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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."
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!
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.
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.
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
That's why I like subject-specific wikis (see sig). An article of no importance to Wikipedia may very useful in another wiki. There are also other benefits, such as community rules more appropriate to the subject.
Developers: We can use your help.
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!
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.
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..."
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.
Exactly. If I want lots of detail on a particular Haruhi book/episode I'd go to the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Wiki. Same for Pokemon or lyrics or homebrew DS software or anything. Wikipedia isn't supposed to have everything in one place; it's supposed to be a general source of information. Make it anything more than that and fanboys/fangirls insert a lot of unneeded information that might not even be necessary to people looking it up.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
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.
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.
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
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.
Don't forget the bureaucracy. I don't mind rules about style and content insofar as they're reasonable (I like consistency) but Wikipedia has acquired a big body of laws about other things. And these and other decisions are not always reasonable and not always arrived at in a democratic fashion. I've been involved in many "rope pulling contests" before and even though Wikipedia says they rule based on consensus, in practice this is not the case. I got really frustrated at times with people who were obviously wrong (not just according to me) but who simply used the vast amounts of time they apparently have on their hands to push hardest and then use the result to tweak the rules to make it even easier to do. We've scored a few victories, yes. But not enough. And in any case, I want to write articles and I don't want to have to defend them all the time. It isn't the anonymous vandals that burn you out the most, it's unreasonable long standing contributors that make you go away. Even when you're thinking about an article that probably won't be bothered by them, you still think about adding it in the context of adding it to a bigger entity that has those problems and then you stop bothering. I haven't logged in in months now. I've still asked questions on talk pages though, but I simply can't bring myself to edit anymore. Although it was probably a certain autocratic decision from above that pushed me over the brim, but even if that hadn't happened, it was probably a question of time before I got fed up with it all.
How about massive layoffs?
I used to edit wikipedia from work. I'd look something up, notice an error, and then fix it during my 15-minute breaks. Now, not having a job, I don't edit the encyclopedia at all. My last edit dates back about one month prior to my last day in the office, but I bet once I return to work, my contributions will skyrocket.
Perhaps the same phenomenon is spreading throughout the world: more time at home == more time doing other things, not wiki-editing
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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....
My favorite tag is "citation needed."
I generally read this as, "someone needs to look up a citation for this, and I'm too high and mighty to stoop to such a level! Do it for me, peons!"
Whatever happened to the encyclopedia *anybody* can edit? Either find and add the citation yourself, or delete the fact for having no citation. But shitting those little tags all over the pages doesn't accomplish anything except making the article hard to read.
Comment of the year
I am one of these elusive deletionists. I am motivated by the huge amounts of spam articles being put into Wikipedia these days, articles almost unambiguously meant to drive customers to the company. Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world, and a Wikipedia article will shoot your company right to the top of Google. One CTO of a company posted such an article and told me that they found visitors who came to their website from Wikipedia stayed many times longer than people who found them through Google. These people are single-purpose, have enormous conflicts of interest, and have no interest in Wikipedia beyond what it can do for their companies' bottom lines.
This pisses me off because I have frustration issues in my life that I am unable to channel in other ways. I could start martial arts training or yoga, but Wikipedia is much more available.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Right. It was paperwork that pushed business offshore, not inhuman wages and a lack of environmental laws in other countries.
And the solution to the offshoring problem, I take it, is to cut taxes and cut regulation?
Grow up. Paperwork is a good thing when it protects people from thieves. We need old-fashioned tariffs, not a race to the bottom of the living standards scale.
Businesses decrease wages because they want to keep more of their revenue as profit. It's that simple. Whatever wage decreases they can get away with, they will make.
Regulation ensures that companies can't get away with these bad practices.
And yes, the rich can exploit flaws is regulation. But that's not a reason to get rid of regulation. It's a reason to fix it.
It's as if you're saying, "The roof leaks! We're getting wet because water can use holes in the roof to get in. The roof is making us wet, and we need to tear it off entirely."
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
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?
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.
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.
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