Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Disputes Editor Exodus Claims
eldavojohn writes "The Wikimedia blog has a new post from Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Erik Zachte, a data analyst, to dispute recent reports about editors leaving Wikipedia (which we discussed on Wednesday). They offer these points to discredit the claims: 'The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow. In October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September. Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world. The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing. There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day. The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then. Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people." They also note that it's impossible to tell whether someone has left and will never return, as their account still remains there."
If someone starts off saying "it ain't so" by listing half a dozen facts that have nothing to do with the question, he's either terribly stupid, or trying to pull a fast one on you. It's called misdirection and confusion. Yes, it's actually a named trick in the arsenal of con artists.
So much for that.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2004, IIRC. There were plenty of cases who people left and you could tell they weren't likely to return, as their User or Talk page had some spectacular meltdown where they cursed the entire project and -- in the cases of the more qualified editors -- they vowed never to write anything about their field outside of academic rounds ever again.
That's a lot of eyeballs.
If nothing else they deserve an award for not plastering advertisements on their site. I know some major newspapers that would love to see their sites get that kind of traffic.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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 as everyone gives up this "free" foolishness and goes home, to read newspapers and watch network television for the rest of their lives.
Dr Felipe Ortega 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^WGdansk^WDanzig^WGdansk without the possibility of damage to actual human readers. Please donate so that they may never bug you again.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The number of Wikipedia editors is not declining. In fact, their population has tripled in the last six months.
Well I looked for and article about this and couldn't find it on Wikipedia, so it must not be true.
And this damn well better be modded as funny if at all.
I think the original article was talking about English Wikipedia, but Eric quotes statistics from all Wikipedias combined.
I joined recently to update the page of a candidate running for Ted Kennedy's seat (election will be done and over with by January). I wasn't updating much, adding the candidate's birth date, linking to a book he had written, and adding the part copied from other candidate's wiki pages that links him to the Senate race. After a full day of back in forth with an editor deleting whatever I had just added, the only think that made it through was the link to the book he had written. And I think that just slipped through. Not worth the effort at all trying to update a page with new info. That ends my time working with Wikipedia.
If someone starts off saying "it ain't so" by listing half a dozen facts that have nothing to do with the question, he's either terribly stupid, or trying to pull a fast one on you. It's called misdirection and confusion. Yes, it's actually a named trick in the arsenal of con artists.
So much for that.
Did you actually read the fine blog? It's titled "Wikipedia’s Volunteer Story" (emphasis mine). So it's not so much an answer to a question as a question about the relevance of the supposed question. It's like asking whether nuclear warheads or terrorism is the greater danger to world peace. (I'd answer both.)
The Wikipedia blog raises an interesting point about the seemingly irrelevant statistic about an increase in the number of readers or users as against the alleged decrease in the number of editors. This invites comparison to the free and open source software communities. Majority of those in the FLOSS community aren't developers (editors) but users, users who may include the free software advocates and others whose contribution don't necessarily involve the writing and rewriting of code. For example, the helpful mailing list or forum member who might volunteer to explain to a newbie how to edit a certain /etc/config file to revive a bjorked installation.
The point being, there's no automated way to do this, in order come up with statistics about the site.
An anecdote of "Well I stopped editing in 2004, and so did some people I know" may make for interesting discussion, but doesn't tell us anything useful about trends in Wikipedia editing as a whole, and certainly doesn't support the recent story.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia is one of Slashdot's blindspots - where the usual thought out points go out of the window in the groupthink, and mod points are dished out purely on who can criticise Wikipedia, for whatever reason, be it a personal bad experience of editing there, or some axe to grind against its policies.
I think the problem with wikipedia is fairly effectively demonstrated with the following two examples:
Some guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) [wikipedia.org] for deletion and fails in his attempt. So what does he do? Merges every episode, save that one, into List of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes [wikipedia.org]. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
And then there's Torchic [wikipedia.org]. A front page featured article with 20 paragraphs and 46 citations now reduced to redirecting to a list of pokemon, with 2-3 paragraphs (depending on whether or not a one sentence paragraph counts) and no citations. Amazing stuff.
