Slashdot Mirror
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."
Wikipedia was run by people that equated quantity with quality. It was routine to see someone heralded as authoritative because they had made tens of thousand or more edits. In reality the only thing that shows is that someone is obsessive compulsive, doesn't have a job or has a job where they don't have to work. The result was large numbers of articles that were complete and utter crap, a few that were well qualified and the constant question of was the last edit done by a PhD that's an expert in the field or a bored teenager?
It's long overdue for quantity to step to the wayside so that quality can step up to the plate. When wikipedia can stop ranking editors by quantity and start ranking editors by quality the entire site will gain credibility. The concept that just anyone can know what their talking and edit something accordingly leads to idiots that cite wikipedia over the CDC or a thousand other examples I can think of.
Wikipedia still suffers from tremendous a vocal minority on certain political subjects that are locked and to prevent any viewpoint other than the vocal minority that won the right to represent their view on the given subject. Wikipedia has made improvements, but it has a hell of a long way to go before it can be anything other than a starting point for the curious and gullible.
Pick almost almost any random article, something not too obscure. Look for some cumbersome or inelegant prose and clean it up. Don't even change anything factual, just make the article objectively clearer. This isn't even very hard to do, since many articles are written by technical-types who aren't very proficient at communicating. You see this sort of thing with engineers especially; the kind of people who resented having to take English classes.
Now wait about five minutes. Your edit will automatically be reverted by a bot squatting on the article. And after a few seconds you'll receive an automated message, usually beginning with an insincere and condescending, "Welcome to Wikipedia! I've automatically reverted your edit because...".
You can try to start an edit war, but the entrenched editors of most articles have more seniority than you, they're "experts", and it's really not worth the hassle just to make small changes. So you end up with a lot of articles which seem like they have been written by people with Aspergers, or a tenuous grasp of English. I can't speak to the editing climate in other languages.
I don't have a comprehensive solution to this problem, but it probably has something to do with getting rid of the automated bots which protect pages. That'd be a decent start.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Precisely this.
At one time, ages ago, getting admin privileges was easy. Make some good edits, prove you could contribute well, and you were basically in.
Then came editcountitis, where people with less than X thousand edits (I think it's at what, 50,000 now?) were cast aside. Editcountitis created the current "revert monkey" culture and the fast-action tools so that people can automatically revert anything that happens without even reading the edit. Push button, issue revert. Most of these monkeys sit around slapping "revert" all day without reading; some of them actually just use a script to automatically click "revert" on their tool of choice in order to pad their edit counts.
Then came, also, the cliques. Self-protecting groups formed, and the worst is the admins because once you are an admin, you are expected to ALWAYS back up the actions of another admin. You can't badmouth other admins - that's not the way the game is played - but you can be as ugly and mean-spirited to any normal user you want, and when they respond in kind you can either issue a block yourself or ask a supposedly "uninvolved" admin to be your proxy in return for Favors To Be Named Later. Because after all, "civility" only applies to those who don't have the Special Buttons.
The way the game is played, if you are trying to influence an article on Wikipedia, is simple. You revert-monkey someone right to the point of 3RR. You never discuss anything on a talk page and if you've hit 3RR, you find someone to collude with to start reverting in tag-team, then you accuse the other side of either "breaking 3RR" or "not discussing." If you want to and have the backing of a friendly admin, you get them blocked and then issue gloating messages or just template the hell out of them to further infuriate them and bait them into responding "incivilly" to your harassment, at which point your friend the admin gets to escalate the blocks over and over again. Eventually, you'll run the new person off and you get to [[WP:OWN]] your article again, so long as you can keep new editors from ever sticking around long enough for them to actually work and discuss and change the consensus.
The goal of wikipedia's admins is to drive off new editors, and anyone who tells you differently is likely a wikipedia admin.
I would like to echo this, if only to provide some balance to all the complaints. Not to deny that unwarranted (or at least poorly explained) reversions and deletions occur, but for a lot of these claims, upon closer examination, it turns out the edit had problems and violated one of Wikipedia's policies (most often because it's not the kind of information Wikipedia includes, with lack of sources the second-most-common reason). For some of the Slashdotters complaining, I would be astonished if their edits did in fact adhere to Wikipedia policy and style, just given the way they post here.
I've written at least a half-dozen Wikipedia articles or major article sections on a few different topics (bios of various authors, among others). None were summarily deleted or reverted; as far as I can tell (I don't keep close watch on them), they all still exist, and most still incorporate significant amounts of my contributions. They all seem to be in better shape now than when I first wrote them.
Here's what I did: First, I registered an account. Whenever I was thinking of making major changes/additions to an existing article (in some cases it was non-existent or a stub), I first posted on the talk page, expressing my interest in the topic, diplomatically describing what I thought could be improved, outlining what I was planning to do, and asking for comments and suggestions. This rarely got any replies, but ensured I wouldn't be stepping too hard on any toes.
In parallel with this, I figured out what the best available sources on the topic were: online material, sure (more for orientation than for incorporating), but preferably published books. If I didn't have them already I got hold of them, either through the library or second-hand (or Google Books if not in copyright). In some cases, articles in academic journals were more useful, and I was able to access these through a university library. I read or at least skimmed them.
Then I wrote the contribution, using (not copying verbatim) the information from the references and providing citations to them. I tried to write in a straightforward but encyclopedic style, to format it to be consistent with the rest of the article, and to follow the letter and the spirit of Wikipedia rules. I submitted my edits, and sometimes made another comment on the talk page, inviting comments or explaining any deletions I'd made.
I'm not claiming this is a guaranteed way to get your text on Wikipedia, but in my experience it worked. While I've also had some negative Wikipedia experiences (with smaller edits to other pages, where I didn't go through such an elaborate procedure), overall I find that as long as you understand the basic Wikipedia principles (what kind of stuff belongs and doesn't belong), can separate yourself from the work enough that your edits aren't blatantly about your own ego or biases, have solid sources for what you write, and can string a coherent sentence together, people will usually take you seriously.
There are many disgruntled attempted-Wikipedia-editors out there, some with more legitimate grievances than others. Sometimes it seems like most people who have tried to contribute got shot down. But of course, the most embittered ones are the ones most likely to go on about it: the real distribution could be quite different. Or maybe it's simply that most people aren't capable of making good, suitable contributions to an open encyclopedia. Would that be particularly surprising?