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).'"
This is the one where upon completion of recording all worthwhile knowledge, Wikipedia writes the final article describing Wikipedia itself. Following that, it detonates a bomb that implodes the universe back to a singularity so that no new information can be created and its volumes are complete for eternity. Luckily, as a Slashdot user, Wikipedia knows absolutely nothing about me or my intentions so I'll just take my Scooty Puff Jr. here over to the Wikimedia Foundation's servers ...
My work here is dung.
Not for nothing, but Wiki editors are so obtuse and didactic, that attempting to add anything of relevance has become a chore unworthy of its meritlessness.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
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.
Or frustration at the deletionists nuking anything added about (not-so) niche topics?
Not all Wikipedia editors are as obtuse as you claim. Let me reiterate the comment I made on the submission: If particular editors are violating Wikipedia's policy against ownership-like behavior by not allowing a consensus to form after discussion of a reverted edit on an article's talk page, consider using the various dispute resolution means in the Wikipedia community.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eldavojohn
The War of 1812 is an odd example to pick -- the summary makes it sound like it's a representative military history item for which there is lots of good scholarship, so that the readership and edit traffic numbers might generalize across other history articles.
But in fact, the War of 1812 has been getting more press lately, because it's currently the 200th anniversary. There's even a post-blog, 1812now, specifically about it, and a variety of interest-generating retrospectives in mainstream media.
Their broader point may not hold up for other, less topical pages.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
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.
Maybe there is a need to split this project along the lines of the split between Red Hat and Fedora?
They tried that. Wikipedia was originally the draft version of Nupedia, and Nupedia fizzled.
I just looked on Wikipedia for what happened on October 28, 2012, and there's nothing there! The 29th doesn't look very complete either. Jeez, how sloppy. So clearly it's not finished yet...
There are still plenty of Japanese cartoons, political ideologies and conspiracy theories that need pages and links to those pages in every other page that has the slightest real or imagined association.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eldavojohn
Hoisted by my own petard!
Whelp, here I am trapped for all eternity listening to Jimmy Wales sing a 12.7 second fair use clip of "American Pie" at 64kbit/s in ogg vorbis as punishment. I guess I deserve this.
My work here is dung.
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.
It isn't that hard. There are plenty of local landmarks around. And there are always new things being built, and new major historical events occurring. And then there is foreign stuff. People write about what they know. Most Anglophones write about things that exist or occur in the English speaking world. There are plenty of famous people, places and historical events in foreign countries that either don't have articles or have very weak articles.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
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.
What articles about "(not-so) niche topics" were deleted despite citing three different scholarly or mainstream media sources independent of one another and of the subject?
So, if some media slut says some inane inflammatory bullshit and gets all over the news, that can be cited and documented in Wikipedia... However, if one of us lowly netizens finally reverse engineers an undocumented file format, of use to many folks in the 3D graphics fields, it doesn't get in Wikipedia because there's not three independent "scholarly or mainstream" sources? Even if it's being used like mad in tons of applications, and no one can really find the data elsewhere even though they're searching for it and just don't know what exactly to call it?
Look, Wikipedia blatantly ripped off the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy website, (H2G2) which allowed anyone to add anything regardless of notoriety. It was great, and extremely helpful. There was something on everything. Too bad BBC shut id down. If you didn't want to know about the proper way to drink water upside down, then you didn't read the damn article. Storage is Cheap, esp. for text. Maybe if Wikipedia was more inclusive you'd have MORE EDITORS? Fuck you and your popularity contests.
"... 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.
But seriously, do you expect something as vast and ambitious as Wikipedia to exist without a somewhat intimidating rulebook? I'm not saying Wikipedians shouldn't be more welcoming or helpful, or that they're not, perhaps the problem is related to the way the site is structured. It's not easy for newcomers to find their way around the place, or around the people.
You mean bots like ClueBot NG and XLinkBot? If you've been around for four days and make ten edits, a lot of those anti-vandal bots will stop reverting you.
So casual editors are explicitly not welcome. My kid can't see a mistake, edit it, and expect the correction to stick until he's satisfied our robotic overlords? Fuck that. No wonder edits are drying up.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?