Wikipedia Losing Contributors, Says Wales

derGoldstein writes "According to an AP report, 'Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said the nonprofit company that runs the site is scrambling to simplify editing procedures in an attempt to retain volunteers.' He explained, 'We are not replenishing our ranks... It is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important.' Despite Wikipedia's wide-reaching popularity, Wales said the typical profile of a contributor is 'a 26-year-old geeky male' who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website."

Comments

Easy reason

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an easy reason for this. The admins are, generally speaking, dicks. This wouldn't be a problem if they were in touch with the community, but they aren't.

Re:Easy reason

[eln]

Exactly. Generally speaking, it's better to retain the people you have rather than to find ways to replace them when they leave. Simplifying editing may or may not help replace the people you lose, but addressing the reasons why you're losing so many people is going to be more effective at keeping quality high. When I hear people talk about why they no longer edit Wikipedia, they never talk about the complicated editing process, but they almost always talk about the unreasonable and unaccountable admins.

Re:Easy reason

[roothog]

But how do you fix this?

Require admins, and anyone else who's privilege level is above the basic editor, to use their real names.

Re:Easy reason

[Afforess]

This may be an unpopular theory, but I think Wikipedia's shrinking community has little to do with the admins behavior. I've only personally heard about their poor behavior from 3rd, 4th, or 5th hand accounts. But that's purely anecdotal and a side-tangent.

I think the reason the community is shrinking is because Wikipedia, at least the English version, is complete. I'm not implying that there isn't more information that can be added, but as far as the sum of human knowledge goes, I'd guess that they have gotten past that "magic" 95% marker for easily acquired knowledge. Most of the remaining work to be done is article maintenance, and filling in mundane details of niche articles or emerging fields. The days when 5th graders wrote articles on your home town or park near you is gone. My quaint home town article for Rockford, MI (a town with less than 5000 people) is nearly 3 pages long! (I can't believe there was enough to even fill in 1 page, after the generic census data...),

This isn't a bad thing. It's the natural evolution of such a site. Wales should pat himself on the back and congratulate the community for his contribution to society as a whole. Wikipedia is a job well done and has moved our world forward in a positive direction, in what is becoming a rarer achievement every day.

Re:Easy reason

[quanticle]

That's a bad idea. Administrators may be in a position of power on Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean that they have a commensurate level of power in the real world. Forcing real name use just opens up administrators to possible personal harassment and physical attack.

Re:Easy reason

[roothog]

Power without accountability to the people that you're exercising power over is dangerous.

I'd go further and argue that editors should disclose their real names, too, as that provides some accountability for content. Some people really more qualified to edit an article than others.

Re:Easy reason

[1s44c]

There's an easy reason for this. The admins are, generally speaking, dicks. This wouldn't be a problem if they were in touch with the community, but they aren't.

Agreed. The kind of people that want power over overs in their free time are not the kind of people who are good at using that power productively.

I gave up everything but small spelling corrections and rephrasing on wikipedia ages ago.

Re:Easy reason

[MozeeToby]

Sometimes admins have to be the bigger dick in a situation because sometimes the admins will be right in an argument with someone who won't back down. Do you want the admin that won't allow creative design topics into the evolution page to have his house picketed by idiots who don't know better? Or the guy who manages the abortion page having his car firebombed because he won't let someone put in the pet statistics?

Re:Easy reason

[Bacon Bits]

If your product is based on ostensibly presenting a version of the truth, at some point you must be held accountable for it. This means you must open yourself up to criticism and attack, but it also means you're open for praise. If you cannot be shown to be deceptive, manipulative, or otherwise false, you cannot in any way, shape, or form be expected to shepherd the truth. I do not understand how someone can think they should work in a scholarly capacity and expect anonymity while simultaneously having authority. Authority and anonymity are a recipe that breeds corruption and lies, as anyone who has had contact with a bureaucracy can attest.

To put it simply: Why should we believe anything Wikipedia says is true if they aren't even truthful about their identities?

