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

[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

[Anrego]

Yup!

This is definitely the core of the problem.

It only takes one aspergers inflicted admin to make a good long term contributer throw their hands up in the air and say "fuck that shit". Additionally other people see this happening and decide not to get involved at all.

The fact that this issue is brough up nearly every time wikipedia is mentioned would indicate that this is a serious and obvious problem ... not the editing interface. I have never heard anyone complain that "it was just so damn hard to get the text to look correct that I stopped contributing". I _have_ heard people rant about control-freak admins on a fairly regular basis.

I think the big problem, as someone mentioned, is that the people who make it to the top are the people who spend all day trolling through articles and correcting things. In other words... the people who are probably running on a lean mixture and take things just a little too seriously. The people you need admining wiki are the occasional contributers who are socially well adjusted (which is why they are "occasional" contributers.. they spend time doing other things with real people). How you achieve this I do not know.. but I think it's the answer.

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

[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

[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).

Sick of the cabals

[Pope]

Or more likely they're sick of the cabals that form. Wikipedia has lost lots of contributers over the past few years because of them, and will continue to do so unless these spergmeisters are kicked off the pages that they edit camp.

As usual, it's a couple of intractable morons that ruin it for the casual contributor.

Re:Sick of the cabals

[Hatta]

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

Re:Sick of the cabals

[Dexter Herbivore]

I've grown up in a particular industry, I've worked in the industry for almost 20 years, it's a small specialist field referring to a particular geographic area in Australia, I try to add information to the pages that already exist and are not complete, I always cite my work when I edit something and I remain factual and not opinionated or personal... yet most of my work continually gets rolled back by editors based in the US who edit camp particular sections of wikipedia and don't seem to like ANY change to their pages.

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.

Let's see... my experience with editing Wikipedia

[Opportunist]

I once was an editor there. Allow me to illustrate why I am no longer.

It all started when I dared to step into the turf of something one of the "higher ups" considered his. An edit of me was reverted. Not just something trivial that begs for a "citation needed", it was a well worded and sourced piece of information. The reason was that it was "not enough on topic". Ok, I see that differently, but so be it. Not like I have to have everything I write published.

What bugged me was that the day after, my entry was, almost verbatim, in there again. This time under the name of the person who thought it's "offtopic" only one day earlier. But ok, so be it, some people need it for their ego to be the "only authority" on some subject.

The problem started when this became the rule rather than the exception. Whenever something new developed in an issue, it descended into mind numbing bickering whose version gets to stand. And since I'm more in the fact-gathering and less in the butt-kissing game, usually it's not my version that stands. So hey, maybe they don't need me as an editor.

The last straw was when I removed some defacement (IIRC it was an article about greek pillars and someone made a rude reference of someone fucking someone else up the rear) and it got reverted by my personal stalker. It seems, they get butt-kissing brownie points for doing as many reverts as possible, preferably without reading first what got written.

So, in case you're wondering why you don't get more editors, take a look at the existing ones.

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.

Not surpricing

[luvirini]

Given the "friendliness" that greets new contributors.

I have entered correct information with references and such in few articles where I am somewhat of an expert, like one where I did my masters in the topic and created couple of pages that were in the page request list in topics where I am fairly knowledgable.

End results: >70% of my edits were removed within few days and in several cases replaces with actual WRONG information. Of the created pages one has today totally wrong information, one has been proposed to merge with another page, but nothing has happened in way many months and a third page was just removed.

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?

Don't make a non-PC edit

[Quila]

Long ago I noticed once that the well-sourced facts set out in one Wikipedia article contradicted a claim (not directly sourced) made in a related article. So I naturally edited the claim to correspond to the facts, mentioning the edit was for internal consistency. I hadn't come to edit an article, but I consider it to be a Good Thing to fix small errors as you see them.

Unfortunately for me the claim happened to be in a gay-related article and apparently embodied the PC position towards this incident.

The storm hit. An admin reverted it without comment (against Wikipedia rules). I explained the reasoning in Talk and reverted back. Then he reverted again, no comment. Now I reverted, explaining he was violating the rule about explaining reversions.

Count: Two reverts for me, two for the admin.

The admin reverted again, saying I needed to cite the source outside of Wikipedia (the same source the other article cited). So I re-did the entry and re-posted with the suggestion. I can work with people, and take positive editing suggestions seriously.

Count: Three reverts for me (if you consider a repost to be a revert), three for the admin.

He reverted it AGAIN without comment, blatantly breaking the three revert rule. Then he said if I tried to change it again it would count as a 3RR violation and I would be banned. I checked the admin's personal page, yep, a gay activist.

At no time were the facts in the other related article challenged or changed. At no time did he tell me I was wrong, or that my edit was factually incorrect. He just didn't want the facts to be on that page.

Even if an admin isn't involved, a cabal of supporters can do the same thing, reverting your posts at will. They can get one or two reverts each, winning while you hit your three revert ceiling. There is really no consensus as Wikipedia tries to reach, since a small, organized and dedicated cabal can easily win over the unorganized concensus of many casual editors. If the cause is a liberal one, it is most likely that their cabal will be supported by the admins.

Now I try to stay away from anything relating to PC, but even then it can seep into the most neutral-seeming articles.

The Slashdot approach

[Tony Isaac]

Slashdot has figured out how to fix this problem.

Most comment sections on news Web sites are junk, usually not worth reading. But on Slashdot, the comments are generally more entertaining and useful than the articles themselves.

Why is this? I think it's because of the clever moderating system. Ordinary users get to vote comments up or down, and the result is that the trash sinks to the bottom, and the good stuff gets highlighted.

So Wikipedea should try the Slashdot approach...let people vote on the edits that should be reverted, and which ones should be kept.

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.