia grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many contributors.' Arguments over various articles have also taken their toll. 'Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again,' adds Ortega."
No need to keep posting slashdot stories on Wikipedia's impending demise. Just follow this new user page on wikipedia.
Trolling is a art,
How much more can we write about Louis Pasteur or the Treaty of Worms or Heilongjiang? Wikipedia has had a ton of stuff poured into it and doesn't really need new contributors. Not surprising they're trying to drive contributors off. One thing I've learned in life, when people are being dicks they're doing it for a reason that benefits them.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
They also have a stupid rule regarding "how important stuff has to be" before it can be added as a new article on Wikipedia. That one alone is the main reason I never again will try to contribute anything to it.
Lock it down, allow no modifications, and leave it as is. Keep it hosted though.
Honestly, the repository is large enough. If I want to find something on there I can. Anything worth being added can be handled by a small team of admins.
Oh. And of course, make it subscription based. (I kid...)
This happens to any system of sufficient size and age.
Europe has been there for a while.
The US is getting there now.
People are never content to leave well enough alone.
The german version is having these problems, as well, with authors being frustrated, because their articles are being deleted for various stupid reasons (like: only referenced in blogs, no real-world influence, except for some obscure hacker meetings etc.) The discussions have even reached the big media.
I stopped even trying when I was editing the Hezbollah article for a little less bias and a little more clarity and then getting all my edits erased due to Wikipedia being run by editors of the Zionist persuasion. Finding out a few days later that the CIA was editing all kinds of articles on "terrorism" and other methods of opposing the agenda of the US government was just icing on the cake. The "neutral-viewpoint" promoted by Wikipedia almost always defines their own political agenda as neutrality and any other views as "biased" or "controversial."
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
There are too many destructive people who revel in destroying content. It should be harder to become an editor. Perhaps a quota should be assigned: you can only delete 1 article for every 5 that you create.
One thing that is politically incorrect but a real dynamic: the majority of those who create are male, the majority of those who delete are female.
Wikipedia is what it is. Even if all the contributors dropped dead right now, it'd be the best encyclopedia around for quite some time yet.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
I think there are three big issues. First, there is a lack of low-hanging fruit. That is, the easy articles have all been written and many have been expanded to decent lengths. That makes people less inclined to help out or to join in (and moreover to stick around). Second, the project has also become much more deletionist. Much of the material on pop-culture subjects has been either cut down or deleted outright. This has pushed many editors to other smaller wikis where they can have the level of detail they want. Moreover, many editors who previously first got hooked by writing and tweaking fun stuff are no longer getting hooked that way. Third, the deletionism has combined with a general attitude that is very bad unwelcoming to newcomers. The overall result is a serious decline. Some of these effects (such as inclusionist and pop culture editors leaving) also reinforce other aspects since when they leave it leaves the overall community more deletionist. I think the project is still healthy but it might very well not be so if these trends continue for another year or two.
The system is set up in such a way that when people put massive amounts of effort into adding contributions or what not, they aren't rewarded with anything for doing it other than more rules and regulations and difficulty in posting more edits and content.
Couple that with the natural tendency of people to burn themselves out of things after a while and the natural idea that as the wiki grows, it shouldn't need edits on old content and people have less and less to contribute, and you end up with a declining contribution pool... It's bound to happen inevitably, it's just a matter of when and how they deal with it when it starts to happen.
When 'deletionists' destroy the work people are putting in, it's not surprising when the people who have put that work into Wikipedia leave the site. There's only a finite amount of things that can be written about and as Wikipedia progresses, the articles that are created must become more and more obscure. But with those kinds of articles effectively banned from Wikipedia, the only editors it needs around are those that upkeep the existing articles.
A lot of people (including me) hasn't worked since the beginning of the crash. For those of us who want to work in the commons - be it open source or open documents such as this - there are insufficient personal resources to handle these in addition to trying to find work and ensure food and shelter.
At this point, barring some strange legal international gambit on information control (ACTA? *heh* *ducking*) the commons will survive and some will be heavily involved regardless.
Me - I'll be continuing to try to find a future and the commons can wait, as it won't put food on my table and - that problem takes my excesses of time.
I used to contribute to Wikipedia, but I stopped when it became a chore to do so. These days it's impossible to add anything without someone (usually admins) throwing a childish fit and reverting it all. This occurs with information that is added with properly cited sources.
I don't even use Wikipedia to look up information any more. I use my own local version of it on a USB flash drive that I've personally streamlined and updated. It is not only faster and cleaner, but more factual than wikipedia.org as well.
Exactly the reasons I left a long time ago. Glad to see others are finally doing the same, maybe the Wikipedia leadership will wake up.
"Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again," adds Ortega."
Been there, done that. You've contributed to improve an article, a dozen people have worked on it. Then a fucktard comes along and nominates it for deletion because of lack of "notability". Delete discussion goes on, clear consensus on "keep".
Two months pass. Article gets improved further. Next fucktard comes along, delete nomination. Discussion, with links to the first one, consensus arrives at "keep" again.
Winter holidays. The same fucktard from the 2nd time comes along and nominates the article a 3rd time. This time, vocal people are away or just tired of it all. Whoops, delete request accepted by a narrow margin, all the work of everyone goes *poof*.
So you treat people like shit, destroy the result of their volunteer work, and then you're surprised they're leaving? You've gotta be kidding me.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's always more fun to be breaking new ground on a project where people appreciate every contribution than it is to maintain a mature project against the normal background of misunderstandings, agendas and entropy. This is hardly unique to wikipedia.
Kid's paper after using Wiki as his source:
George W. Bush, the US' first retarded President, started wars in the Middle East to help his Vice President's (Dick Cheney) portfolio.
Of course, they'll be folks on the other side:
Barak Obama, America's first Socialist President along with the Wicked Witch of the West, Nancy Pelosi, turned the US into a bankrupt shell of its former self.
Then, there will be others....
Ray Vaness, the World's greatest porn actress, has been a great influence on American politics.
Now, just think of all those little kids putting references to porn actresses into their school papers and bringing them home?
I for on welcome the chaos that may ensue.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Wikipedia also has a problem with site admins who do things like block people first and ask questions later. I myself was blocked for merely reporting (in the proper venue) that another user was editing in violation of his community ban.
There are admins who it appears can violate every community rule yet won't receive any sanctions. Of course people are leaving - the admins have driven them away.
Then there are the cases where people have been hounded off Wikipedia and later it has been shown that they were correct and their antagonist was the one who should have been banned.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Mr. Wales, I think that if you approached Mark Cuban and asked him to give Wikipedia editors a cool million dollars each not to leave, you could save Wikipedia.
Boy, dreaming up solutions when you perceive financiers to be bottomless pits of money with no brains sure is easy!
My work here is dung.
Wales states that there's a drive for more accuracy -- hence the rules. The problem is that wikiadmins are not interested in precision. Protected articles may well be accurate as perceived by their agenda and groupthink, but that does not mean they are precise, nor necessarily true.
The rise and power of the wikiadmins was always going to sound the death knell for truth. It just seems to be happening faster than many expected.
One thing that might benefit the editing process is a paragraph-lockdown feature. Controversial articles tend to be edited in a back-and-forth way until arbitrators arrive and force a cooperative consensus to be reached. They might also lock the whole page, but such locks are always temporary and as soon as they are lifted, some new users come along, who didn't participate in the consensus, and mess it all up. The the edit war begins again. A paragraph lockdown would ensure that paragraphs reached via consensus would stay unaffected by new users, while still allowing the overall page to have new stuff added. The associated discussion page would be required to be used, before changes were allowed to affect a locked paragraph.
But the quality of Wiki articles is close to horrible. Okay, articles regarding computers, LOTR, Star Wars and Star Trek have been very well written and thought out but if you actually have knowledge of any other subject and look at wikipedia about those, you quickly notive that the quality of articles is extremely low - whether it is about political sciences, economy, more exotic animals, etc... And that is without even going to the most controversial topics...
Wiki is OK place to look up what some word means and what's the basic concept but for anything more it is pretty useless.
The kids have a crazy idea, work hard, total chaos, but lo-and-behold Something Wonderful Is Made. Then the foosball tables get wheeled in, there's an in-house rave with free pizza and beer and cocaine every Friday night, the kids try branching out into a hundred other lines of business they have no good reason to be in, and that hockey stick revenue projection starts to look more and more like a zombie's EKG reading. Finally, the adults get called in, all the kids get thrown out except for the one or two who have been featured on the cover of Wired, and everybody hopes it's not too late to "finally get down to business."
"It was the life we choose... we fight and never lose..."
I'm not sure why someone would say Cnet when all Cnet does is paraphrase the article that ran in WSJ yesterday. Why not just go to the source?
Har har har. How very funny.
Actually, the Wikipedia:Statistics page gets you all the stats there's to be had.
Also, Wikimedia:Statistics is showing a steady influx of New Wikipedians and Active Wikipedians, albeit not quite as many as previously.
Hmm, I wonder if this is more a publicity stunt in relation with their current funds drive?
At least, "Wikipedia shows signs of stalling as number of volunteers falls sharply" should probably have been "Wikipedia shows signs of maturity as number of new volunteers falls slighly".
"Good news, everyone!"
I know I find it increasingly frustrating to contribute because whatever you add, there's always someone waiting to revert it immediately without any attempt at compromise or discussion.
