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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.
... but then my motivation to ever help Wikipedia in any way whatsoever was deleted due to "lack of notability".
Cull the edit nazis.
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.
Is there anything to that statistic beyond the slowing of new content since it's a mature product? That's a good thing, right?
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
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).
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.
...and I'll come back.
There are lots of other wikis that focus on stuff that doesn't belong in an encyclopedia.
And that makes Wikipedia "more welcoming to newcomers" how exactly?
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."
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
Whilst I would NEVER quote it in an academic essay, as a source of information on non-controversial topics, (e.g. dates in history, who wrote what, basic chemistry and physics issues, all you ever wanted to know about British Railway stations past and present...) it's excellent. The sources that it quotes are the next step in serious research, with the best articles quoting online primary resources. A core question is 'were encyclopedias ever that much better?' They all come with their own agenda and biases. It's not perfect, but it's a useful resource, as well as providing the occasional giggle.
They also keep reverting your contributions to Time Cube. What's up with that?
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.
Wikipedia has developed a cabal of powerful admins that play Wikipedia ten hours a day instead of completing their degrees. Until their power is curtailed participation will continue to decline.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Based on Jimmy's /. interview a couple months ago, I'd say Jimmy is the problem. He is either doesn't know or doesn't care that there are fiefdoms, mod problems and an unwelcoming environment. I simply could not believe his thick-headed responses to sincere questions.
Short answer: fork it, and leave Jimmy behind.
You want to address your failings?
Fuck you for making it so difficult to edit Wikipedia successfully. Even to use the talk pages, you have to work with some obscure mark-up language which most people have no intention of ever learning. If you don't, any contribution you make will be deleted for "vandalism".
And double fuck-you for playing favorites with various editors and admins. If you perm-banned the top 1000 most frequent contributors, the quality of wiki would go through the roof.
Jimmy Wales is also upset that one of his party guests peed in his swimming pool.
He's trying to use a spoon and a net net to remove the contamination, but somehow that just isn't working.
I asked Jimmy directly about this in a pretty even handed way when he did the Slashdot interview questions back in August. He responded:
" Things have mostly stabilized. It's still not a crisis, but I still consider it to be important. One of the most exciting developments is the visual editor, which I hope will bring in a whole new class of editors who were turned off by the complexities of wikitext."
More or less he dismissed the premise that there was a problem in the first place, and any issues that are left could be handled with a better editor UI. Now, I do think the Wikimedia editor needs work, but Jimmy is kidding himself. Maybe he'll get a new rush of editors when they release the new UI, but I'm not convinced they'll stay.
Wikipedia does not need more editors. It needs editors with more expertise in their subjects.
I have not tried to contribute to wikipedia yet (though I have thought about it, I have been unsure whether I want to try given the currently climate described), but it occurred to me: how does one become an editor?
I am wondering, if current editors are appointed and have permanent control and this is causing problems, what if Wikipedia switched to something akin to slashdot's moderation (and metamoderation) tool? Let random people vote on if they think the change was warranted. They don't need to be experts on the topic, just answer yes or no as to whether the change was significant and properly documented with references. If so, then vote ok, and overrule the mods that may be blocking it. Is that not possible?
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I too have experienced assholery on the Wikipedia, but there are articles out there which need help and are unlikely to be controversial and so have a "guardian" associated with them. For example, 2-photon imaging is an important new(ish) biological technique, yet its article on the Wikipedia is rather short and doesn't reflect the importance of the technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_excitation_microscopy
soylentnews.org
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.
Seems like the guy who keeps removing your "valuable contributions" is right.
There's a lot of dick moderators and revisionist editors on Wikipedia, but some of them exist because of people like you who submit the same anonymous change 20 times...
Also, yes, I would love to see your Time Cube edits. Please like them next time!
Exactly! My simple, logical, and eloquent changes to the George Bush article patiently explaining that he is the Devil, and my fair and balanced notation to Barack Obama's page that he is clearly not a US Citizen, were not only reverted but they banned my IP address! (They apparently thought I was some greek guy guy named "Anonymous"!!) With that kind of attitude how can I correct Wikipedia's obvious factual errors concerning the Moon Landing, Scientology, and Nazi Time Travel??? I am not deterred!!! Important edits like mine should be in bold type, and whats wrong with caps WHEN YOU ARE MAKING A SERIOUS POINT!
It's really too bad, IMO, because I get a lot of value out of Wikipedia. Regardless, the in-fighting over article submissions is totally unacceptable and will lead to its demise eventually, if something isn't done about it.
