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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."
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
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.
No you can't. Zionism is a political agenda defined by racial politics and largely based on religious fairy tales. For these reasons I think it constitutes racism and should not be considered acceptable by civilized peoples. Zionism isn't some made-up boogeyman - it is a real thing, and the word is used by people who are Zionists! The word and idea did not spring fully-formed from Zeus' forehead and start posting on Stormfront one afternoon.
As to what constitutes neutrality on Hezbollah, I think the issue just goes to show there is no neutrality anywhere. Every article is going to have biases either explicit or implicit as all human beings have biases explicit or implicit. Hell, there was a months-long flamewar on the Brazil article on whether it constituted linguistic imperialism to spell it Brazil rather than Brasil. I didn't expect "neutrality" in the mythological sense, but what I did expect was that the words of the senior leadership of Hezbollah on their motivations and agenda be included in an article on their organization.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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.
Right. The important articles were in the first million. Let's see what's coming in right now:
Any questions?
That's why most new articles are deleted. Most of the whining about "deletionism" is from fans who want to blither endlessly about their favorite movie/comic book/Star Trek episode/vampire. That's what Wikia is for.
Wikia ended up as a hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Trek|Craft|Wars|Gate] wikis, and the low-end advertisers who target that demographic. It's not going to get Jimbo Wales a private jet. It's useful to Wikipedia, though, in that the rabid fans can be diverted to Wikia, which has rather lower standards for inclusion.
I have many interests and often find myself spending half an hour or more on Wikipedia every day...usually looking at articles that have nothing to do with what I initially searched for (I think everyone has been sucked into that pattern). I don't make edits anymore. One of the few topics on which I feel that I have enough knowledge to contribute is naval history, and have made lots of significant edits (and created new articles) in the past...but I started having edits reverted in what seemed to be a knee-jerk reaction from a few moderators: innocuous edits, sometimes adding one new line to clarify an already-made statement, get reverted within five minutes and I receive a terse note from the moderator scolding me for not bringing my potential edit up in the discussion page. When I look at the discussion page for the article, it hasn't been edited in months. So, what, I need to pose a question to a micro-community that doesn't exist and wait around for approval from some mod? To make a one-line addition to an article about the Battle off Samar or whatever? Or face a scolding from some supercilious asshole who has been given mod powers by some other asshole? Yeah, I don't make edits anymore.
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.
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
Hosting Wikipedia is very expensive, so a fork would be difficult for someone to maintain. I could grab a copy of the DB easily; it's only about 5GB, but the images, movies, and other resources are a few TB (at least). Then you add on the bandwidth for hosting it and the CPU costs for people editing it and you'll find it's not so easy. Hosting it on something like FreeNet would be a nice idea, but I don't know how well FreeNet handles wiki-like functionality.
Claiming that Wikipedia is finished is hilarious. Of the last ten things I've looked up on Wikipedia, four have been stubs. I contributed a little bit, but never really felt encourage to participate a lot in Wikipedia for two reasons:
First, deletionists irritated me. A couple of pages that I made some changes to were marked for deletion and then removed. Looking at the history of the people nominating and voting for deletion, none of them had made any changes to Wikipedia other than to propose and vote for deletion. I don't really see that any content should be deleted from Wikipedia. At most, it should be moved to a specialist wiki, and if one doesn't exist then it should be created and the Wikipedia page should be redirected to a general page on the subject that links to the specialist Wiki. I suggested this well over a year ago, but still people delete content from Wikipedia. There's little incentive to contribute anything to a project where someone who has made no positive contribution can come along and delete your effort.
The second issue was that there was no concept of responsibility for articles. Most of the time when I spotted something wrong on a Wikipedia page, I made a note on the talk page. If I checked back a few months later, no one had responded and no one had made any changes. Fine, I can make changes myself, but then I'd be writing in my own style which would disrupt the flow of the page. Ideally, each page should have a maintainer and various editors. The maintainer should be responsible for making changes, the editors (who can be one-off visitors) should be responsible for flagging errors. Possibly this belief on my part is an artefact of the way that I work normally (I'm a freelance writer), but it is how I produce my best results.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I also quit after an extended argument over citations.