I also have to say that I think people will find it humourous 50 years from now when they look back at comments from 2009 about how there's not much new stuff to add. That's a bit like the fellow who wanted to close the patent office in 1899 because everything had already been invented.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Can't imagine why contributors are leaving. It's become a cesspool of those who do nothing but revert legitimate edits (to get their edit count up) because it isn't from anyone in power worth brown-nosing to.
Like juries, the people who have enough time to become a real political power in the wikipedia game are not the people we want in charge of the contributions or making decisions.
EITHER
you monitory your pages every day
all the while remembering that they aren't "your" pages, and that all you can do is make your best evidence-based case and hope that other agree with it...
OR
you don't, and you watch as bitrot and entropy slowly but relentlessly degrade the pages to something you can't bear to look at any more.
I maintained some pages for about a year, and then after one particularly nasty edit war I gave up. Not in a petulant "they won't have me to kick around any more" way. I just stopped caring so much. Wikipedia dropped off my mental list of sites that I check every day.
I still use Wikipedia—it's near the top of every SERP. But I haven't tried to edit anything there in years.
You have to be obsesive to mantain as a Wikipedia contributor. All if not most of my contribution was deleted, including CC licensed images.
The wikipedia has great potential but same time there is lots of problems what really blows away the good contributors.
Example. You edit technical article based multiple other scientific sources. You explain things bretty deeply, create even graphics to site and then suddenly there jumps few new users who undo all the work you do because they say there was one mistake. What they should do, is to fix the problem and not undo all.
Or then there is no error, but the article does not anymore reflect their personal or public believes by persons who do not know the technical information or does not care. So they simply undo again or write back the things what you fixed. And they do not use sources or they add as sources the other wikipedia articles or even marketing infos what is simplified so much for avarage joe that the information is not accurate at all.
There comes lots of discussions about sources, what are valid but they do not even care to read them and understand because the other wikipedia articles are against them. Even that the other scientific articles what you show, proofs that other articles includes mistakes as well.
This just leads to situation where new users starts upkeeping false information because the other articles includes such. So only way to support their own information, is wikipedia itself. And no matter how much you throw a history data or scientific data, it is not accepted if it is against wikipedia itself. Problem is, people trust too much the wikipedia itself so it comes the fact to itself.
Example of technical and political correctness and support for biased articles. Ubuntu users goes trough the wikipedia adding screenshots of Ubuntu to articles where they do not belong, as there should be somekind neutral screenshot.
A week ago I checked the "GUI" article on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface
There is added a screenshot of Ubuntu 9.10 what includes GNOME. If wanted article to be not so biased, there should be screenshots as examples of Windows 7, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, GNOME, KDE4. etc. But instead having pure GNOME screenshot as default, they use Ubuntu one. What has a Ubuntu's theme, wallpaper, iconset and even configurations applied. That does not present the modern GUI, but the Ubuntu's choise of themes and styles.
It is as biased thing as it would be adding a screenshot of Windows 7 running in classic mode, aero disabled and with ugly wallpaper.
And for one reasons to support this wallpaper place tehre, is that Ubuntu is different operating system than what the Kubuntu or any other Linux distribution is. The whol idea of that can be chased back to the situation where the OS is for Ubuntu people just the desktop environment with nice theme and wallpaper and not the technically correct, the Linux kernel. And do not even let me start about the Linux kernel and Linux articles where almost both are biased with GNU ideas. Again screenshots of Ubuntu and believes what are sometimes copied straight from canonical website.
When going to rare articles where there is no such amount of young people intrested to edit them. Like animals, history etc. The effect of the problem is much smaller. But on technical and daily things, the problem is presented very clearly. The articles what are about subjects what are typically fighted around web by opinions, are in same situation on wikipedia. No matter how much you give them a sources, they denied them by saying something "public does not care about it" or "normal user does not see it that way".
Thats why I stopped contribution to wikipedia few years ago. Because on many articles, it was just impossible to do anything.
...which article you are talking about? It sounds pretty unusual that a dozen contributors lose interest in one article at the same time. Perhaps you can provide a link to the delete discussion?
I stopped participating on Wikipedia years ago due to deletionists slashing and burning any and alls article in the name of HURR HURR NOT NOTABLE. I mean, why bother? That said, I recently saw something interesting - about two months ago someone wrote an article about her negative Wikipedia experience - Bullypedia, A Wikipedian Who's Tired of Getting Beat Up. As a result of this article, some folks got together to start WP:NEWT, where they wrote articles while posing as n00bs to see how they were treated. In some cases, they were in fact treated poorly indeed. Gems include "The reason I deleted the article was that the wikilinks did not have the proper markup. In addition, "See also" should be used instead of "See articles" and "External links" should be substituted for "Sites". Willking1979 (talk) 02:43, 6 October 2009 (UTC)" and User:Multixfer throwing a total shitfit when (fully appropriately) outed as being a total asshole.
In the first 3 months of 2009 49,000 people who did nothing but patrol wikipedia all day were downsized because of the economy; raising questions of how the Internet will survive without the uselessly employed.
I mean, did anyone bother to do an environmental impact study before launching something with such worldwide and long-term impact?
Did anyone do a double-blind study to make sure Wikipedia wasn't emitting harmful radiation/gasses/particles/etc?!?!
Was there even a government committee chartered to keep watch to make sure the millions of school children who access it every day weren't harmed?
DIDN'T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!?!
Maybe Wikipedia should be shuttered until we can get a "still alive" from at least a majority of the "tens of thousands of editors" who have gone "dead" -- if even a sample of those who don't respond turn out to actually be dead then we should consider the very real possibility that Wikipedia might somehow be at fault. Remember: just because we don't see a correlation doesn't necessarily mean there isn't one.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
all the special interests that constatly undermining the credebility of the wikipedia who have time and money to constantly spin information, in small increments, towards their goals of presenting things only in how they perceive things should be. They have money, time, and resources.
Large corporations, countries, special interest groups and political parties infiltrated and subverting the credibility of Wikipedia.
Alas, Sisyphus 2.0 with changes rolling back every day.
Very occasional editor here on just one article and i can say that unless my subject had a big newspaper link then most of the relevant edits went /dev/null. That works well if your subject is msm worthy but i'm not promoting the times of india newspaper website usage/ad viewing.
Jimmy Wales must decide that if 'proof' is a single reuters/ap article interpreted 50 times is a fact is good. And that non msm subjects dont always have millions of sources to back them up.
I am through with wiki editing, i don't want to be a professional editor (who know little about any subject but a language it was written in)
Balls in your court Mr Wales.
Generally speaking editing rules aren't so hard to follow - at the very least any useful and well-intentioned contribution can be adapted by another editor to follow the rules, allowing not-so-involved editors to contribute without having to read through volumes of style guides etc.
The real kicker is the administration going on in the site. The sheer volume of beureaucratic bullshit that goes which has no direct bearing on the usefulness of a specific edit/editor. Quite simply, from my own experience it is impossible for a user to be banned from the site (even in name alone). Every final warning will be followed by a final-final warning, any actual repercussion will be lessened on appeal, any restriction will be lifted on the basis of promises of change already made and broken numerous times before. Threats of violence against specific editors on and off WP, racist abuse, personal abuse, and general trolling will all be responded with a threat of a ban that becomes a two week edit-restriction if the offender chooses to speak against the "unfairness" of being punished for his/her actions.
And the worst thing is there are vast people on WP who love this. Not just the trolls and the POV-pushers themselves but people who love the debate, the rationalisation and apologeticism of waging these constant battles. Some bizarre subculture of wannabe-lawyers and bleeding heart liberals who have taken the argument-baiting and pedantry of a decade of internet forums to a whole new level.
it'd be the best encyclopedia around for quite some time yet.
citation needed
Reply to That ||
Balderdash (pronounced /B*ryhed734as/)
Hello new user. Thanks for adding your contribution to Wikipedia, but you are not worthy. Here's a slap in your face. There is no point in re-adding your article, because I am watching you, my reputation is better then yours and I have much more free time on my hands then you do.
This new article doesn't meet Wikipedia's requirements for Notability. I've never heard of this topic, and I've heard of everything on the planet. Therefore, I am recommending this article for deletion, and then you'll have to redo it from scratch.
If you don't respond quickly, we'll delete the article. You DO check the deletion logs every day, don't you?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
That's why people are leaving.
Allow ads!
I hear they're meeting up with the leaving iPhone developers for a dance off!!!
I was researching the NES Zapper (working on an emulator) and came across Wikipedia's page on it.
It mentioned that the zapper wouldn't work on projection or plasma screen TV's, and actually said "the reasons why are unknown"
Are you kidding me? Yeah, it's a magic wand imbued with the powers of the ancient elders to kill ducks, and is beyond the capacity for mortal science to understand. OR, it's just a light sensor with a 15khz low pass filter.
Just one of a million examples of Wikipedia's complete inadequacy for any kind of actual research.
I imgagine if I was researching non-canonical Mario erotic fan fiction, Wikipedia would be a treasure trove of information.
Wikipedia seems to be infested by an army of self-serving propagandists. It was because of this kind of nonsence. It's weasle words like the following that's the worst.
" Consumer versions of Windows were originally designed for ease-of-use on a single-user PC without a network connection, and did not have security features built in from the outset.
