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).'"

Comments

Oh Yeah, I Remember This Episode

[eldavojohn]

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 ...

Re:Oh Yeah, I Remember This Episode

[SomePgmr]

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.

Re:Oh Yeah, I Remember This Episode

[readin]

Articles in regular Wikipedia on more advanced topics—especially in mathematics—could do with some work in that direction, too.

Certainly the articles don't need to be dumbed down overall, but it would be nice if at least the introductory paragraph were comprehensible to someone who hasn't spent years studying the topic, or hours following an ever-growing tree of other articles the summary links to (and others that those summaries link to, and so on) just to try to understand a majority of the nouns and verbs therein. It's often difficult to even guess at what kind of thing the article concerns without opening at least a half-dozen other tabs.

I agree. The first page of any math article should be easily accessible to someone with a BS in a STEM field

Re:Oh Yeah, I Remember This Episode

[skids]

This. The math articles are actually very good, but you have to make it past the hurdle of being able to comprehend WTF the article is about before you can appreciate the power of all the crosslinks. Many of them drop almost immediately into notations, which even if notations don't scare you off, generally aren't very helpful to the objective of description. Also they follow the general mathematical convention of "here's a big bunch of symbols, now here is what each symbol means" instead of what humans naturally need: here is thing thing, we'll use symbol to represent it, and here are these other things with these symbols, and what's going tpo happen is we are going to divide this generic concept by this other generic concept and add this other thing and now here's the big mess of symbols that describes exaclty how we go about that and here are a few things you might want to notice in that big mess of symbols because they are important/interesting."

It always amazes me after studying a mathematical topic how easy it is to picture the very simple structure of meaning after you already understand it, but how very hard it was to upload that simple structure from the printed page to the wetware. I often hold out hope that a true talent for visual art combined with modern multimedia might make that whole process much smoother. I keep meaning to suggest teaming students from our art department with math students to try to come up with art/video that explains math.

What I would not like to see is what we see on things like the Science channel where documentaries about scientific subjects are really just human interest stories about the scientists involved. That material should be on its own page, except for the tie-ins.

Coulnd't add to it if you wanted to

[alphatel]

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.

Re:Coulnd't add to it if you wanted to

[arth1]

Not only editors, but the various scripts that automatically undo any and all changes to articles without anyone even looking at the changes.

It's become such a chore and so many hoops to jump through to add or correct wikipedia that I'm not surprised that people won't bother anymore.

Terrible editing culture

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Terrible editing culture

[lcrocker]

As one of the first Wikipedia editors, I have to agree. The current state of Wikipedia is unusable. 5 million articles is a pathetically small number: every town, every park, every building, every movie, every TV show, every book, every law, every government official of every country throughout history: all of these should be articles, and would be if it were easier to make them.

--Wikipedia user #43

Re:Terrible editing culture

[alexgieg]

all of these should be articles, and would be if it we were allowed to make them.

There, fixed it for you. For more obscure subjects it isn't only a matter of having the knowledge about them, and then the references about them, but also of having editors consider them relevant. I've lost the number of times I've searched for a subject just to find a page that at some point existed in Wikipedia, but was deleted because it wasn't "notable" enough. Funnily enough though, sometimes the exact same "non-notable" article exists in some foreign edition of Wikipedia, so Google Translate comes to the rescue.

Loss of interesting articles to write

[Anonymous Coward]

Or frustration at the deletionists nuking anything added about (not-so) niche topics?

We Know Eveything

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eldavojohn

Re:Violations of Wikipedia:Ownership

[alphatel]

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.

Exactly what a Wikipedia editor would post.
But seriously, when you try to argue with a senior editor know what everyone tells you? Read the 20 awesome Wikipedia entries that validate their statements, however unjustifiable they are in real arguement.

Re:Violations of Wikipedia:Ownership

[DerekLyons]

And one of Wikipedia's sock puppets/cheerleaders chimes in as expected with his "it's all sweetness and light if you follow the bureaucracy and play Wikipedia the Role Playing Game" posts...

You just don't get it do you? It's exactly that all that bullcrap, favoring those who play Wikipedia The Role Playing Game over those who want to do the work, that has driven the latter away. The lunatics are now running the asylum.

New Articles

[readin]

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.

Re:Violations of Wikipedia:Ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Nerd kid build sand castle on beach.
2. Jock bully kicks over and destroys sand castle.
3. Nerd kid goes to complain to authorities.
4. Nerd kid learns jock bully is really popular with beachgoers because he is the star quarterback of local football team.
5. Jock bully gets a free pass because of this. No punishment, sand castle remains destroyed.
6. Nerd kid is no longer trusted among beachgoers due to bringing "baseless" accusations against popular kid. Further complaints are ignored.
7. Nerd kid stops building sand castles and stops trusting beachgoers.
8. Beachgoers wonder why nobody builds sand castles any more.

It's far, far easier to destroy than to create or rebuild. When you have a culture that supports unchecked destruction by the popular kids, you drive out the culture that wants to create or rebuild. Having a complaint system doesn't help; the culture is still based around destruction, not creation. Moreso when said complaint system only serves to scare the new kids away from complaining by setting up a bureaucracy that, even when followed to completion, only serves to remind the new kids that the popular kids are more popular than they are, so their decisions stand.

Re:Violations of Wikipedia:Ownership

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The question is, after being rejected like that do I care sufficiently to follow up through a complaints procedure? Or do I just walk away and not bother posting to Wikipedia again.

My guess is that a lot of the people do care enough are also the people who are strongly opinionated about the page they're trying to edit, and probably deserved the rejection.

The majority that don't bother to follow up are more likely to have been the ones that might have been useful contributors. ....but I guess we'll never know for sure.

Re:Revert bots

[Just Some Guy]

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.