Or more apropos: [citation needed, bitch]

Re:Easy reason

[discord5]

I'd go further and argue that editors should disclose their real names, too, as that provides some accountability for content.

Which will most likely kill of 99% [citation needed] of edits on Wikipedia. Good job! [citation needed]

Some people really more qualified to edit an article than others.

Sure thing, Stephen Hawking is going to update that page on black holes immediately, right after he updates the Theory of Everything and breaks down the entire universe into a single formula [citation needed]. The man has little else to do anyway.

The problem with wikipedia doesn't lie with the crappy contributions (those get edited out over time anyway), it lies with the people who insist on arguing about its content rather than improving it. This is why most pages [citation needed] are littered with "[citation needed]" left and right. Pointless little edit wars where a paragraph is added, removed, added again, removed again, simply because of clashing egos [citation needed] and not necessarily because the content simply wasn't up to shape [citation needed]...

Adding real names to this isn't going to change that kind of dickish behaviour, because you have no way of verifying all of the credentials on the various subjects on wikipedia.

Sincerely yours,
Captain Dick Darlington
Department of Funology and Funectomy
Her Majesties Royal Army

P.S.: If you want proof of my authority on the subject of funectomy, invite me to a party and allow me to suck all the fun out of the room. My certificate of authority from the Mexican University of Fun expired last week [citation needed]. Sorry about that.

Re:Easy reason

[emtilt]

You're right, but the parent is right, too, because in some respects what you describe is niche (regardless of its objective importance). I, for instance, despite being highly educated, wouldn't have any clue where to start contributing to Chinese culture articles.

I used to edit wikipedia, but I rarely come across articles that I an improve aside from grammar and proofreading these days. The stuff that's missing requires quite a bit of expertise. The only articles I can still meaningfully contribute to are those related to my own field (astrophysics) or a hobby that I know in great depth (film).

Re:Easy reason

[Trixter]

I think the reason the community is shrinking is because Wikipedia, at least the English version, is complete. I'm not implying that there isn't more information that can be added, but as far as the sum of human knowledge goes, I'd guess that they have gotten past that "magic" 95% marker for easily acquired knowledge.

Until the cancer of "not notable" is gone, it can never be "complete" (not 95%, not even 50%).

I've seen articles on an entire range of software get deleted, while the page for Luke Skywalker goes on forever.

Re:Easy reason

[Anrego]

Yes!

The notability thing is high on my list of "stuff they need to take less seriously". It's a community driven project, so if the community wants to talk in gory detail about anime or star trek or whatever, what is the harm. If it's factual and well written.. who cares how "notable" it is.

Uh

[mikkelm]

Perhaps if the whole thing wasn't run by a small clique of sociopathic dorks who wield a ridiculous bureaucracy in a manner that can yield any conclusion that they wish it to yield, then people might stick around for longer than their first editing war.

Every procedure on that site is a complete farce.

Wikipedia's policies are insane

[Dwedit]

Wikipedia needs to amend its "Notability" and "Verifiability" policies badly, and stop deleting articles (which blocks access to the edit history). They don't accept evidence as verification, only "published sources" which use inaccurate speculation and second-hand information. Misinformation keeps reappearing on pages, because it has a citation to some other website which makes the claim, despite that it is untrue.

An example of a time I was highly frustrated is when I was trying to read about the software program called Impulse Tracker, then discovered that its page was deleted. So what if Impulse Tracker is "not notable", its file format is still used in the tracking scene, so I wanted to read about the original program, but can't because the page was deleted. And if I want to reconstruct the page, I can't because the edit history is blocked out.

Re:Wikipedia's policies are insane

[qzjul]

This; when you've worked on an article over a month or so with a dozen people to make it better, and then random editors delete it for notability, it really turns you off from doing anything more...

Wiki Nazis

[fishb0ne]

If by simplifying editing procedures you mean getting rid of the untouchable wiki nazi admins, there may be hope still.