However, Windows NT and its successors are designed for security (including on a network) and multi-user PCs, but were not initially designed with Internet security in mind as much, since, when it was first developed in the early 1990s, Internet use was less prevalent"
Microsoft Windows
The only thing they allow to be edited/created are sci-fi articles and ultra-left-wing screeds against those on the right, or society in general. Anyone try to change anything against the grain on Obama's or Pelosi's pages lately? You get hounded for a week from the "editors". Of course you can any anything you like on Palin's or Limbaugh's pages.
The theory is that anyone should be able to edit Wikipedia.
This theory is easily shredded to pieces. Let's copy some of the raw code from the article about Obama (and we should expect this to be the pinnacle of Wikipedianess):
Obama intervened in the [[Automobile Industry Bailout|troubled automotive industry]]{{cite news|title=White House questions viability of GM, Chrysler|date=March 30, 2009|work=The Huffington Post|url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/30/obama-denies-bailout-fund_n_180563.html}} in March, renewing loans for [[General Motors]] and [[Chrysler Corporation]] to continue operations while reorganizing. Over the following months the White House set terms for both firms' bankruptcies, including the [[Chrysler bankruptcy|sale of Chrysler]] to Italian automaker [[Fiat]]{{cite news|title=Chrysler and Union Agree to Deal Before Federal Deadline|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/business/27chrysler.html?_r=2&bl&ex=1240977600&en=670e4df8295b2843&ei=5087%0A}} and a [[General Motors bankruptcy|reorganization of GM]] giving the U.S. government a temporary 60% equity stake in the company, with the Canadian government shouldering a 12% stake.{{cite news|title=GM Begins Bankruptcy Process With Filing for Affiliate|author=John Hughes, Caroline Salas, Jeff Green, and Bob Van Voris|url=http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aw4F_L7E4xYg|work=Bloomberg.com|date=June 1, 2009}} He also signed into law the [[Car Allowance Rebate System]], known colloquially as "Cash for Clunkers" bill, on August 7, 2009.{{cite news|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/21clunkers.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=cash%20for%20clunkers&st=cse|title=Government Will End Clunker Program Early |author= Nick Bunkley|publisher=''[[New York Times]]''|date=2009-08-20|accessdate=2009-08-21}}
This should be supplemented with a Flash-based editor, where you could simply click on words and type in details in a drop-down menu to mark it as a reference.
And that is just one of the momentous amount of problems Wikipedia has. I remember in the old days, there were actually some people saying that "if you contribute to Wikipedia, you could even mention it in a job interview" - at the moment, if someone told me that they're a Wikipedia editor, I would assume they were a zealous sociopath. Do you think that none of them noticed that Wikipedia was getting inaccessible to ordinary users? No, power and status is like water, if 999 paths are blocked it will take number 1000.
If you can put some more context in here, it would help us understand the history. btw, are deletions final? Isn't the metadata kept around somewhere?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
"There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. America grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many citizens."
I've used to make maybe 5 edits per year since Wikipedia began. Recently I've made a lot less, and it's not because I've run out of things to contribute.
Of the past 5 edits I've made, I think 4 of them have been tagged as a "good faith edit" and removed because they didn't live up to their new policies. Really, I understand their motivation -- they want everything to be as verifiable as possible. But I think this goes against what made Wikipedia big in the first place.
It used to be so quick and easy to add new information. Anyone who spotted an error was compelled to correct it. It brought the entire internet together as one big community. Now you have to stay caught up with their ever-changing policies, be prepared to defend an edit in the discussion page, etc. -- it's no longer quick and easy. It's no longer fun to contribute. It's more like actual work now. I'm glad that some people can still enjoy doing it because I find Wikipedia an invaluable resource, but as an 'infrequent' contributor, I have a lot of trouble finding the motivation to put up with it any more.
I have started three (minor) articles and contributed to hundreds more.
I am no longer doing this. Wikipedia has become a slew of in-fighting political activists, and many articles have been severely distorted by single-issue fanatics insisting on deleting anything which does not accord with their point of view....
When the Chinese writer wants to contribute about Heilongjiang, I'll be right there supporting them. But it's not going to be anyone who's been with Wikipedia all this time. Those people have already written everything they know. The original post is about the current editors leaving. It's finished for them.
Now figure out a way to get Jing Gu to write about Heilongjiang.
There are times when I feel like a lawyer when some people get into a dispute with me. It becomes a battle of who can quote the rule that suits them best. There are so many rules that it has gotten out of hand, knowing the rules of Wikipedia is quickly becoming a full time job in itself. I even had one guy dispute one of my edits because I quoted a primary source and he insisted that the rules prefer secondary sources over primary. I knew the subject much better than he and I knew that the primary source was correct and his secondary source was bogus. But that wasn't good enough for the 'rules.' Nevertheless, I slapped a Dispute tag on the offending part of the article, took it to the Content Noticeboard, and that section of the article has remained in dispute ever since. I can't be bothered resolving it.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I was an old-timer on Wikipedia who began contributing in 2002.
I've witnessed layers and layers of bureaucracy be added to Wikipedia all under the benevolent dictatorship of Jimbo. I've witnessed what used to be a culture where all editors were considered equal become one where there are definite castes and hierarchies (and cabals).
It just isn't worth the effort to edit anymore.
Case in point: from 2002 to 2006 I was one of the primary editors of a set of articles that had to do with a subject that definitely has politics surrounding it. All the editors involved and I did our best to present both sides of the topic and to try to keep the articles fair and balanced. The number of editors was sparse and it was relatively easy to keep the articles on track.
A couple of years ago a new user started editing these articles. He was extremely contentious but a skilled at wikilawyering. Every edit he didn't agree with would be dragged by him down a rathole of WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:POV, WP:PSTS, and so and and so on ad infinitum. It doesn't matter how well *your* edits are sourced from quality peer-reviewed sources. If he didn't agree with your edits he would find something to complain about; the journal you are citing isn't respected enough, the author you are quoting has an obvious bias, your summary of the published literature doesn't agree with how he would summarize the published literature, etc, etc, etc. Similarly, any objection you had to his edits (or to the overall effect his edits in aggregate were having on the article) would also be dragged down a similar path of his gaming the system.
Editing the articles involved simply became too painful to continue. If you wanted to make any change that this user would disagree with then you had to prepare yourself of days of arguing with him before he would leave you alone. Similarly, one became hesitant to "correct" any of his articles because of the time-sink that you knew arguing with him was going to become.
The existing editors tried many times to work within the system to make this user stop. There were multiple attempts at mediation and arbitration. But over time all of the "old" editors simply gave up. It just wasn't worth the effort anymore.
When I visit these articles today I am ashamed at what they have become. What was once a fair attempt to present all sides of an issue has become extremely one-sided and quite misleading to a reader not familiar with the subject. The "problem user" has become in effect the only editor of these articles, tolerating only a handful of other editors who primarily make grammatical and punctuation changes.
The only hope for the articles in question is that this user eventually gets tired and quits. He has won in his attempt to take over these articles, everyone with an established interest has been driven away, and I don't think any new user is going to be able to mount a challenge as he will simply tie them down in wikilawyering forever.
The bane of Wikipedia is people with deletionist mentality.
I did a quake engine, the article about it survived about 4 years, and got deleted. More important stuff than my engine got deleted.
The whole quake thing is "asking" for a deletionism run, since most of these stuff was online-only. Hell.. the "quake-hub" website is down for a few years already. Probably you can get similar scenarios with old stuff like VRML, SGML, etc. Websites are not here forever, break and die. I read the deletion logs, with intense facepalm sentiments, with text like "I have search at google, and theres not hits for X", say dude that know *nothing* about the topic of the article he is discussing to delete.
Somehow, the deletionism group win the war, and has Wikipedia ransom. Live in some "HardDisk is full" scenario, where having more articles is bad, so theres the need to remove these that don't fit some limited vision of notability. Limited as in... how can people that have no idea of quake engines discuss about the notability of some quake thing? Is like me discussing the notability of some greek poet... I know nothing of that. Lame and sad.
Is obvious that the wikipedia is roting, and part of it will suck because of that.
Hell.. have you guys see the talk pages? simplicity has died. I use to sign my coments as "--Tei" logged or unloged. Now this is not enough... argh.
-Woof woof woof!
The problem with most volunteer organizations, is the people that gravitate towards leadership positions are often the people LEAST capable of running the organization effectively. The "normal" people are too busy leading their real lives to seek leadership positions, so into the vacuum step the feeble-minded or sociopathic tyrants hell-bent on payback. It's just like a volunteer fire company or church group. The same dynamic often develops there too.
Or not.
I'm certain some of the contributers have gotten frustrated by the rules and quit but there are likely more who just didn't have anything else they felt like writing about. I only felt that I had some worthwhile information to share regarding the DEU Doom WAD editor so that was the only article I wrote. It's since been absorbed into the Doom WAD article, but still retains a fair amount of what I had to say on the topic.
In short, the rules may be frustrating for some, but I don't think that they're necessarily the sole reason people aren't posting as much as they used to do.
Unfortuantely, that difference is usually bad. Take, for example, The Price is Right article, and its accompanying articles. The game show is a legend, and has had over 100 different pricing games, all with unique rules, and many of them are very well known and notable.
However, it's impossible to find books or websites explaining the rules or discussing the games' histories. Sure, there are thousands of clips on Youtube, but who in there right mind is going to take the time to use those as citations? As a result, one flamboyantly gay user has been able to single handedly destroy most of the somewhat well written articles (yeah, some of them are full of "fancruft", but the vast majority are not).
That's just wrong.
