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Wikipedia's Participation Problem
holy_calamity writes "More people use Wikipedia than ever but the number of people contributing to the project has declined by a third since 2007, and it still has significant gaps in its quality and coverage. MIT Technology Review reports on the troubled efforts to make the site more welcoming to newcomers, which Jimmy Wales says must succeed if Wikipedia is to address its failings."
In my direct experience the majority of hardcore contributors and long-time editors are complete ideologues and giant assholes who are extraordinarily hostile to any outsiders or differing thought.
Their main contribution is to drive people who don't think like they do off.
Technical solutions to a social problem do not address the primary issues. They need to be willing to admit that it is not a welcoming place for non-combative contributors.
I contributed to wikipedia a couple of times years ago. My edits were quickly reverted. I haven't tried to edit since. I'm guessing many other people had this experience.
Fire the fat butt-hurt dweller mods who over-moderate and reject articles for stupid subjective reasons. Unreasonable rejection is what turns people off.
Honestly? They need to fix their 'data fiefdom' problem. Whenever you attempt to edit something, your changes are usually encroaching on someone's 'turf' and they will revert your changes (even if your right). You can certainly go back and reverse their change cancellation, but they will come back and cancel out your cancellation of their change and so forth - after a few times, since your new; they will just vote to block you and all of your hard work goes into the pages of 'unaccepted revisions' (which is just shy of the great bit-bucket in the sky).
...and I'll come back.
The wikipedia community has made itself utterly insular and there's way too much protectionism-via-automation.
Make an edit on an article someone thinks is 'theirs' ? Auto reverted via a bot. Complain about it? vote to block.
The constant barrage of Wikipedia-specific jargon and acronyms, all on its own, is enough to turn off most people.
Wikipedia's culture has very much evolved away from everyman's resource to a rarefied and specialized discipline that requires as much specific knowledge as most jobs.
This space for rent.
Every time I've tried to contribute in my areas of expertise (and we're talking very modest and very non-controversial stuff), I've been met with a wall of pricks who basically stop anyone who isn't in the inner circle from making even the most benign contributions, additions, or edits. The editors there suffered from a clear case of what we in the old college frat used to call the "It's my party of no one else is invited" syndrome (in reference to newer fraternity brothers who wanted to make the frat as exclusive as possible, exactly one second after they got in). It didn't take me long to get tired of even trying.
Now, that was a few years ago, admittedly. But it was enough to drive me away and make me vow never to return. Maybe things have changed since then, but I'm not really looking to find out.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I said it yesterday and I'll say it today, Wikipedia is an MMORPG that allows griefing of new players and has no safe zones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG
Anyone who is a higher level than you can kill-steal you whenever they want, retroactively.
This. Too many times i've tried to look up something on wikipedia, either because it's a subject i care about or a subject i want to find out about, and discover there _was_ a page on it, but it was deleted for lack of notability. In the second case it's annoying because it's entirely defeating the purpose of a reference work, trying to look up things i don't already know about. If it was more notable i probably would have heard of whatever it was before and wouldn't need to look it up. In the first case, it just feels like a snub.
Then there's the bit where they keep deleting lists of things inside articles, particularly lists of trivia. Trivia lists are one of the quickest and most rewarding things to skim through. (This is why every site on the internet these days frequently posts articles in the form of lists. They get a lot of hits.)
Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia. It's sometimes less informative but it's usually more fun, and i don't get the feeling there's a band of people running around deleting the stuff i'm interested in.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Wikipedia does not need more editors. It needs editors with more expertise in their subjects.
Of course Wikipedia editing is declining. The articles that matter were done years ago. Most new articles are on very minor subjects.
Print encyclopedias were like that as well. Writing the original Encyclopedia Brittanica was a huge job, but ongoing maintenance required only a modest staff.
Some of the decline comes from Wikia, which is a hosting services for obsessed fans. Many of the people obsessed with popular-culture trivia content are adding it to Wikia, which monetizes it with ads. Wikia doesn't have a notability requirement, so fans can add as much trivia as they like.
I love wikipedia (and have contributed both $ and time).
There seems to have been a move on Wikipedia away from actual contributing, and towards criticizing others. This drives new folks away.
It's far too easy to slap all the labels on articles. The rate of tagging for problems seems way above the rate of fixing.