Established editors defend this by saying stuff like "wikipedia doesn't need articles on every pokemon when so many other real world subjects are lacking!". What such editors don't understand, however, is that when someone's pride enjoy is spat upon, as it often is at wikipedia, they not only stop contributing to those articles - they stop contributing to all articles.
And wikia isn't an alternative. I mean, what's the definitive wiki on pokemon if it's not wikipedia? pokemon.wikia.com? bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net? pokemon.neoseeker.com? pokemonwithus.wikia.com? pokeworldpokedex.wikia.com? pokebuddies.wikia.com? pokemates.wikia.com? pokepals.wikia.com? pokemonpokedex.wikia.com? pokemonaiman.wikia.com?
I never really could understand the title "deputy director". Isn't that just an Assistant? Does s/he get paid more if s/he is a deputy as opposed to an assistant. Or is it just another pretentious affectation? Please explain.
Anecdotes are not evidence, and tell us nothing about trends in contributions.
But yes, basically some people have a bad experience about working with other people online anonymously. But it is a mistake to think that this means Wikipedia is flawed - for all we know, the other person is also here complaining about people who kept adding "rubbish" to an article... I'm sure you think your change was valid, and maybe it was, but that's not always the case. There's no right answer, yet people will always come away, complaining about Wikipedia, no matter what their edit was.
It's entirely natural that some people aren't cut out for Wikipedia editing - I wouldn't expect a massive collabation with large numbers of anonymous people online to be easy. I mean, what do you propose? That all edits should be allowed to stay? Well no, that would be unworkable.
Many things in life, especially those in life that involve working with other people, require cooperation and time, and sometimes not everything goes your way. It is a mistake to think that making the edit is the only work necessary, because such a policy of no reverts would be unworkable. You have to sometimes discuss changes with other people - that's true of all sorts of things in life, such as open source projects, volunteer work, or jobs. But that doesn't mean that no one is interested, nor does it mean that there is something wrong with the activity. Imagine someone saying "I tried working in a band once, but it was hopeless, the other guys didn't want to play any of the songs I wrote or listen to my suggestions, so I left" - sure, it's a nice little anecdote, but it tells us nothing about (a) whether you were in the right or not, (b) about trends in music, or (c) whether working in bands is a good idea or not, other than the obvious point that you have to be prepared to work with other people, who sometimes may not agree with you.
Why is Wikipedia so different? Yes, by all means tell us about how you didn't like being an editor, but please don't present that as criticism of the project, or evidence of a trend - anymore than my dislike of playing football is valid criticism of football, or evidence of a decline in the sport.
The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow. In October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September.
I don't think the number of readers was actually a point of contention. How long those readers actually stay on Wikipedia and how useful they find it now that everything is getting culled by overzealous moderators citing "lack of sources" etc. is possibly more the point.
Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world. The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing. There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day.
Wikipedia's own article on Wikipedia has a nice graph of article count. Since Jul 2007 it seems they've typically been adding about 2000 articles a day ... so "thousands" is being used in it's most literal sense. But without the number of articles being edited down to nothing, or simply being culled, this data is useless, and they damn well know it. Tell us how many articles are being deleted each day, and that that number isn't increasing !
The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then. Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people.
Interesting this is exactly the point at which the increase in articles per day flatlined, meanign that the number of editors they ave maintained since means a linear addition to the total volume of articles, and not the "projected doubling that they expected" on the graph.
They also note that it's impossible to tell whether someone has left and will never return, as their account still remains there.
So they don't maintain a timestamp of "last activity by author" ??? Fucking nonsense, pardon my language.
The report touched a nerve, and their response with half-assed, half-complete figures does nothing to convince me the report was incorrect.
And they have the gall to ask for 7.5 million US in donations for a diminshing product. Jimbo's days of champagne, caviar and jet planes are numbered methinks.
Why hasn't this summary been given this tag yet?
[Citation Needed]
A more robust citation is needed. Marked for Deletion.