I should add that it has gotten somewhat better over the years, but as far as I know only because a bunch of webcomic fans blew up a shitstorm over the *constant* nominations for deletions.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
People like you are killing wikipedia.
You think you are contributing, using the delete button, but you are just putting a filter that will put the obscure / not popular information out.
You are blind, so you obviously don't see what we will lose with this.
-Woof woof woof!
i dont want to see what people are fighting about. i just post facts and run away. every moment spent arguing with some idiot over minute bullshit is a complete waste of time and by posting more than arguing, im outrunning the idiots and avoiding the mire and muck of 'the process' and 'the system'.
The thing is, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia at its soul, so it needs a lot of volunteers for initial content, but after that, it doesn't have to change all that much.
This is my sig.
Some people like to feel important and powerful, even if they do so by being harmful to the organization as a whole.
It happens all the time. In fact, it happens so often that the phenomenon has a name: the Iron Law of Oligarchy:
Another problem is that some articles are, let's say... unnecessarily detailed. For example, an article on necrophilia that almost reads like that South Park episode: "This is necrophilia, here are pictures of necrophilia, here's another close-up, and here's a recording of what necrophilia sounds like on your grandma's eye sockets". *Starts fisting a mayonaise jar*
...but that is no answer to my question. Yes, there were many questionable decisions in Wikipedia, but not every single one is related to every other incident.
Wikipedia is going to suffer the same fate as Usenet and IRC.
In the beginning, it was a magnificent user community, and great value was derived from it.
Then it was exploited. Users started editing articles to suit their own views, opinions, biases. Usenet got full of groups with very narrow focuses. IRC of course got overwhelmed by bots and wars.
Now, anyone with integrity is suffering under the rules that keep the idiots, griefers, and those who prefer to make Wikipedia into their propaganda instrument from succeeding.
I tried once to create an article, and it got both rejected and re-edited. Among the things I did/did not do to annoy the editors:
- Not enough links on terms and subjects to other articles. This was an article on a game-playing experience. I didn't think linking to 'video games', 'role-paying games', etc was useful, but then Im not a very good Wikipedia article writer, so I'm not into it.
- No attribution. Ok, this was an expression of my experience. Attribution? check the author. Ok, it wasn't very suitable for Wikipedia, despite being written by me in direct response to a request for some more details on the game...
Overall this is sadly predictable. Wikipedia is becoming important, which makes it important to get things right, and so long as that community had to deal with contributors editing articles for their own purposes, it was a matter of time before the process drove away even the dedicated contributors.
Wikipedia will die out slowly, or will attract new contributors and fix the process so they don't walk away in disgust.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
But in the past:
Wikitruth documented the corruption and scams and scandals that happened in Wikipedia. But it happened so much, and hardly anyone cared about it that Wikitruth had to quit. There was no point in continuing as people didn't care that Editors and Admins who claimed to have PHDs didn't actually have them, or that oversight abuse happened to remove evidence of corruption, etc.
Conservapedia, no I won't link to them, but they claimed Wikipedia was not a neutral POV but a liberal one, and created their own Conservative Wiki Encyclopedia.
Uncyclopedia was started after Wikipedia refused to host deleted facts and other nonsense section of their Wiki site, so many of us went to Uncyclopedia, and others went to Illogicpedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica or both or all three, etc. Even the humor sites seemed to be more accurate than Wikipedia and not as prone to politics, corruption, etc.
Wikipedia is good for WWE/TNA Wrestling facts, and Comic book and Sci Fi and Movie facts. That they do right, there is no bias, and a neutral point of view mostly. I find myself checking Wikipedia for comic books, movies, sci fi shows and movies, wrestling, and other things a real Encyclopedia won't cover but Wikipedia will.
I am not notable enough for a Wikipedia entry, nor are most people. I don't want a Wikipedia entry on me as I want to be a private citizen. I do a lot of open source writing on Uncyclopedia, Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Wikia sub-Wikis, etc. I might later on publish a few books when I get good enough to write them without community help, or I may release them to creative commons license on LegalTorrents instead and give them away for free. That might make me notable, but I don't think it would be notable enough for a Wikipedia entry. I am just one in 9 billion people trying to survive. I also do open source programming and help people fix their computers via home tech support for friends and relatives, like most Slashdot readers.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I once tried adding information to a Wikipedia article and the editor-in-charge (?) summarily dismissed and deleted my edits arguing that it's "irrelevant information". The article was about a movie and I was just pointing to a PC game based on the movie. But he just wouldn't accept that piece of information and had the right to revert the changes I had made and there was nothing I could do about it.
Deletionists are people wholly incapable of understanding that topics uninteresting to them are not necessarily topics uninteresting to everyone. They also don't understand that there's plenty of space available, and that a multitude of articles doesn't cause confusion because there are search engines and disambiguation.
In other words, deletionists are both douchebags AND stupid. Not sure either can be fixed.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
50,000 / 3,000,000 = 1.7%
Alarming
What's killing it for me is how some editors go overzealous in making things good for "fair use"; that is, images are too often made so damn tiny that they're barely any bigger than the thumbnails in the articles' infoboxes. I mean, imagine a screenshot of an operating system... sloppily resized to 1/5th of the original size, without filtering. All you see is a tiny, ugly mess, a little square full of jaggies and moire. Because showing a full quality pic is going to hurt the developer somehow!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I tried to get our speed limit site called Wikispeedia under the wikimedia umbrella, sort of a way to introduce our open-government stuff.
They said I need to join OSM which is a possibility.
Out of spike, I put our speed limits in the Firefox side-wiki since they wouldn't let me put any edits on their speed limit page..
What I really detest is their SF stance on porn. Thats what will kill them, once the high schools wise up to this hole in their knowledge dyke!
Cum shot
I no longer contribute to wikipedia because they shot down my suggestion to update the article on earth to "Mostly Harmless". I hate those moderators.
Wikipedia has become a captive of dogmatists. Two areas exemplify this: climate and medicine. Conflicts of interests and an unscientific prejudice for pushing "global warming" occurs, where major scientists are disparaged by their clear inferiors and their "dissident" works undercut. In medicine, the most reactionary doctors control articles about which they know nothing, eager to pass on information known to be false, from biased, *provably wrong*, "mainstream" journals. Where their clinical and scientific misunderstandings would be embarrassing if more broadly known, as well as getting you booted from serious universities or organizations a generation ago for incompetence or fraud.
One of the things I hated most when I was writing for Wikipedia was the anti-science attitude of many editors there. I wrote mostly articles on biological organisms and was a strong proponent of using scientific names for article titles. Common names are simply not unique, a fact that has resulted in many heated and pointless debates (i.e. Tiger vs. Puma). I figure WP should try to move beyond that and embrace the advantages of scientific nomenclature that biologists have known about for 250 years.
Most of the folks who were actually busy writing the articles agreed, but every time an attempt was made to change the policies, our efforts would be met with great resistance from people who simply did not know what they were talking about, let alone make any contributions of the kind. You could see from their edit histories that these people were bureaucrats: they produced very little content and an amazing amount of hot air. Yet, they have enormous influence at WP due simply to their dogged persistence.
In my view, the fact that more productive editors are now leaving as opposed to arriving is only partly explained by the low-hanging-fruit phenomenon. I, along with many others, was willing to take WP -- or at least my small corner of it -- to the next level, but the problem is that those bureaucrats simply don't share the same vision. When it comes to certain subjects that enter into their own realm of consciousness, it seems like they'd rather keep things looking like an expanded version of the old encyclopedia that their parents once bought when they were kids. It's completely at odds with Jimbo's original vision, but try telling them that.
As a result, the easy work has already been done, but anyone with the knowledge to do the hard stuff is quickly discouraged. I suspect most professional biologists don't even bother; a few of the ones I spoke to outside of WP had a low opinion of the site precisely because scientific names were not being used for article titles.
Finally, there's the problem of vandalism. Since I've left, no one has stepped in to keep an eye on the articles I wrote, let alone expand them in any meaningful way. The vandalism, however, is constant. Most of the obvious stuff gets reverted, but it's the subtle vandalism that is the most problematic. Unless you're a specialist, you just can't tell the difference. Either WP should start paying specialists to keep watch, or they should start try treating their own volunteer specialists with more respect. I've heard for years that WP v2 was supposed to solve a lot of vandalism problems, but so far it hasn't appeared.
You did the right thing: your were Bold, in keeping with Wikipedia's Be Bold guideline. If the moderator disagrees, they should bring up the subject on the discussion page -- but not scold you (see ad hominem) for being bold.
-kgj
Failing fast? Keep in mind that this isn't affecting readers yet, just growth
It does effect readers. It makes Wikipedia less useful for anything that might have a political aspect, which means that I think about using Wiki much less generally than I might.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After you build the house you don't keep the builders around. That would be awkward.
If you want to run it as little power tripping club then don't be surprised when everyone gets fed up with your shit and leave.
I think that reflects the attitude of a tight knit core group of editors who'd rather not have the general public make edits to their pages.
Rather than a single tight-knit core of editors, I see multiple cores of editors, each grouped around their favorite topic(s), whose knits have varying degrees of tightness. Some topics attract fanatical editors; other topics attract little or no interest from anyone.
-kgj
I used to regularly edit articles, though I rarely, if ever, made any new ones. But during the 2008 general elections I went to the Obama page to learn more about him. I was blown away to see what was the cleanest, most beautifully designed and positive page I've ever seen in Wikipedia. Not even Ghandi's page gave me the same feeling. Then I took a look at the discussion page and saw a huge number of people angry that they could not edit the page and many had their accounts suspended. Clearly anyone who did not add content that reflected Obama in a positive light would find themselves mired in Wikipedia litigation and essentially unable to really respond because they hadn't passed the Wikipedia bar exam.
