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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Well I can't speak about him, but I can speak for myself and say the deletionists ran me off. I originally found the idea of Wikipedia fascinating-- Kinda like a bugzilla for knowledge. Anybody could supposedly help by finding the "bugs" or adding to the knowledge base, sounded cool to me.
So one day I found an error. It wasn't a big error, or one that would make a big difference to pretty much anyone (or so I thought) just a tiny error where a character in a TV show was supposedly A as far as sexual orientation and it was actually B. I knew this because I had just read an interview with the creator and head writer discussing this very thing. So I did what you were supposed to do when you found a bug- I fixed it and cited the page along with a second source with a video of the author discussing it at a convention.
Well within hours my change was deleted and I found myself banned from editing. Apparently the page was watched by a deletionist and he/she didn't like the thought that a character they liked may not be the sexual orientation they wanted them to be. So that was the end of that and now I mainly go to answers.com when I need a quick bit of info. After it happened to me I looked into the "behind the scenes" stuff floating around the net and Wikipedia seems to have its own version of trolls, sadly though the trolls have gained quite a bit of power there--the deletionists.
From what I saw it pretty much doesn't matter if the info there is correct or not, just as long as the page stays the way the deletionist likes it. Which is kinda sad as it distorts the whole thing, just look at the CoS follower that watched the page on Scientology like a hawk and changed anything bad about LRH or the church no matter how much documentation there was about their activities. So there is my little anecdote to add to the pile. I just wonder how much of this exodus is being caused by the deletionists running off or frustrating those that don't fit their mindset. I have found that Wiki is fine for more obscure info that the deletionists don't care about, say info about some minerals properties, but anything that has to do with current events or pop culture is pretty much off limits if there is a deletion troll lurking it. That is my take on it anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.