But you were an editor too, along with everyone else giving their experiences here.
Editors can't delete articles, so that is factually wrong. Admins can, but that is not "without warning", it's after a debate when comments are invited from editors (including you), so again that is factually wrong.
There's also Speedy Delete which can be more contentious, but that's still not without warning, and again only Admins can do that. And it's a balance, without it, Wikipedia would be bogged down with thousands of nonsense articles that editors create, as this can be done at a faster rate than they could be deleted through the AfD debate. And if anything, this is another reason why more editors is not necessarily a good thing, as it also means more work generated - the number of editors is meaningless, without telling us what those editors are doing. And indeed, perhaps the editors leaving are the ones you dislike, in which case, you should be glad :)
So wait, one editor is rude to another editor, and you blame "Wikipedia"?
Perhaps if a troll upsets me here, I should blame "Slashdot".
Wikipedia, a heap of self-serving corporate propaganda and free advertising pretending to be an Encyclopedia
Now we're getting silly - believe it if you like, but your anecdote of a bad experience from another editor does not support this view! I can't see how these two issues are even remotely related? That editor was likely just a random other person (who for all we know, is also criticising "Wikipedia" based on his experience with you!) not anything to do with representing corporation. Hell, I'm sure even people working for Britannica have a bad day sometimes (as with just about any job), but that's not a reason to criticise the end product.
Self-serving? It serves people who want to read it. Corporate propaganda - examples? Free advertising? Well yes, it's free of adverts. And yes, it's an encyclopedia. Squabbles between editors don't change that.
And then there are those who won't even try. I have subjects I could contribute too. But a wise man might be described as someone who doesn't make the same mistake once.
I heard long ago complaints about elitism and the elitist top grand master guru cabal who control the website. New comers are scoffed, 'good 'ol boy' network prevails.
I suspect the editors who are still left are well suited for their post - elitist power hungry control freaks who validate themselves stepping on others. I want nothing to do with them. [Citation Needed] and [Marked For Deletion] have become memes I suspect from people who have been burned by the wikipedia process and the control freaks who consider themselves demigods.
I pass. The frustration I hear from others who have tried to contribute I won't accept in my life let alone seek it out. The expertise I have in a subject or two will never make it to wikipedia. I won't even bother to get started.
-[d]-
How did they dispute it? Did they just edit the wiki article about editors leaving?
But seriously wikipedia started dying the second they handed out enhanced powers for being a no lifer trolling Wikipedia all day. Later on top management showed no interest in reigning in abusive admins, and even rewarded several who were shown to be taking part in out right fraud and lying.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
You know the tiny fastmail.fm Aussie company who just does mail business and stays afloat with their fast, simple, modern UI and advanced/up to date tech/software usage?
Someone dared to write the unique features of Fastmail, when I referenced it to a server admin (in mail business) friend, he joked back at me for using a "spammer mail company"... I asked "how?", some idiot "citation needed" type went to article and marked it as spam. Imagine you claim your local pharmacy to sell drugs, it is the same thing for a company who just stays up with mail. Like, "do business with us, check wiki article, it accuses us to be spammers of a free encyclopedia".
Fastmail guys didn't care much, I cared (as user) and reminding the nazi editor what would happen if it wasn't wikipedia and if they accused a big evil mail provider to be a spammer on a large dotcom didn't help much. "no legal threats" policy.
If I was in mail business and if Wiki did similar thing to me, I would find that editor/user and sue him for hurting my image and putting my business to risk. Their NPVO or whatever self claimed terms wouldn't matter a second. Who the hell are them and what makes them different from other dotcoms?
We should give up creating our own monopolies really...
What's the difference? Wikipedia is simply a means of promoting whatever is the accepted "common knowledge" about a subject at the time. Anything resembling original research is immediately stricken from the Wikipedia "Gospel according to the Experts." In this regard, Wikipedia resembles the kind of banal nonsense one reads in high school textbooks.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
I just spent the last fifteen to twenty minutes perusing the Special:NewPages, and it's terrifying. For every actual encyclopaedic or even semi-valid article, there seem to be a handful of pages that are pure garbage. There are "articles" about fictitious bands, self-promotion, slander, and things that really don't matter. On top of that, many of the new submissions seem to be very poorly written from a grammatical point of view. They're not quite as bad as the average YouTube comment, but they're close. If I was in charge over there, I'd be deleting things left and right as well.