After seeing this I stopped contributing content and money to Wikipedia and I only use it to look up things that are straight facts - like frog species and mountain heights.
BTW, I did not support either candidate in the election, so I really didn't care who won.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I spent a great deal of time updating and correcting an article about a certain set of laws in a certain country. I used -- and cited -- official government sources of that country. The previous article was highly inaccurate (among other things, saying that a provision regarding the air force was repealed...in 1917!) and in several critical respects completely wrong.
Within a few hours, all my changes were reverted as being "vandalism", and my protest on the talk page was also removed. Apparently, a certain individual considers that article to be his private property.
At that point, I said the hell with Wikipedia. I have a page on my own site that details the actual facts, and cautions that Wikipedia's information is wrong.
If a contributor leaves because they don't want to spend time using common journalist practices of fact checking, attribution, citation, etc then their contribution most likely isn't quality information. If someone wants the privileges of defining the basic meaning of something to the entire internet then they have to accept the responsibilities that go along with it. Wikipedia has become the de facto encyclopedia on the internet. I would say most people trust wikipedia articles, which to an operation like it is vital to it's success.
How the Wikipedia Did Come to be Bad. An Essay by Stargoat
(1) Once upon a time, a man named Jimbo did create a website where the knowledge of the world might be stored. This website was called the Wikipedia and it was good.
(2) Many were the people who did come and they added vibrant knowledge to the Wikipedia. Most of the knowledge was useful. Some was not. The information was stored haphazardly and there was great inconsistency. But the information was there and it was good.
(3) Those who call themselves journalists did gaze upon the Wikipedia and mocked it. They stated that the Wikipedia could never work, for who would contribute? All could alter it. And information that was incorrect was placed upon it.
(4) And following the journalists and among the journalists were trolls, who did put incorrect information in the Wikipedia.
(5) But behold, for the many people who did come outnumbered the trolls who placed incorrect information on the Wikipedia. The incorrect information was usually found and replaced. And the Wikipedia did flourish and many more people did come to read and add vibrant information to the Wikipedia. And it was good.
(6) Then, some journalists decided that Wikipedia was a creditable source for news and when they came across incorrect information, they did complain and moan and carry on. But the people were learned enough to sift through the vibrant knowledge. As such, the people did not care for credibility, for Wikipedia was good and much information was stored, though haphazardly.
(7) But alas, certain cliques of editors of the Wikipedia did claim the title of Administrator. And certain cliques of Administrators did not trust the people's ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect information, though the people were learned.
(8) And the certain cliques of Administrators did remove the haphazard information. They justified their initial restraints on information vibrancy by claiming copyright violations. And with some gain of power, like all petty fool-tyrants, the Administrators lusted. By taking more power, they destroyed what was the Wikipedia. The Old Wikipedia was dead and the New Wikipedia took its place.
(9) The New Wikipedia was more difficult to edit. Many were the tags that were placed and these tags hung heavy on the articles and upon the people who did edit and create articles. The New Wikipedia took the information from the old Wikipedia, which was good, and attached needless and counterproductive rules, which is bad. And the people did look upon the information and indeed some could not tell a difference.
(10) But those who had added information saw it tagged for content violations and for notability and for references. The people who added information sighed and did say, "This sucks." Then they did stop adding vibrant knowledge and the Wikipedia did not grow as before.
(11) Thus endth the beginning of the story of the Wikipedia, which did start good, but became bad.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
If they are leaving, just to sit on their ass and say "oh hey I used to contribute to Wikipedia, but now I don't because X, Y and Z.", then who the hell cares about them. Wikipedia will keep growing anyway, and their contributions will remain. If they actually are going to contribute to a competing solution, what is it and why. Or maybe, they are getting together to create a new solution to their woes. Now you've got me interested.
But as far as I see it, Wikipedia is by far the best at what it is and does. Do something constructive if you're going to leave. Otherwise, continue contributing and remember that your contributions are still there in the history of the article, which in my opinion is by far the most underutilized feature of the site.
The online encyclopedia, knowledge base, social networking site, essay repository, blog, search engine, news aggregator, dessert wax and floor topping Wikipedia has reached its three millionth article and ceased all editing.
Palo Alto Research Center reported that only 1% of edits by random users were kept. "They were all unspeakable shit," said burnt-out administrator WikiFiddler451. "All of them. No, I'm not exaggerating. Go to Special:Newpages and read a day's entries some time. You'll start by deleting the whole database, before you get onto plotting the doom of humanity. Christ, why go on?"
Recent media coverage has highlighted the "inclusionist/deletionist" wars of 2005, including enquiries from Endemol looking for a "passionate deletionist" to join Big Brother 11, "preferably one with big tits." It is thought that Wikipedia could have had ten million articles by now had they not viciously abused their editorial powers by deleting your valuable contributions about you, your teacher at school, your garage band or your dog or the many cameraphone pictures you uploaded of your penis.
"Everything's already been written," said WikiFiddler451, burning the last of his Star Wars figurines before leaving for his rehabilitation course in social interaction skills and basics of hygiene. "Do you have any idea how big THREE MILLION articles is? A BILLION GODDAMN WORDS! Are you going to read more than a droplet of that in your life? No you aren't. You're following your goddamn Twitter.
"But hey, only two million articles are The Simpsons in popular culture or Doctor Who in popular culture. No-one actually reads this stuff, they just write it. We have LiveJournal for stuff people write that no-one wants to read. 'Oh, I wandered lonely as a cheeseburger/ My passionate angst filling my Coke with darkness.' Or Knol. KNOL! I'll just Bing that one."
Shell-shocked veterans of Wikipedia are at a loss now that it's all over — wandering the alleyways of the Internet, mumbling to themselves about "ANI" and "we had to delete the village in order to save it," threatening the policemen moving them on with "arbitration" and bursting into tears when the policeman answers "citation needed." Mere children, sent into the culture wars to save knowledge from horrors they barely understood, and coming home as crippled wrecks. No victory parades for these brave men and women. There is only so much Citizendium, Uncyclopedia and 4chan can do for these child heroes. With your help, we can build Potemkin wikis for these honorable veterans, where they can safely ban and unban, revert and edit-war, and correct the naming of Danzig Gdansk Danzig Gdansk without the possibility of damage to actual human readers. Please donate so that they may never bug you again.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I think everybody just realized the foundational problem in the idea behind Wikipedia.
We all thought it was a really great idea at the time. I was a big fan of it.
But some things threw me off.
My guess is that it all began by people realizing, that there is more than one view on some things, because it’s either impossible to find out the truth, it's not worth the effort, or there are in fact two physically distinct truths on the same thing (relativity). (Don’t even think about confusing this with the Creationism bullshit please. As you will see below, my arguments are specifically methods to prevent such things. :)
This naturally caused the admins to think about what to do against that problem. Unfortunately they chose a very bad “solution&rdquo. They got in a back room (mailing list) and discussed what views Wikipedia now would represent. (And as a consequence, which things would be censored.) You may remember this turning up on Slashdot as the “secret admin mailing list scandal”.
But as there are always people with other opinions. Some that you can’t prove wrong. Perhaps because it is just as much true. Perhaps for lack of information. And some that are just trolling. Then there are many more in between.
So of course people fought about the “one true truth”. And as “anyone can edit” Wikipedia, anyone did.
Which led to the logical conclusion to lock down pages, and enforce strict rules. And that is what broke the neck of it, for me. It was as if Wikipedia died at that moment, and something else emerged. “Anyone can edit“ my ass! Now you have to get at least three ranks up to even post a picture. And check all your changes for just being reversed for “Because I can” pseudo-reasons.
No wonder, the term “Wikinazis” even came up. I mean, if that does not remind you of it, then you have to learn your history.
Here you have to know a basic rule about human psychology: There are two reasons why someone does something: A) Because he thinks that is the right thing to to. And B) Because he thinks he is forced to do it. But both have in common, that they themselves are good and not wrong. That self-value and sense of the own reality is so important, that the inner “it” literally think it’s dying when it breaks down. (Aka, going crazy.) So people will go to extreme lengths to prevent from having to accept being bad or wrong. This is not a bad mechanism. It’s an evolutionary developed one. And in normal life also a very useful one.
Now imagine everybody, basing on his own knowledge, what he thinks is right and wrong and soandso. But since they don’t have the same base of information, they reach different conclusions. And then they base their self-acceptance on it.
I think you can already feel the luring conflict potential in this, can you?
The thing is, that there is in theory, apart from some unusual physical properties of the universe, a real physical “truth” for all of us. But in practice, that does not help us very much, does it?
Because: What ways of finding “the truth” do we use?
Of course, we could go and deduce it via plain hard logic. But then you end up with people having different paradigms that don’t fit. If you even ever get that far. Have you tried finding out what is “relevant” enough to be put in an article via pure logic based on the rules of physics? I have. It’s not a pretty thing. And you won’t be able to do it in a lifetime. Or even a thousands of lifetimes.