Do these sound familiar? "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified." "This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling." "This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed." "This article may need a more detailed summary" "This article may have too many section headers dividing up its content."
Perhaps they could just put a global message up. "This Wikipedia may have items that require editing. If you find such an entry, please fix it yourself."
Before long we are going to have just heavy fisted editors, and the PR flaks paid enough to deal with them and warp the articles.
Most regular people don't have the time to battle it out, but I thank everyone who tries! And I love the "welcome to wikipedia" people, keep up the good work.
Funny. I only use it to get information on an episode of a television show.
Fanbois are allowed to write countless pages on minor characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_characters
Editors are self appointed. You just get an account, find articles you are interested in you think you can help, and start.
Wikipedia has in theory a bottom up system and in practice a top down one. The tension drives a lot of the problem. It is hard to describe if you have never contributed, but if you try you will within 6 months get bit hard.
I couldn't even reach the point where I was even affected by the overzealous editors. I quit long before that, and I'm sure a lot of potential editors never even got that far. It's not newbie friendly, and if you want new users, you need to have newbies.
1. The markup language. It's not as trivial to use as it should be. When I first started editing wikipedia, I figured I would start small with typo corrections, cleaning up wording, etc. It's a good thing that was my goal, because trying to figure out the process of editing and getting it looking right was a task in itself. If I were a regular person who noticed an error, or wanted to add a paragraph, by the time I figured out the markup language I'd have forgotten about the correction and probably lost interest.
2. Bots. Why is everything I change automatically reverted in a few minutes. I then have to figure out some weird protocol for defending my change on some specialized discussion page which I need to know the special rules for in order to comment and... you know what, it was just a typo, I don't care anymore
3. Deletion. Diskspace is cheap, if someone wants to devote their life to creating a series of articles on the twist and turns of the 3' wide stream behind his house, that's fine by me. But what the real problem is: Why should I risk learning the language, crafting a decent article with sources, putting it up and doing all that work... only to find out it's been deleted? No thanks, I'd rather go do something productive.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The main problem I've encountered is that the article content is determined by whoever has more time for endless debates and edit wars.
One solution is to limit each user's number of edits per article per day. For example, if each editor can only edit each article once per day, or 3 times per week, it would stop a lot of edit wars and eliminate the problem of editors who think they "own" articles. More debate would be moved to the Talk pages.
There would be some drawbacks: For example, editors doing major revisions or fixing their own errors or starting new articles would be overly restricted, but there are workarounds for that. Also, a group of editors would still dominate an article, because collectively they would have many more edits than the newcomer.
The Wikipedia article on Bitcoin has a statement like, "Bitcoin has been criticised for being a ponzi scheme". The citations for this "fact" are [...] (2) an article in Reuters [...] one can actually check the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme and see that a free-floating asset class cannot meet that definition.
If the reliable sources are wrong, Wikipedia will be wrong. As Philip Roth demonstrated, to get a correction into Wikipedia, you first have to bring it to the attention of reliable sources. Write a letter to the editor of every newspaper that has carried the erroneous Reuters article, for example, to clarify for the record the difference between a Ponzi scheme and a free-floating asset class. Find some published economists with blogs and get them to clarify the difference. Then you'll be able to cite these corrections.
I think the problem with Wikipedia is basically described by Animal House. Initially conceived as a criticism of communism, Wikipedia's editing system was also a form. Except there was no central bureau to control it all. That's the only difference.
Basically, Wikipedia's goal is an encyclopedia where "Everyone is equal".
But as we all know the full quote is "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others".
And Wikipedia is a perfect modern day illustration of what happened in the early to mid 20th century - it starts out as everyone is equal, but soon, some become "more equal" and thus end up in control.
So we basically had the 21st century exploration into communism - and the same results occur - you end up with a group of "elites" that end up controlling the entire site while the proles think they have power and control.
And the unfortunate thing is, human nature will ensure that "some are more equal than others" because there will always been a human desire for power. (Or greed.).
The only good thing is that it's only Wikipedia so as an experiment, its effect on the world are minimal.
It's also why most successful FOSS projects are benevolent dictator style things because power abhors a vacuum. If no one is a leader, someone will become one either by mutual agreement or through forcefulness.
Why is anybody who just wants to correct some misinformation going to go through this much work? I'd just be like, "fuck it then." And that's exactly what's happening.