There are probably a number of reasons for the lack of quality, but certainly the ability for anyone to contribute has got to be a big part. Is there an easy fix? No, probably not. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the barriers to approval are lop-sided, so raising them won't necessarily help. It's not like potential users will put up with taking a written exam just to be able to edit a single page...
I would suggest using privilege escalation to grant users more power and control based on how long they've been members and require that when people create accounts, they specify a number of areas that they possess knowledge of. Say I create a new account. When a user creates a login, he has to pick five to ten topics that he thinks he's qualified to write about (and these can be fairly broad, otherwise we'd have far too many checkboxes). He can't make any changes or contributions for a week (to prevent people from signing up just to vandalize articles) and can only lurk and learn the rules. Then, after that time period is up, he's allowed to only make changes to existing articles in his self-proclaimed fields. If he makes enough good and accepted changes, then allow him to start writing new articles in his self-proclaimed fields. Finally, after a period of time has passed where he's acknowledged as knowing what he's talking about and not a jerk who does things for the lulz, let him make changes/create articles anywhere.
One thing I would love to see done more than anything else, however, is the clear separation of fiction and non-fiction, by at least a subdomain, if not an entirely different FQDN. Star Wars as a film and a cultural institution in America? That goes in Wikipedia as non-fiction. Luke Skywalker as a person? That's in-universe and belongs in Wookiepedia, or at least in the fiction section. A biography of Luke doesn't belong in the same encyclopaedia as one about Louis Pasteur, plain and simple.
Reading your lengthy post shows anectodal evidence of why people doesn't like Wikipedia editing.
Trust me, people likes Feynman, Einstein, Hawking like scientists not just because their amazing breakthroughs... They like them because they were friendly to average people.
"Editing an article, dealing with editors feels something like snail mailing a typed letter to Britannica HQ in 1980s. At least, Britannica guys were polite people."
Here is another "anecdotal" evidence, a quote told to me by a very very important Scientist who were horrified by some issues on articles and tried to fix them. As citation, what would you need? Name? Home address? Phone? On web? No, thank you, I better stay as another anecdotal guy.
As Slashdot is open source, Perl based, it won't be a problem.
Lets merge Slashdot code to Wikipedia so people, semi-randomly selected can moderate Wiki editor responses. It will have karma system too. If an editor does too much flamebait or "troll", his karma will go negative and by default, his editing powers will be reduced to normal levels and eventually taken off.
You have no clue how your type of editor responses makes users and the real deal (one off editors) feel right?
Did you try registering for an account and making a few edits to unrelated pages to establish yourself as a serious editor? If so, what was the your Wikipedia username?
If the page was fully protected, did you try blanketing the talk page with {{editprotected}} requests? Did you try checking the page's deletion log (View history > View logs for this page), seeing why the page was protected, and then seeing if the problem had blown over? If it has, request unprotection at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection.
Wikipedia was a very interesting concept. A free online encyclopedia that everyone could contribute to. Everyone could fill his knowledge and information in, contribute to the common knowledge and, eventually, this should lead to possibly the best, most complete collection of human knowledge ever assembled. A quite noble goal, and for a while it worked out well.
Then came the trolls, the spammers, the corporate shills, and we noticed that human is appearantly not able to cooperate without rules and boundaries. Sad. But we're humans. Driven by base interests, instincts and egoism. So the idea of editors and supervisers was born, people who should take it into their hands to make sure these shills, spammers and trolls are kept out and tossed out. A noble goal, and for a while it worked out well.
But editors are just as much human as the spammers, trolls and shills are. When you are given the power to shape and regulate the knowledge of humankind, it becomes quite tempting to not only shape and regulate it, the big temptation is to dictate it. You are the keeper of knowledge, the overseer of truth.