So how do we “know” anything at all then? Well, that’s where the alpha/beta sense of reality and the concept of trust come is. See, why do you believe a single word of what I just said? Or what you read in TFA. Or on TV? Or even from the person that is closest to do? How do you know that there is a computer screen in front of you right now? We
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I can tell you from experience that the college I go to does not allow Wikipedia as a research tool. They feel the information is inaccurate and will not allow citations for APA papers that reference Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has to keep growing. Any staid project will eventually succumb to demise. Maybe next for Wikipedia, implement a paid model based on micro-payments whereby contributors and editors have a fiscal incentive to stay contributing. There a many ways to provide incentives: special attribution/acknowledgements, free stuff, and many others. Keep up the momentum and the ideas. Don't move backward to a no rules model.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Wikipedia really should have been an Encyclopedia Galactica collecting the sum of human knowledge about anything and everything--that's what I thought of when I first heard about Wikipedia. Noteworthiness could have been addressed by flagging topic pages with a noteworthiness rating, and maybe a policy discouraging links between articles with a high noteworthiness rating and a low one, rather than just deleting whole subjects based on someone's opinion of a subject's noteworthiness.
The reliable sources policy is also, while well-intentioned, a cause of much loss of information and articles on Wikipedia--a rule should exist to mitigate it, such as a rule discouraging editors from removing poorly sourced information they nonetheless know or suspect to be correct. While no one wants inaccurate information to stand, the reliable sources policy sometimes goes too far since even first-hand sources are discouraged.
I'm also fairly disgusted at Jimmy Wales' authoritarian control, used to censor articles as he sees fit. If an item is factual, it should be fair game for inclusion and the biases and personal opinions of a project founder should not enter into the picture.
At any rate, while I certainly use Wikipedia a lot, I do so by default and would gladly switch to any viable alternative which took a more inclusive and less tyrannical approach.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
It used to just say "Harmless."
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
In a thriving economy with enormous growth, there are plenty of people who have time to contribute because they have the luxury of a well paying job and the best of intentions. Place these restrictions on the contributors, plus the failing economy and you have the perfect storm for a grand exodus. To answer the question, "Where are people going?" They are spending time looking for a job, working more hours, or working more than one job to make ends meet. They are donating their time to activities that reward them for their contributions rather then getting stuck in the bureaucracy.
Then again, if you look at the number of iPhone apps that are published each day. Maybe people are building apps instead. Same painful approval process; but, at least you might get paid.
I'll answer that for you: No.
I've tried a few times, but the bureaucracy was such that I gave up.
A noble idea, but I wonder if it's really viable. I've seen other online knowledge systems degenerate in to bad jokes, full of disinformation. Yahoo Answers is positively scary, with an oppressive "moderation" system to boot. It would be a shame if Wikipedia went the same way.
...laura
Wikia went hand-in-hand with the noteworthiness filter as a strategy to try to make Jimmy Wales into a Big Internet Entrepreneur. Maybe it's not working but it's not for lack of trying.
I think the answer is to allow all Wikia content on Wikipedia and allow Wikipedia to accept advertising. That neatly solves many problems at once. It brings all the information into one place, which moves Wikipedia toward its stated goal of all human knowledge. Advertising would defray hosting costs and thus reduce the need for a "noteworthiness" filter. I do not believe it would affect the usage of Wikipedia in the slightest. While many hardcore geeks get up-in-arms about online advertising, the vast majority of users simply don't care as long the site is highly useful.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I gave up on wikipedia when i learned they were actively perpetrating a lie with a media blackout on some reporter who had been captured by some extremist group. THe justification was that it keeps media attnetion off him, helping him to stay alive.Any time someone would edit his page informing the world that this person was missing, wikipedia would change it back, eventually locking it. Unacceptable. It should not a be a repository of knowledge's job to change for socio-political reasons. Please present the facts, nothing more, nothing less.
Good-bye
Really, I was modded flamebait? I challenge anyone to prove me wrong on any of my four points.
Dude, where's my packet?
I think you are presenting a choice that is often false, but continues to be hotly debated in all aspects of human society.
The choice is usually presented thus: "either I personally guide it, or it fails." It is often false because it fails to take into account the interests and enthusiasm and worldviews of other people. In economic terms the choice is usually presented as "either we centrally control our economy, or it will spin out of control." In moral terms the choice is usually presented as "either we restrict what people are allowed to say and do, or the society will fall into moral decay and sin." In management terms it's often thought of as "if I don't micromanage every aspect of my staff, they will produce subpar work, if they work at all."
I hope people can see that none of these are true. If a system is set up that privileges a small set of people to wield power indefinitely over others, it will not be stable long-term. The power-wielders will grow weary, and no one else will be able to step in and refresh the project. A system that empowers the greatest number of people to lead and drive change looks sketchier in the short term, but in the long term is the most flexible and adaptable.
By drawing the protections ever-tighter around Wikipedia's content, the current leadership of the project are jeopardizing its future. I know that I have stopped making edits because I had almost no freedom to do so without running into bureaucracy. Reduce the bureaucracy and you will engage ever more people, keeping the project going and adapting. Circle the wagons to keep everyone else out, and over time you'll find that there aren't enough people inside the circle anymore to drive the wagons anyplace else. People age, priorities change, life goes on. In the meantime an entire new generation risks learning that they are not welcome on Wikipedia--and so decide to spend their time online elsewhere.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Troll mod, for my the parent post? Really? For what? Criticizing Wikipedia? Really? In an article suggesting that Wikipedia has problems? Really?
Let me guess: Wiki admins with mod points.
While I agree with your general point, I have to call you out on one thing in your post: What does being flamboyantly gay have to do with decisions to delete stuff related to The Price is Right from Wikipedia? I wouldn't mind if your point had been related to an article about, say, gay activism, but it wasn't.
Your complaint is valid. Your treatment of the user in question isn't.
I am officially gone from
I never create an account any more.
Pretty much 100% of the content I created was removed (some of it arbitrarily-- and on obscure subjects where the options were my content or nothing).
I still update little pieces-- and still have things backed out-- even automatically.
There's an obscure 1930's movie that lacked information about where it was filmed. I added the information and a link to the larger site where i got the information from in the link section. The link was automatically removed. I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of my post is gone by now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Any useful organisation that depends on volunteers degrades when the original memes die.
The geeks invent it, the enlightened make it easy to use, a few champions popularise it, the bullies move in with the rest of the crowd and it's no longer interesting. It's a common pattern, really.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
but I bought a subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica instead.
this is what happened to many other attempts and projects in human history before, when they took the elitist route.
wikipedia was no different. it wasnt going to be an exception to the rule.
those who screwed up wikipedia, now sit and enjoy the shit you have done.
Read radical news here
Wikia went hand-in-hand with the noteworthiness filter as a strategy to try to make Jimmy Wales into a Big Internet Entrepreneur. Maybe it's not working but it's not for lack of trying.
Suprisingly, no. It's a side effect of the Israel-Palestine issue.
There was at one time a well-known high-ranking editor on Wikipedia who spent his working day making Israel look good on Wikipedia. His main tactic was removing material he described as "original research". Over time, the effect was not that Israel looked better, but that material critical of Israel was cited in more and more detail, with a footnote to a reliable source for every factual statement, sentence by sentence. Then that editor could no longer delete it as "original research". (He kept trying, which got him into trouble. Eventually, he lost his privileged position and was barred from editing any article related to Israel.)
Gradually, this standard for citation spread to the rest of Wikipedia. For people used to writing for refereed journals, it wasn't a problem. For fans, it was hell.
Wikia is Wikipedia's dumpster, or slush pile. As such, it's useful. I had misgivings about Wales being involved with both a profit-making and a nonprofit entity in the same area (the IRS doesn't like that), but it doesn't seem to have meant much. If he wants to monetize fancruft, so be it.
there are hordes of subjects, especially from the field you gave, the world history, to be written yet. apparently you are not into history, if you were, you would know that following a particular history subject in detail through wikipedia always ends up with a dead end, a template article that is put there for the relevant subject, but noone contributed yet.
please lets not shit online without knowing. especially, about things you dont know about.
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In this case, it was Jimmy Wales foolishly applying his apparent Randian worldview onto the project (he used to either frequent or admin some Randroid newsgroup).
The article on Kant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant just doesn't have the disdain for Transcendental Idealism that I would expect from Rand.
"Contributors are becoming disenchanted with the process of adding to the site which is becoming increasingly difficult "
Yes. Worse, I'd say 10% of the time I get to a page on something I am interested in or I find a useful picture, and: A) it's marked for deletion, or B) sizable parts of it (usually the interesting parts) are marked for deletion. If I project that observation, I can see that wikipedia will become less useful to me in the future. And why should I contribute my own effort if stuff is going to be arbitrarily deleted for trivial reasons?
I liked the fact that things weren't always consistent, and weren't always forced into a strict format. Yes, consistency is nice, and something to work towards over time, but the deletionists are way out of hand. I'd rather have something rough than a stub or nothing at all.
That is one of the dumber stories the WSJ wrote, although since Murdoch took over, there have been a lot of dumb, poorly edited stories.
The significant fact, as I and other readers pointed out in the comments, is that it's meaningless to say that 50,000 wikipedia editors left, unless you know the base number that it's drawn from.
Google search for "Number of Wikipedia editors." 300,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times. So that would make it 17%. Aren't WSJ reporters supposed to do that?
But another WSJ reader said:
Guys, Do your homework. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia becoming less relevant or the other reasons discussed. It's because they mahttp://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedia-In-Record-Numbers?art_pos=6#de a technical change to the site that makes it less attractive for spammers to use. It's a good thing that these spammers are no longer editing the site to link to their blogs / websites.