As an example, one of my good friends tried to submit a few articles to cover specific BBS "door games" from the 1980's -- only to have his articles flagged for removal as containing "irrelevant" information. (I can't remember the exact claim, but whoever moderates the submissions apparently felt the door games he discussed were too obscure for anyone to care? Funny, because a Facebook message group full of over 150 users from the BBS days were the ones who brought these door games up, and were frustrated to find nothing about them on Wiki.)
Why does this come as a surprise?
The various "cliques" of power-tripping old-timers on Wikipedia has actively driven people away.
And most of the time, they can actually use Wiki's pointless rules (style, notoriety, original research) to justify their wholesale reduction of content to the least objectionable pablum possible, even going so far as to revert corrections back to the last known-incorrect state.
Make no mistake, many of wikis guidelines exist for a damned good reason, and I wouldn't suggest gutting them wholesale. Instead, I would gut their editorial staff that has perverted those reasons into mere excuses to behave like petty tyrants. Where to start? If someone has more deletions/reversions than contributions under their belt - See ya!
Every single time I make an update, it is reverted within minutes. There are blatant errors in many of the articles, but the ideolog editors prefer the error. Its as bad as news media bias.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
I'm sure this is a problem, but it is not one I've encountered at all. I've always ensured that my changes are congruent to previous points of view, and when not possible to ensure that a new position is well written and sourced. Wikipedia is no different then any other peer reviewed work. It's unreasonable to expect that you can tread onto someones prior work without due diligence and soft skills.
I can't count how many time a page with some hard to find information has been deleted simply because someone just have no clue about the fact that that information is hard to find. The usual excuse is that there is not enough reference to verify the information. Hell, this is precisely why this information is hard to find !!!
Basically Wikipedia is now a sandbox for frustrated asshole that only show there ego by destroying others contributions. Every contribution must be retained: aside of complete joke or manipulation, people express there new viewpoint about a fact and this is important.
There is now way in expressing a unique viewpoint about a fact. The only solution is to retain all viewpoint and to classify them.
I'm sure your information is perfectly valid and should be published.
I doubt that Jimmy Wales has gotten rich from Wikipedia. And that's part of the problem. Unlike Facebook or Google, there are no billions of dollars in stock options from Wikipedia, so the original founders have all walked away.
I quit (early on in wikipedia's lifetime) when a change I made when I noticed a typo in an article on the Constitution was reverted by a bot for lacking a source. My 'source' was a link to the actual photograph and transcription of the Constitution hosted on archives.gov
I just lost all motivation when I realized that I would have to 'fight' over the most trivial details.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
...in my opinion, the decline in contributing members is mainly because of today's "gimme-gimme-gimme and I won't give anything back in return" mentality of the young generation of internet users.
So in other-words, everything started going down hill September 1993?
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
I see a lot of complaints here that boil down to "Subject matter experts try to contribute knowledge, dorky editors revert them over some stupid policy I don't understand the purpose of." From there it just devolves into poo-flinging. Most of you are missing the major policy points that require those reversions, and the truly deep (and perhaps, unsolvable?) problems which are the reasons for those policies. The WP policy stuff is really doing the best it can do, and you're caught up in blaming the "lesser of two evils" results of the process.
The *real* problem for WP can be broken down like this: The WP guys really do genuinely want to build an archive of all human knowledge, freely available to all humans, while minimizing bias and falsehood. They want it to be crowdsourced, too. The obvious problem is that lots of the crowd will contribute false or biased things, and those things have to be filtered out somehow. The primary mechanism of filtration isn't "assign brilliant people in every field to fact-check submissions based on their own expertise", because frankly that would only lead to more bias and more problems. So instead of futilely trying to judge objective truth in that matter, they redefine the objective to a more-attainable version of the truth: we want what's commonly accepted as the truth, not what objectively really is the truth.
The reason for this distinction is it can be enforced easily: all contributions of knowledge have to be backed up by external, 3rd party, editorially-verifiable sources. Then at least the version of truth that passes WP muster can be said to have passed societal muster in general before it arrived on WP, which diverts a large part of the truthiness problem. This leads to a pair of lesser problems, both of which deserve attention, but are very difficult to solve:
1) WP doesn't accept original work from subject matter experts. Even if you *are* the world's leading authority on Quantum Chromodynamics, it's not good enough for you to create an account in your name and start adding random facts from your head to an article about QCD Coloring. Even you, the SME, needs to actually referenced a published book or peer-reviewed journal article for each factoid you add to an article. Obviously, this pisses off SMEs that know what they're talking about; it's annoying to be required to find what is probably an objectively less-qualified source than yourself to back up your claims. Unfortunately, it's the only way to prevent false SMEs: people with an inflated view of their expertise and/or a clear fringe bias. It's also the only way that a committee of non-SME editors can validate the process.