No nobel goal this time and behold, it doesn't work out well.
It's the same "who watches the watchers" problem we see a lot today. If there's nobody overseeing your use of power, the temptation to abuse that power becomes strong. It seems we are unable or unwilling to self regulate ourselves when we are not held accountable for what we do. As we see here (as well as in politics or business) if you are only held accountable by your peers, it's unlikely that anything but the most gross transgressions will ever be punished. And with "gross", of course I mean "whatever goes against the interests of your peers". Not what goes against the interests of your "inferiors", your users or even the project or duty itself that you agreed to oversee and manage.
So what could be done? Another superstructure above the editors? I think it's already been done, and it doesn't change jack. A broader base has to be founded, not a smaller top. Power in the hands of more people, not less. The meta-moderation system of /. comes to mind, where some (or many, computers can handle it) can vote for or against a certain moderation. One person may err. Some people may conspire to push an agenda. A few millions are hard to bribe, convince or sway.
Wikipedia allegedly has millions of users. Ok, so use them. Again, certain people may have a dislike of a certain editor and will vote his edits negative no matter how much they might remove vandalism because they feel slighted by them. The majority won't. And IF the majority feels slighted by a certain editor, it might be a good idea to remove that editor. Quite obviously he's not doing a good job.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
the fact that there isn't a wikipedia entry about this proves that there is a decline.
So they don't maintain a timestamp of "last activity by author" ??? Fucking nonsense, pardon my language.
There is a most recent contribution for each username, and this contribution has a timestamp. But the blog post discounts inferring things based on this date as it "doesn’t predict whether the same person will make an edit in the future". I'd make a comparison between this view and the concept of a lapsed Catholic.
the problem with other editors that won't accept your edits as valid unless you can show them a citation they understand
Aggravated further still by the fact that the "other editor" is, in real life, a self-absorbed Starbuck's barista whose only claim to precedence arises from the fact that he got involved in editing Wikipedia when it was the cool thing to do for sociopathic high school geeks who didn't have the motor coordination to play online shooters. He was navigating manufactured bureaucracy while you were navigating jungles leading that archaeological expedition; now you want to correct something on the article about the very same cache you unearthed, but "Would You Like Extra Foam On That?" Boy is throwing up speed bumps, mainly because he he lacks any basic understanding of your field of expertise, but also because he just had a fight with his mom and he's in a real foul mood.
It is fascinating how ofter Wikipedia apoogists seem to repeat this same argument in other comments of this article.
... whom? Wikipedia?
It's the fault of culture of rules and bureaucracy propagated and promoted by
When there's police brutality without punishment, do you blame the policeman or the government?
When there's a massacre perpetrated by your authoritarian government, do you blame the army/policemen, or the government?
When Madoff steals money over there in the US, do you blame Madoff or those who didn't stop him?
Of course, you can blame the person who directly committed the crime (or the immoral act, depending on laws). But sometimes, just sometimes, the act is a product of the culture. I have a pratical example of bad culture influencing otherwise smart and good people in my country, but stating my personal experiences directly would make me a racist.
Is it core Wikipedia management's fault that I had problems adding a short stub article about a well-known Croatian band? I don't know. Is it Wikipedia's fault? Yes. Wikipedia is more than just the site, it's also the community. Whoever created the rules is responsible for making active editors and admins behave like shit. Why did [citation needed] have to become a joke?
What is this? Wall Street? That's the only place I know of where when something stops growing, because infinite growth of any human enterprise is not possible in reality, it's a signal to mark the time of death and run screaming into the hills. Oh noes! Company XYZ's growth is not going to be 50% a year forever! They're projecting 49.9%! Sell! Sell! Oh woes is we! Buy more bad loan products! Those are safer!
I would have thought hitting a level of stability in something like Wikipedia would be a good thing.
It will have to taper off at some point and as most information get put in there then some people will wander off.
I don't think the fact the admins generally seem to be assholes helps much but it would have happened without them.
(Ah, so because I disagree, I'm now an "apoogist".) Sure, sometimes one might blame the system rather than the people, but you still have to show how the Wikipedia policies lead to this situation. What policies lead to the problems being discussed, and how could it be done better? So far, all of the criticisms are not about the policies, they're about bad experiences between other editors - which includes the people making these criticisms! Which rules are you referring too? Note that the only fundamental policies are no original research, neutral point of view, and verifiability. The other policies are decided by, yes, editors - you, and another else who edits.
(And actually, when someone commits a crime, yes I blame the person who commits the crime, not a Government or anyone else for "allowing" it to happen.)
Why did [citation needed] have to become a joke?
It's not a joke. The joke that people make about Wikipedia is precisely the lack of citations - see? If you want a Wikipedia where any edits are allowed, without reverts, without citations, then you're the one responsible for the "Wikipedia" that so many people make jokes about...
Also, what's the problem with your article? At this stage, the article failed to assert notability (you don't have to prove or even show notability, you just have to assert it - this is simply way to filter out people writing any old crap, which they do. As a result, you then made improvements, and the same editor admitted he was wrong, and removed the tag, giving us this article. So what was the problem? It looks like an example of collabaration working, if you ask me.
And don't tell me that you didn't know - when you create an article, it clearly links to Your first article, including "Gather references both to use as source(s) of your information and also to demonstrate notability of your article's subject matter." - if you don't RTFM, it's not the fault of Wikipedia, its rules, or anyone else who edits there. What is your suggestion for improvements? That no articles should be deleted? That references shouldn't be required?
Wikipedia should fire all its editors and start over. Otherwise the bad editors who are causing all the troubles, will destroy it. In case any good editors might complain, explain how saying you are a Wikipedia editor, at a party, is equal to saying you have some sort of contagious disease, and this is not something to strive for and is caused by the deletionists. Now wikipedia is just a collection of the saddest people, and no one wants to be affiliated with that. The only good thing is that they are collected in a single point of potential damage, and can also be named and shamed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion#In_anime
Everything currently wrong with wikipedia can be summed up by this one link, as well as the edit war currently going on over the section. The people most willing to fight over revisions are the generally the ones you don't want involved. Qualified academic writers are driven out by people who will fight for hours over the importance of crucifixion in an episode of their favorite anime.
Surely these are false dichotomies? There's no reason why in any of those examples that only one person or entity can be ascribed guilt. It can be neither, either, or both, depending on the situation.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
heise (german) reported this, too, but they had some more details about the numbers:
basically what wikipedia says is, that if someone just removes a typo and then never edits anything again, you shouldn't count him as leaving editor... wikipedia's own statistic counts people who stop contributing after making at least 5 changes.
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
That tell us more about you - as a stupid person. Then it does about Wikipedia itself.
Wiki is playing the field, they where hopeing that some of the big media comps would buy them out and no one did. They made it easy for any moron and a computer to cite information (not citing wiki itself, but the references used in the wiki article). Although having a single source of information is benfitical to us all, it does pose as a problem to some. On top of that, having nearly ever editor being freelance unpaid to add/delete/edit articles all the time, well, will eventually slow down. Editors are not leaving 100%, they just are not maintaining content like before, why? because people have lives.
Also, I really could care less about the indept bios on movie actors. If you where to go word for word in articles, I'm sure there is more about hollywood in wiki then there is about science and what does that say about us.
-site:wikipedia.org
Is that the new tag line?
Wikipedia --- a resultant-free encyclopedia that's pretty damn good.
Yes, that was the entire point of his post. Just because it's the individual's fault doesn't absolve Wikipedia for creating the institutionalised environment that allows that individual's antisocial behaviour to flourish.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There are also games with hundreds of thousands of users, with 8 year history, that were never described in a standard, "trusted" medium and thus don't deserve an article.
Wikipedia is a general-purpose encyclopedia. Its editors have adopted this sourcing policy by consensus. To get an article for your pet game, send a press release about the game to reviewers in standard, "trusted" media. Or you can always write an article in a gaming-specific reference wiki that has a looser sourcing policy.