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Wikipedia_Adds_NOFOLLOW_Attribute_To_Outbound_Lin
actually post here to clear up any misunderstandings about their procedures, if there are ?
if any of them are reading this, they should take up posting and explain themselves. for what we are reading here is really really not good.
and they shouldnt at all snob this place either - for there are hordes of I.T. people here who can break or make frameworks, projects, leave aside websites, with their collective (and sometimes individual) action.
i, for one, am a web developer for example. i also maintain numerous websites. in addition, i am a participant in various high volume profession and interest forums. sufficient number of these rightful negative reviews, and i may decide not to use wikipedia in any aspect of my work or personal life, stop giving links to it, even may stop using and giving support to any infrastructure that runs wikipedia, if things go that far. and switch to an alternative as soon as it comes up.
im just one person. but, there are many of us. and, 'the people', which seem to be getting snobbed by wikpedia, as the article points out, rule the web. never forget that.
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This is THE lifecycle of businesses that grow to a certain level in the USA: the "managers" move in after the leaders create, then the leaders move out or on to something else because they can't stand the ethics, morals and values of the so-called "managers". The "managers" then gets as much as they can from the labors of the leaders and the laborers. Need anyone ask why no one likes americans?
All those editors probably contribute to an even better website now: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
> 2/ Why is Hezbollah a "terrorist" organization?
They *target* civilians. How can you defend them when they send people with bombs strapped on to kill children and civilians in nightclubs? Yes, others kill civilians, for example when they retaliate against the young men firing rockets at them.
You talk about it being based "sickeningly" on religion, but you have no problem with what they do in the name of Islam?
I have three words for you: Pot. Kettle. Black.
I quit because of the lunatics. There were always people who would try to put their insane new-age gibberish into science articles, or who would remove innocuous information from geographic articles because they had some insane idea that it put their ethnic group in a bad light.
The eastern European and south Asian articles are pretty much all controlled by ethnic whackos. The biology articles are full of people who think that herbs cure cancer. And so it goes. If any of my friends quotes Wikipedia nowadays, I laugh in their face and tell them to get a real source.
At first this sounded somewhat alarming, but then i realized there is so much of a general user reliance on this open source encyclopedia that if it were to collapse, dissappear or whatever, some sort of morphologically similar entity would appear in no time in order to satisfy the need.
You forgot your link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedo
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
is the day the spam takes over
Years ago, I edited the Kraftwerk entry on wikipedia to correct a mistake regarding the german and english names of their albums. I qouted the correct sources only to find that weeks later the credit for the change had been removed from wikipedia. Yet my changes to the respective entry were still intact. If you run a site when everybody contributes, but only select members get credit, the "unselect" members will leave. As far as I am concerned, I now have no time to waste on wikipedia's project as they show no respect for their contributors. Wikipedia needs to wake up or get out of the game.
My first computer had 1024 bytes of ram
Most social circles I'm in don't trust Wikipedia on political issues. Read through the comments on this story and you see it over and over - we've figured it out, there is a watchdog biasing each article.
Just take a look at the posts discussing the various other reasons that people don't like it - what is deemed 'important or 'relevant' has nothing to do with fact checking. Wikipedia's standards go WAY beyond just 'facts' and people who study those standards act like lawyers and shut down people with whom they disagree by exploiting most people's unfamiliarity with the intricacies of the 'standards'.
The URL contained a malformed video ID.
I agree with you that much of the math content on Wikipedia is unevenly developed and sometimes almost impenetrable.
Not sure I would get hot and bothered about presentation order. If I went to the page wondering "what the heck is a haversine?" I'd be happy to find it near the top. That's a common use case. I gave up on pedagogy long ago. How does one implement outcome-based-pedagogy on a site such as Wikipedia?
My personal Wikipedia survival guide: at the first sign of opposition, edit somewhere more obscure. These days I rarely edit anything except to trim the most egregious bloopers.
Wikipedia failed to deal with some serious issues during its adolescent phase, and now it's discovering the consequence.
One of these failures is the Wikipedia has no concept of a regression test. Instead, the strong nuclear force is implemented as an edit war, with a winner and loser. It almost works like one of those sleazy dollar auctions: eventually the better man steps aside.
Wikipedia also failed the deletion test: you don't solve the problem of someone contributing an article you don't want by returning the system to the state which elicited the unwanted contribution in the first place. That's just a good way to piss people off.
Wikipedia needed to come up with a quarantined content tier which is not included in normal use (does not appear on Google, is not linked from primary content), but which *does* appear in searches performed by people wishing to create a new article.
I thought Wikipedia was truest to its nature as a squatter city with a lot of ramshackle cruft. The whole process breaks down when it puts on the pretence of being encyclopedic.
I don't think Wales learned much from the failure of Nupedia. His brilliant accident was redefining the venture. The harder they pull toward the old concept of Nupedia, the more it resembles the old Nupedia: tedious, gridlocked, and uninviting.
Whatever happens, Wikipedia will remain a great resource for studies in the sociology of collaboration, automatic spam recognition, machine learning, and perhaps even machine translation.
I wish they had worked harder on being maximally inclusive, with a fairly narrow criteria for what Google indexes and presents to casual visitors, with the rest of the shantytown available to anyone who wants it.
Google is part of the problem here. You need to be able to mark shantytown content as indexed, but with demerits. If your google search hits some content in a Wikipedia article in a section titled "Bokononism in Popular Culture" it shouldn't come up until everything else of value is exhausted. But it should come up if you dig hard enough. If you're determined enough to go there, Red Light districts can be a useful resource.
For me, Wikipedia would work best with a safe well-scrubbed downtown core and a vibrant street culture for anyone who wishes to wander down a side alley. I've never entirely bought into its agenda to become a sober encyclopedia, all glass and steel, with no life. Radiant City Beautiful, as Jane Jacobs used to put it. And very sterile.
It will be interesting to see what happens as the human maintainers fall away. We could end up seeing a lot more maintenance bots. That would be interesting in its own right. We're about to enter the golden era of knowledge bots, within a decade or so. Some people call this the semantic web. I think it will crufty with many cockroach heuristics.
And then you have the same discussions over which of these many versions become the default version! Already there are discussion as to what the page should be, and now you've just multiplied the problem many times.
It's already possible, anyway - just create a version of the page in your user space. (Sometimes people do do this, as a way of working on a new proposal.)
Well, problems described here, do really exist. It's sad, but some of the problems are quite natural, for big communities. The thing I would like to understand is how that number became 10 times bigger just in one year? Being wikipedian with few thousands of edits, in past 3 years, I can't see such a dramatic change in the past year. Did researchers took into account, the "unified global account", introduces in mid-2008? Otherwise, they could conclude, that users who started using one global account instead of few accounts on different wikipedias, to be "inactive" while actually they were just using new, global account. Let's say one was editing on 3 different wikipedias with 3 different logins, one for each language. Then he have unified his logins, and get one global account. There are chances that if this was not taken in account, they will got 2 "new inactive users", which will not be true. Any link to original research, and details on techniques they used to get such numbers?
49,000 lost contributors in three months sounds like a lot.
Out of 3,000,000 active contributors, that's a little less than 2%.
Even that would assume 0 new contributors signed up during the three month period. Conveniently, that number was skipped. If 49,001 contributors signed up, while 49,000 left, the shocking figure of 49,000 leaving is actually a net gain.
Given the site's been around since 2001 (let's call it 25 three month periods), gaining 3m contributors implies an average of 120,000 have joined in each three month period. Even if it's slowed, my guess is it's still enough that the actual drop off, if even a drop off, is well below 1%.
Not exactly the death of a system.
Yet oddly, despite all this, it still works well enough.
As for TFA, I don't see that losing thousands of editors is a problem, as it tells us nothing about how many are left! It also doesn't tell us who those editors are - are they the ones who made lots of decent articles? Wikipedia isn't a company losing employees or paid members, so the statistic is meaningless. You don't need hundreds of thousands of editors to write an encyclopedia (how many does Britannica have?)
Hell, for all we know, these people leaving are more likely to be the problem editors you talk about, in which case, good riddance!
The obvious point is that Wikipedia reached immense popularity in 2007-2008 IIRC, so there'd obviously be an influx of people who edit for a while, and then get bored. That's not a problem as long as you've still got the original editors, and indeed, too many editors may just give more problems.
Wikipedia got to being a Top 10 website before these 49,000 came along, I'm sure it can manage without them.
Another example: the Wikipedia page on Singapore describes its political system thus:
What is mentioned only obliquely, however, is the fact that Singapore is totally undemocratic because any meaningful opposition party or politician is ruthlessly crushed using oppressive defamation laws and stacked courts to bankrupt them. It is a "democracy" in name only.
Wikipedia simply says that it is "criticised by some" in relation to democratic rights. I tried to add more detail to this to reflect reality, which is that there are substantial and well recognised problems with Singaporean "democracy", and was brutally and instantly edited into oblivion.
Apparently actual, objective, provable facts which are slightly offensive to some are now called "opinions" and are not relevant or informative.
Read Pynchon.
I often find information on my favorite musical artists -- often those overlooked by the media and radio -- on Wikipedia. However, when I find one they missed, and add a page for them, it is almost invariably deleted because the information I entered is too similar to the artist's own website. Well, where else are you going to get the discography? I have given up, although I have not officially informed Wikipedia of this fact.
Does anyone remember DMOZ?
