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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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.