His citation was to a fanciful coffee table reference book published before the system in question was declassified, and which was widely cited elsewhere on the web. My citation was to a professional academic analysis written a decade after the system was declassified, but which existed only in a few thousand hard copies. (Damm thing cost me nearly $100.00, in comparison his was usually found in $10 bins around Christmas time. At least that's where I got my copy of it.) In addition I had actually worked on the system in question.
The powers that be decided than since he could point to places on the web that cited his citation - it was obviously more correct than mine.
Well I'm a mathematician and to my mind there is an awful lot to be done on the mathematics pages on Wikipedia.
The majority of mathematics articles on Wikipedia typically begin with a rambling, incoherent and unhelpful introduction to the topic. When they do begin to properly define the entity at hand, they typically pick the most opaque and rambling definition possible. Important properties are often glossed over while any pertinent mathematical oddities are given their own individual sections on the page. Throughout the spectacle, hyperlinks to equally poorly written articles are liberally thrown down as though the author believes the reader would actually benefit from the topics convoluted connections to some advanced graduate level topic. This article basically sums up the situation in a nutshell.
I've actually attempted to change things, but it's an uphill struggle which I for one know I can't win. Time and again I have been faced with what I can only describe as completely inane article custodians whos arguments at times read like a satire of themselves. In the instance of only one article I was told that "Compound interest is the best way to introduce e^x as everyone understands compound interest", "It's better to talk about the properties of a function before defining it", and "Thinking that a certain method is a better way to introduce a topic breaks Neutral Point of View policy."
At times, the stonewalling becomes so exasperating that I end up losing patience somewhat and end up essentially telling these people outright that they are being stupid. Bad idea. I have recently been brought up on Wikiettique charges of hurting someone's feelings, and despite my complete and utter lack of ability to change just about anything on the site, have been labeled "a bully"; a label to go with my being a "Point of Viewer".
My current opinion is that the Wikipedia editors and custodians have the mentality of 12 year olds. I have tried and tried to explain to these people that the articles they have taken charge of are in need of serious reform; with mathematical bric-a-brac like havercosine coming before the sum of cosines formula on trigonometry pages. If you try and change something, they will revert it. If you try and argue a case, they will dismiss it. If you press them on their opinions, they will appeal to WP:RULES. If you press them further, they will quite literally start crying. I deeply, deeply wish I was exaggerating here. I cannot believe I once thought so highly of Wikipedia and the people that ran it. The influence of these pages on the learning and perception of mathematics worldwide terrifies me.
Now, maybe I'm just an old crank, too stuck in my old ways. But you tell me where the formula for the the sum "cosA + cosB" should be on this page. Before or after the formula for the sum of an infinite number of cosines, or that for "versed cosine"? Now; guess where it is?
Wikipedia is rotten from the top to the bottom. I used to think that the rot set in at the top with Wales, and slowly trickled down to the user base. Now I'm not so sure. It may be that Wikipedia was always going to primarily attract the type of person who is not interesting in providing knowledge for all, but only those for whom its articles are personal prestige projects, intended to impress only themselves and their imagined audience.
May the Maths Be with you!
This is much, much easier said than done. Wikipedia is far more than just the content, and it would take a significant problem in the community to make a difference of this nature.
The Spanish Wikipedia community did get to the point that a majority of the Spanish language editors left and formed their own alternate wiki, with their own funding sources and infrastructure. Because of the fact that the Spanish Wikipedia was never really deleted, the two communities have essentially co-existed and shared content with each other.
This is also one of the few "successful" forks I've seen for a project like Wikipedia. I was also encouraged to do something similar with the Wikibooks project when editors were not happy with some Wikimedia foundation policies getting shoved down the throat of the Wikibooks users. Knowing the problems with forking, I encouraged the editors to stay put and fight the policies from within. In retrospect, I'm still not sure I made the correct decision there, but it did keep the community mostly in tact.
The only way you are going to see a major shift is if the Wikimedia Foundation no longer can financially support and sustain Wikipedia servers and infrastructure. There is quite a bit of fluff to the Wikimedia's budget that can be trimmed before that becomes a significant issue and possibility.
Coming up with an alternative to the Wikimedia Foundation is the real trick, and something that I don't think could be developed nearly so easily as simply ripping a copy of the latest Wikipedia content dump. If you can create a legitimate alternative non-profit foundation to compete with the WMF, that would be a chance to make a huge difference. The question then is.... why? If you have the bucks to create such a legal structure, why are you wasting resources in this manner?