It use to be the be all to end all directory to get in to for new sites on the web. I have not had a new site listed on DMOZ in at least 6 years, and have not bothered even trying in at least 4 years. Wikipedia has gone the same way. Even if I have an authoritative site on a subject (not many other sites), and I am myself an authority on a subject, getting things published is nearly impossible now because of all the little kingdoms that have popped up on wikipedia pages. I simply quit trying.
Living in Chile
What's wrong with redirecting the scientific name to the article? The point is being able to get to the article somehow. If an article has settled under a common name title that's ambiguous, you can always use the "not to be confused with" templates or just clarify in the article text.
For those interested, there is a published policy for article titles for organisms.
Wikipedia needs to have a section in it's articles to show other viewpoints/opinions, particularly for more controversial articles. Well, when they can be properly supported, not just any random asshat's opinion mind you. This would go a long ways to calming the ridiculous edit wars, and give people a more well rounded look at the subject matter.
Meh.
I don't know why this reply is labeled redundant except to show a bias against stating a legitimate concerns and problems with Wikipedia. It sounds like there is a broken mod system here on /. as well.
My post (in response to great-grandparent post) might be redundant with other posts. Chances are a *lot* of posts on any given Slashdot thread are redundant, if one views the thread globally.
But who views the thread globally? Who reads all the posts before making their own post? And surely it's a common event when two people post similar ideas simultaneously. If one user posted the same idea multiple times in a given thread, that might grow annoying, if one actually noticed the pattern; but I don't see much of that on Slashdot, nor do I practice it myself.
In any case, my "Be Bold" comment wasn't intended as a global comment. It was intended as a personal statement to a specific user (Teancum) because I was moved to show sympathy and solidarity with that user.
And justifiably so, considering your (Teancum's) reply, which resonates with my own philosophy:
Of course I tend to be an inclusionist at heart and consider the words that somebody has written in good faith to be valuable resources.not to be discarded for light reasons.
Thank you; I couldn't have said it better myself.
-kgj
The summary is utterly wrong. It wasn't lack of rules that made Wikipedia popular. It was simply that the rules rarely had to be utilized when there were fewer people, and therefore, fewer conflicts.
The rules are a total and utter mess. All the politicians in the world coming together in committee couldn't come up with something so wasteful, frustrating and time consuming.
Wikipedia's rules work against patent vandalism, but NOTHING ELSE. One person steadfastly insisting that the Earth is flat can bend Wikipedia to his will, and it will take months of your time to get official refutation for ONE of those edits. After a few dozen of those, he might get temporarily restricted for a few days before he can push his agenda once more. Meanwhile, you've lost a year of your life.
No. That's not an exaggeration.
Meanwhile, I, and many other Wikipedia refugees, have headed over to Citizendium for something better. It's policies make sense, and were designed to overcome just about every problem we see with WP. In fact, several of the foundation documents are really thinly veiled recitations of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.
Specifically "We think humanity can do better":
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F#We_can_do_better
As well as:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:We_aren't_Wikipedia
I'm hopeful mankind will get it right the second time around.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The deletionism that creates problems is the deletion of character lists, the merging and deletion of episodes for television shows, etc.
Some of that may be for copyright reasons. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York held in Warner and Rowling v. RDR that the use of a non-free work in a reference about that work must be transformative enough. Otherwise, including too much detail from a non-free work may infringe copyright.
what is Wikipedia if it is not about documenting contemporary culture?
Contemporary culture is non-free for the first 95 years. Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia. In fact, Wikipedia projects in some languages even value "free" more than "encyclopedia" to the point where articles in several categories aren't allowed to have pictures.
Ok, my company (a small software startup) posted a Wikipedia article about itself but only included details about the founders, dates of operation and the space in which we compete.
If you start an article about an entity that you represent, special rules apply to your conflict of interest. The FAQ for organizations recommends that you create the article in user space, cite three independent reviews of your product from mainstream media, and then ask the relevant WikiProject to move your article from user space to article space.
If he didn't agree with your edits he would find something to complain about
That's called ownership, and there's a policy against it. Have you tried the various forms of dispute resolution that Wikipedia offers?
fixed
Read radical news here
I don't get it either. Somebody mod grandparent up; at least "under-rated".
The problem here isn't that people want information about their particular situation in wikipedia; it hurts nothing to have a page on whoever or whatever from any particular viewpoint. The problem is that there is a "priesthood" on wikipedia that wants to restrict content to the "notable", and in so doing, appoints themselves judge and jury of notability. Your own remark...
The best suggestion I've seen in this discussion would be to allow multiple versions of each page, one per every time there is a deletion of information - delete something... bingo, you're editing a new page, while the old one continues to exist, sans your edits, unless you can get the prior author to cosign the new page with you. Not just because there is more than one viewpoint on many things relative to the human condition, and nature, but because there are many relevant viewpoints and it is often difficult to see which is which, or even if both are which, or many are which. Editors should only climb onto their rusty old horses when the English used is wandering into the fail zone -- too when to was meant, media when mediums was meant, which when witch was meant, sensorship when censorship was meant, etc. The moment you decide you're more than a glorified proofreader, you've fucked wikipedia right in the heart.
Wikipedia wants "professional" quality, but let me tell you, looking at history, written (and re-written, and re-written again) by "professionals", it's a sad tale of things left out, viewpoints left behind, motivations hidden, sandbagging, whitewashing, and outright lies. And that's without even extending the remark to cover mythology and superstition.
The goal - to document the world - cannot be met if there is a small minded editorship controlling the documentation. All you get is a razor-thin view that the editors agree with. If you don't agree with the editors, the thing might as well not exist.
And that, my friend, is why I neither contribute any longer, or even bother to look most things up there. Wikipedia went from good idea to middle of the road ideological fail in record time. And it's been downhill from there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
...it's no longer edited by true consensus, but the consensus of a very few who strong-arm wherever and whenever they can. Every Wikipedia project is controlled by a tight clique, every tight clique has at least one admin in their back pocket, and every pocketed admin knows full well of the rampant sockpuppetry/meatpuppetry that goes on (ironic, considering that sock/meat accusations are the easiest tool to use to squelch new editors who don't toe the line). In some cases, the admin(s) are doing all three.
The recent debacle on the Linux Mint article displays much of the abuse (and many of the dirty tricks) that anyone not toeing the line (in this case, an editor who dared to remove the horribly-written section on Clement Lefebvre's comments on Israel) may be subjected to. Only when *Clement Lefebvre himself* showed up to shut up the phony "consensus" down was there a remedy. Unfortunately, that happens very rarely.
The rules were never the problem - their enforcement was.
You could easily argue that vandalism makes these rules necessary, but vandalism has been a plague of Wikipedia ever since it started. Its anarchic nature was a necessary evil in the face of the highly open nature of the contribution system. Groups such as the vandalism watchers were a natural development over the course and, by and large, it worked fine. You could compare Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Where we have laws of the state that govern precisely how we may and may not act in public, the EB has strict submission regulations. Where we have customs, traditions and common decency, Wikipedia has its own set of rules. People by and large followed them with the exception of an active minority, and this minority was often dealt with by a dedicated team.
Now where creative spirit once reigned, we now have a set of cast-iron rules which, although nothing particularly bad in itself, leaves a dreadful amount to be desired. It is very rare that one of your contributions will remain there for more than an hour these days without some editor almost robotically adhering to the rules, sometimes with dreadfully hilarious results, including [citation needed] being placed after some of the most blatantly obvious statements these days, it being removed with accusations of vandalism or bias (by someone who is themselves biased). Another frequent problem is bots, innocuously going about their monitoring tasks and indifferently erasing hours of creative work just because an entry didn't meet the bots' strict criteria. Some decent articles are deleted because Articles for Deletion is filled with obsessive deletionists who have very strange ideas of notability. All this makes people feel that there is no point in contributing if their work is in danger of being irrevocably deleted.
Rules are there to be applied with common sense, not religiously in the sense of a bible.
Maybe Wikipedia is getting complete enough for people to run out of things to write...
I am not devoid of humor.
it's meaningless to say that 50,000 wikipedia editors left, unless you know the base number that it's drawn from.
They didn't say merely that 50,000 had left, even the summary mentions that it is a net loss of 50,000, and further, that's a net loss 10x larger than the previous year: which is then evidence of a trend. It doesn't matter then so much what the base number is, so much as the trend is worrying enough as it is, especially if it's exponential.
As with pop-culture, software articles are increasingly being deleted, as being of limited interest and mentioned in few publications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting/Software
For example, on the non-notability and impending deletion of recommended debian torrent client: "100 million users is an obvious indication the torrent protocol, community, and etc are notable. However, if 2% of that number is Linux users, and 2% of Linux users use rTorrent, that is not a huge number."
WP was once a great place to look for software. "List of software which does X". "Comparison of software which does X". That's been rotting away, or rather, being intentionally gutted as not encyclopedic. Britanica is a useless place to look for information on software, and the deletionists are aspiring to the same.
There have been unsuccessful[2] attempts[1] to avert this, but it's really a divergence of vision.
To put it bluntly, you can't trust any source for finding info on things with political aspects. Even if the people writing it aren't making propaganda on purpose, they can't help but see reality through their own value system.
But this is exactly why I *CAN* trust so many sources - because the value system is clear, I can undistort what they are saying like correcting for atmospheric aberrations. It's why Fox News is so popular, because the value system is clear so it's very easy to understand what they are saying and correct for it when needed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley