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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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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!"
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
See: cyanogenmod (a popular firmware distribution for the Android OS). Oh wait, you can't.
That's because it was deleted multiple times-- despite clear notability, numerous citations from other pages, and overwhelming "keep" votes from an active and engaged group of editors.
I see you never worked in business. Bush's signing of Sarbanes-Oxley has driven many businesses offshore and enacted a high cost of compliance for those who've stayed (not to mention all the BS courses I have to take over it). The repeal of Glass-Steagall (which most talking heads on both sides of the aisle claim was responsible for our current economic mess), was signed into law by Bill Clinton. Bush was as anti-freemarket as any Democrat. And Obama is just as fascist as any Republican.
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.
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
Oh, but it's sourced. You can very obviously see where they got the clear Windows design goals from ;)
After you build the house you don't keep the builders around. That would be awkward.
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."
What's "unverifiable" about a blog?
May the Maths Be with you!
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
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
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?
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.
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
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
I would never argue that Wikipedia has problems. But in this special case the problem lies probably elsewhere.
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.