2) Perhaps worse is the problem of self-referential loops with the 3rd-party sourcing. A number of issues come together to create the problem, and a typical example goes like this: A well-meaning person edits an article on Palm Trees in Florida, and adds some hearsay non-sense they heard from their neighbor about a new type of pest imported from Cuba that's attacking the trees and how they might all be gone within 10 years due to this pest. Because very few editors or bots are actively watching the Palm Trees in Florida article, this bullshit goes undetected for a while. Let's say two weeks later, someone gets around to reverting the edit for lack of a verifiable source. However, in the intervening two weeks, a well-meaning reporter for a local news station in Florida happens on the article, sees this shocking fact about Palm Trees dying to pestilence, and writes a local new story about it.
She doesn't cite Wikipedia because, well, that would seem unprofessional. So when the original submitter sees the reversion, the submitter goes googling for evidence to back up the claims and get un-reverted. She stumbles on the local news story and brings it back to the edit war as a verifiable source. The editors pretty much have to accept it, and a new and totally invalid factoid has erroneously become a part of human knowledge.
The problems here are man
You're the smartest guy and most accomplished guy on the internet (for sure!), but through your fog of autism, you fail to see what things are relevant to encyclopedia entries and what things aren't.
Encyclopedia entries are for WHAT not HOW.
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.
I see you're never been to Reddit... :)
I gave up on contributing to Wikipedia when I realized that even in an encyclopedia with unlimited pages, if someone decides the topic you spent a week of free time writing up isn't notable enough your work can be permanently deleted. Not rendered inactive, with a trace of edits like the vandalism that happens daily, just wiped out of existence. I've bookmarked fascinating articles I wanted to refer back to later only to find that even archive.org doesn't have them any longer. If I want to fund psychopaths with a compulsion to control information they can't understand the significance of, I'll just pay my taxes, thanks.
Their elitiest arrogance shows in many ways. Two which particularly annoy me and come to mind at the moment are there position that they get to decide when pages are vanity pages or otherwise trivial and irrelevant, and the really frustrating cookies which expire too soon. Usually my only edits are typoes and afew obvious errors, but it requires a fresh login too often, especially since I browse wikipedia from several different computers, so the likelihood of a cookie expiring increases all that much more.
The editors should stick to resolving head bashing disputes and reversion battles, not substituting their elitist expertise against crowd sourced opinionson what articles are worth chucking out for having no links or for not following some arbitrary standard format.
Infuriate left and right
I tried helping on a few articles. I updated a few articles with newer information: wrote it up, attributed to proper source, after a few days it was deleted, and then a week later had almost my exact update come back but done by one of the maintainer of the article.
I don't put a date as the start of anything. It is the number of people having this mindset, getting to a critical mass and changing the landscape. I know one of those people very personally, my significant other's daughter. All she does is consume information but haven't seen her making a slight contribution to anything online and I know (from her words that is) her friends are of the same mindset.
In my time, I mean, when I went online in late 80's, almost everyone online, including myself, were building "The Internet". In the course of so may years, I don't know how many personal websites I have started for a garden variety of reasons, or how many blogs I have had. Today, the youth, whom are supposed to be the next wave of people to take the proverbial torch from our generation, are only interested in what their "facebook friends" are doing, wearing and sharing. In my opinion, again, "OMG, I am having a wonderful day" facebook status update is not a meaningful contribution of information for anyone.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Wikipedia uses "rough consensus", which really means "consensus among everyone who the admin thinks should count towards the consensus". If one person has a valid point and a drawer of sockpuppets make the same invalid point then the socks win, even though they pay lip service to "not voting". All the WP:RULES are supposed to be descriptive but when it's convenient they become prescriptive.
Wikipedia needs to decide if it's hierarchical or consensus-based. Right now it's a perfect example of why deliberative democracy doesn't work, because as things get more serious it favors people who have the free time to deliberate.
The battles on Wikipedia are well documented. Articles deleted, added back, deleted again. Back and forth in a never ending battle of arrogant assholes with giant egos.
Oblig XKCD
Given how many here retell stories of how they've been driven of contributing to Wikipedia, I conclude that as a social experiment Wikipedia has failed.
