Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Is Nearing "Completion"
Hugh Pickens writes "According to Rebecca J. Rosen, it may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, and central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia is pretty well filled out. 'After an encyclopedia reaches 100,000 articles, the pool of good material shrinks. By the time one million articles are written, it must tax ingenuity to think of something new. Wikipedia,' writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen, 'passed the four-million-article mark in summer 2012.' With the exciting work over, editors are losing interest. In the spring of 2012, 3,300 editors contributed more than 100 edits per month each — that's a 31 percent drop from spring of 2007, when that number was 4,800. For example, let's take the Wikipedia article for the War of 1812 which runs 14,000 words cobbled together by 3,000 editors. Today, the War of 1812 page has many more readers than it did in 2008 — 623,000 compared with 434,000 — but the number who make a change has dropped precipitously, from 256 to just 28. Of those original 256, just one remains active. The reason, Jensen believes, is that the article already has had so many edits, there is just not that much to do. Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences, and maybe even training in the field of historiography, so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard. 'Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. The problem is that it is not mature in a scholarly sense (PDF).'"
Hey, here's a thought: Maybe the reason fewer people are editing Wikipedia articles is because 90% of the time, edits get instantly reverted by some spaz who's jealously guarding their page, typos and all. I've made a half-dozen edits to Wikipedia, and every single one of them has been reverted within an hour or two. And we're not talking factual or debatable edits here, I'm referring to things like incorrect usage of it's/its or adding a citation.
If some stupid intellectuals from Harvard, Yale, etc. aren't happy with Wikipedia's "scholarly maturity," then maybe they/their respective institutions should pony up and donate to the project.
I've done my part.
I'd rather everyone just moved on to simple.wikipedia.org now. Many of the articles are waaay too dense for me to grok, and most of the 'simple' versions just don't exist yet.
Maybe there is a need to split this project along the lines of the split between Red Hat and Fedora? Wikipedia as we know it today would continue as an open source, crowd-sourced knowledge base while the scholarship required to polish the project is applied to produce a more refined product that could be used to support the open source project? How do we translate what has been accomplished as an open, public knowledge product into an economical and refined knowledge product?
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
>> 'Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. ...which is why NO ONE accepts it as the reference of record, right?
>> Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access...so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard.
The current problem isn't that editors don't have direct access to the information; after all, most editors would rather edit than become subject matter experts. Instead, it's that it's not even worth trying to post any change to Wikipedia anymore. As a previous poster stated, it seems that there's about a 90% chance that any revision to any entry will be quickly redacted, whether it's a punctuation correction, a fact backed up by a reference, or just the addition of a reference. From the perspective of contributors with subject matter expertise, Wikipedia has largely become a waste of their time.
How many of those articles are about vapid pop culture topics, like Pokemon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Regardless, I still like Wikipedia, and I contribute to it, when I notice obvious errors (increasingly rare) or poor grammar (much more common). I've even partially rewritten several articles, because the grammar and spelling were so atrocious. Although I'm philosophically what you might call a "deletionist", I'm too apathetic to actually bring up an article for deletion (or even to vote for deletion). Anyway, I figure that every article, no matter how stupid, deserves a chance to be fixed, before it's deleted.
I remember once editing an article that was being used for character assassination against some prominent NYC socialite. After I cleaned up all the personal attacks and gossip, someone accused me of being her public relations team. Ha. I have only one rule, when editing Wikipedia articles: never edit an article that you care about. It keeps stress levels minimal. If someone really thinks I care about NYC socialites, young adult romance fiction, 1980s death metal bands, or anything else in my list of Contributions, they're quite wrong. That's how I avoid burn-out, and, for that, I have to thank all the pop culture-obsessed nerds and gossipy housewives out there, for providing me stress-free articles to edit.
"... getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences..."
Um, no. The problem with this idea is that the editors - as well intentioned as they may be - are generally not scholars of particular fields. They will never really be in a position to judge these things. Worse, on historical events such as wars, the editors have a well-deserved reputation of resisting any interpretations other than those that are well-established and well-accepted. They generally do not allow controversial alternative views to be mentioned, however well-founded, because Wikipedia is about consensus.
If they really want to make the transition to academic-quality content, they need to find away to get experts in the various fields to contribute, and to not only allow but encourage the presentation of more than one viewpoint - while somehow still filtering out the crackpots. This will be a very difficult thing to achieve, will require a very different way of working. I frankly do not believe that Wikipedia is capable of this kind of transition, though I would love to be proven wrong.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
You left out:
9. Nerd kid discovers Wikipedia and vows that no one is ever going to destroy his sand castle again, and he'll show those jerks, just you wait!
You have a great analogy, even more so because it probably explains how hardcore Wikipedia editors are created and why they're so freaking annoying to deal with.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?