Re:Sick of the cabals

[Hatta]

Yep. Wikipedia was in trouble from the moment "deletionists" became a word.

And? What was expected?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are too many rules, the environment is too hostile (examine the default template "warning" about being blocked, it's a threat, not a warning), pages are guarded jealously by people who will claim that there is no consensus for any change they don't like, etc.

So, fewer people are editing for whatever reason, and many people who try and edit, are driven away.

Some specific reasons some people don't post are outlined [...] reasons [people] don't edit Wikipedia (in their own words).

At the article Chronicling the abuses, a commentator made the point:

Wikipedia’s articles on anarchism are the demonstration of the weakness of their policies. They have a ‘teach the controversy’ approach which ends up promoting fringe views on the same level as actual scholarship, so the Anarchism subset of the site is heavily slanted towards the ‘anarcho’ capitalist view, when there is no historicity to the claims that anarcho-capitalism has any relations to the anarchist movement in general.

This type of slant (on other articles as well) also drives away editors who can't put up with the shit.

So, Wikipedia, because of, in many cases the policies and guidelines currently in place, fails to be inclusive. It is not "newbie" friendly (who has time to read all the rules...), and so newbies are bitten and leave.

So, what's the solution? Well, I think that's easy. Any big organization has problems of a much larger scale than small organizations. So, break Wikipedia up into subject specific Wikis. The general encyclopedia model has been demonstrated to have flaws. Now lets try again. The people who care about web comics can edit on Comicpedia. Etc. Fewer arguments about notability as well.

Stop deleting stuff

[MpVpRb]

If you spend a lot of time writing something, and then somebody decides that it's not "notable", it's unlikely that you will contribute again.

Wikipedia is just bits, bits are cheap, why do the editors act like they are rationing a scarce resource?

Re:A million monkeys typing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's run by a gang of mental midget dictator-for-life's who believe that capitalism is the one and only God-given way

Are you on crack? Have you tried editing the page on Karl Marx or Che Guevara? WIkipedia has no shortage of leftards.

Re:Let's see... my experience with editing Wikiped

[NoSig]

Whine whine whine... It is hard to take you and anyone else seriously unless you link to Wikipedia. Citation needed.

I find it much harder to take you seriously if you believe that putting in "whine whine whine" does something positive for you. If you argue like that on Wikipedia, some introspection may be in order on how not to drive editors away.

Re:Self-revert

[Just Some Guy]

Next time this happens, take the revert to the article's talk page.

What you cannot seem to be made to understand is that no one outside Wikipedia can be bothered to give a shit about "the proper process". We don't care. It's one thing to see an article we can copy-edit or add a little bit to. Hey, I can spend two minutes adding to the collection of human knowledge? I'm in! But it's entirely different to expect us to want to spend time babysitting our edits so that the griefer jackasses who stake ownership to large swaths of a hard drive don't delete our work on a whim.

You keep saying "well, all you have to do is..." but that's never going to happen. We're not "into" Wikipedia in the same way that the Aspie teen hitting "reload" 100 times an hour is, and aren't willing to donate large chunks of time to it.

The problems (and any possible solutions) lie wholly with Wikipedia and not with casual editors. Expecting the entire world to modify their behavior to cater to Wikipedia's processes and procedures - which were cooked up by those same editors who are ruining it for everyone else - is a pipe dream at best.

Re:Not surpricing

[vlueboy]

Not sure if you can see the subtext, so let me be the first to make it clear that quitting wikipedia as an editor is exactly like getting a divorce: we've already given up. We just tell our story like a battered war veteran talks about wars --without giving names of things that are long dead, or expecting you, the audience, to fix our past.

In other words, seeing other slashdotters resonate with our suffering does not fix the problem. What fixes it is the fact that we have already gotten closure through a non-negotiable decision to move away. We don't think that a random slashdotter will go up there and fix the problem, either, and unlike marriage, it's easy to find a replacement especialized wiki to contribute to... or to just stop making real contributions while getting all the other benefits and none of the revert drama.