If they don't change course then Wikipedia is already dead and just keeps on with a zombie shuffle until the entries are so dated and irrelevant that they will be passed by.
For all those who's entries have been deleted I submit the speedydelete site to get your work back.
People like you only want to filter out as much contributions as possible. Too much filtering is the biggest problem for Wikipedia: it make every contribution a difficult task. Filtering must be only used to avoid abuse, not to reject contribution you don't like because it don't fit an excessively restrictive policy.
Wikipedia must evolve to retain as much contribution as possible, even from expert, even with self-referencing. Instead of filtering out, it must keep and classify the contributions.
By deleting information, moderator have to redo the same again and again each time an user express a viewpoint that don't match the current policy. By keeping alternative viewpoint, others users can see that it already have been expressed and can contribute to either add more information to it or to change his classification. The moderators work will be lighter, and the contributors will be more happy to add new work.
We are human, and this fact is critically important because human don't simply manipulate facts as a computer do, human interpret facts using his own personality. Since Wikipedia is for human (as now), it must evolve to manage the human interpretation instead of regress into an useless factual only system.
Have you tried the new one ? I think it's a big advance in the usability of Wikipedia.
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've told this before but it's worth repeating. I live in a very small town (>50 people), the wiki article says that the town was devastated by a fire in the 60s. I removed it because there was no fire, at all. It was reversed and added back and I was told I needed a reference or cite. How do you cite something that didn't happen?
The fire wasn't cited either, but it's still there.
I don't have a complete answer, but one of the things you could do is stick in a 'citation needed' flag. Then you could post on the article's discussion-page to state your challenge to the false content, and say that if no citation is forthcoming you'll delete the unsupported content. That may flush out any a-hole who wants to start an edit war (which is something that can attract WP sanctions anyway), and then if you have the stomach for it you can argue/fight directly if needed -- and if you haven't become tired of all the bullshit.
(Seems to me, btw, one of the neat things about this very flawed wikipedia thing is that at least it did (does?) raise consciousness about the need for checking suspect 'facts' and proper sources. There have even been 'citation needed' T-shirts.)
Maybe you could even stimulate the creation of a 'reliable source' (according to the wikipedia policies) by getting the nearest local newspaper to run a letter or article about wikipedia's false claim about your locality. Then cite that.
HTH
-wb-
I'm new to the APK troll phenomenon (seems it's not new though?). I'm guessing this is supposed to be the same APK referenced at http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/ ? I really do have to wonder if the real Alexander appreciates anonymous ass-hats besmirching his good name by trolling under his initials... I assume there's a template file involved, to make sure the troll doesn't forget the post scriptum. I wonder what else goes into it? Browser plugins to assist with converting to uppercase? They should sell a "how to be APK" kit...
I was under the impression that most Wikipedia articles about individual Pokémon species had been merged six years ago. Only 88 species have articles now. See WP:PTEST. Besides, even if something is out of Wikipedia's scope, it may be well within the scope of Bulbapedia, Nookipedia, Super Mario Wiki, etc. See WP:OUTLET.
Wikipedia editors have literally the worst community on the entire internet. It's a world where being right and having facts is irrelevant, and all that matters is seniority and number of edits, and god help you if you infringe upon someone else's stated territory. It's total shit. It is literally a fucking miracle that the site remains as useful as it is.
The worst are the edit wars. Often in reading an article, you can literally see in a single paragraph how the edit war played out. With a statement being made, then another statement immediately following that, if it doesn't directly contradict the previous statement, attempts to "soften" or "counter" it, immediately followed by a third statement about how the second statement isn't important or relevant to soften or counter THAT statement. It's so fucking dumb and it leads to insane, schizophrenic articles.
I'm claiming that the current clusterintercourse is the lesser of two evils. Allowing original research would make it too easy to propagate hoaxes.
Wikipedia suffers from the same thing that happens to most huge - number of participants - open source projects.
After a while, the number of editors and people-who-know-best gets sufficiently large.
At this point, there is more editing and deleting of the material than creation of new material. The quality improves.
But the editing and deletion of material makes it a very high risk to contribute to the project. If you spend a lot of hours creating material to the project, and it gets deleted, you have wasted your time, and the level of criticism to your creativity is high.
At that point, the creative people that actually adds to the material of the projects starts leaving and doing something more rewarding. The editors stay.
The question here is: Why would anyone try to add anything to Wikipedia, when the risk of getting edited away or get your creation deleted is so high, and there's better projects you can spend your time and energy on?
In a paid project, at least someone will pay you for your work even if it gets deleted. Your motivation will drop, but at least the investment in time and energy wasn't purely your own.
I think all open source projects that grows to this scale needs to consider why people still contribute new materials, motivate them, and how to limit the amount of destruction of creativity done by editors in the name of quality.
Short answer: fork it, and leave Jimmy behind.
You can't just "fork" Wikipedia. Well, you can, but it's not trivial. They have a good amount of infrastructure (servers, storage, admins) to run the tech behind the website.
No specialist in his field wants to bother with the asshole editors, and the bulk of articles parrot US government propaganda.
And it's not even particularly "encyclopedic".
The only positive thing is that changes are viewable, so you can see what assholes the editors have been, as well as how hopeless wikipedia is.
If you don't want to deal with unpleasant editors and revert wars, your best bet is to stick with obscure subjects and try to follow the house rules for style and referencing. You can accomplish quite a lot that way with very little difficulty. Editing controversial or popular articles is asking for much unpleasantness, unless that's what really you want.
-Bob-
"This page does not have the Stupid Crap Policy macro indicating some stupid crap. If this macro is not added in seven days, this page will be deleted. This comment was added by a mindless bot."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only policy I've seen giving a week's timeframe for deletion if a template is not added is image copyright status. Not paying attention to copyright could get Wikipedia or licensees of Wikipedia sued and shut down. Wikipedia requires all images to carry machine-readable assertions of copyright status so that licensees can automatically identify and omit images whose copyright status happens to be unsuitable for a particular reuse case.
Wikipedia is not a how-to guide; it is an encyclopedia. Wikipedia does, however, have a project page listing other outlets for this sort of thing. One of them is Wikibooks, which is more accepting of how-to information. There's a page about hosts that needs your input. Or find a specialized wiki about system administration and submit your hosts file instructions there.
My last (and only) time trying to edit wikipedia was years ago in an article about hot air balloons. I noticed that "aluminum" and "aluminium" were used interchangeably throughout the article
Hot air balloon consistently uses "aluminium", and Hot air ballooning doesn't mention the element at all. I couldn't find a note about the spelling in either article's talk page. So which article was it?
I checked on it a few months later and it still had the mismash of spellings, and the addition of a note in the talk page critical of my edit.
Did you reply to the note in the talk page? The standard practice on Wikipedia is to plead your case on the article's talk page after getting reverted. And what's your username on Wikipedia so that I can help? If you don't feel comfortable answering here, please answer on my user talk page.
Just wondering...did any of you're submissions misuse the word "your"?
(sorry, couldn't resist)
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.
how about instead of shitting [citation needed] all over the article you actually get your fat butt to the library and look up some citations
Because the library's hours don't fit well with my job. And if not wanting to take a day off just to add citations to Wikipedia makes me lazy
how about instead of shitting [citation needed] all over the article you actually get, then please forgive me for being lazy.
That may flush out any a-hole who wants to start an edit war (which is something that can attract WP sanctions anyway), and then if you have the stomach for it you can argue/fight directly if needed -- and if you haven't become tired of all the bullshit.
I already have to argue in person over what reality is every day. Doing it on a website in my free time would be like playing a game to make me a CPA.
I already have to argue in person over what reality is every day. Doing it on a website in my free time would be like playing a game to make me a CPA.
And that's the core of the problem. The influence any given editor has is directly related to how much time they spend editing and has nothing to do with how much they know, how much research they do, or how correct they are. Subject matter experts are treated with less respect that an obsessive editor with loads of free time.
I run into quite a few misspellingz n grammar problems on the Wikipedia; I'd fix more of them if I was always by default in editing mode. That might be petty, but it's true -- it's a small friction point that I get stuck on all the time.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
To an extent I feel the same way.
But then the original ideal of wikipedia was a kind of democracy where it doesn't matter who speaks, only what is spoken. That in turn means that you or I don't just have status to give an edict and say 'this is wrong', we have to do a bit, to show how and why. Ok, it looks a lot as if the a-holes have hijacked the procedure in many cases.
But it's not all that much more work to stick in a flag and give reasons on the talk page, before coming back later to listen to what anybody else has said before making the deletion.
-wb-
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)... after a few times, since your new; they will just vote to block you
Did you consider that perhaps the reason they're reverting your edits is because you're really bad at written English?
Free Martian Whores!
Since I am still mostly working in science and math, the articles I find are usually very stable indeed. Pity the fools that use it for political information though, because there the truth is NOT out there.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.