The Project To Revive Abandoned Wikipedia Pages Has Been Abandoned (theoutline.com)

For years, an "entrepreneurial spirit" kept alive several of abandoned articles on Wikipedia. The WikiProject called Abandoned Articles, which sought to bring abandoned articles back to life, or "if appropriate, merging information or recommending deletion" is no more...for a long time. From an article on the Outline: A few editors are still listed as active, but most don't actively edit articles anymore. The few I tried to contact didn't get back to me. One email address I found bounced back. Many seem to have moved on with their lives. The concept of "abandoned" Wikipedia articles, one finds, when one peruses the Abandoned project for a few minutes, is sort of outmoded. Back in 2007, when the project was really last active, Wikipedia was a much different place. One user who occasionally edited "stub" articles -- those with little to no content, often the first on the chopping block for deletion because of their lack of "relevance" -- told me that "back then Wikipedia was a lot emptier. It was occasionally possible to find, like, sort of significant people or whatever -- a photographer -- whose entire Wikipedia entry amounted to the work of two people." Now that Wikipedia averages, according to its own statistics, 10 edits per second and 800 new articles a day, a group dedicated to articles that are dormant -- not deleted, simply left to grow over with weeds -- seems almost quaint. In fact, of the many articles still listed as needing to be adopted, almost none are currently abandoned: Straight Face was deleted in December 2007; Pavane got further disambiguated; "From a View to a Kill" was inhaled into the greater entry for For Your Eyes Only, a short story collection by Ian Fleming; likewise, Forward Link was added to the larger entry for "Telecommunications link."

Comments

Baloney

[Frosty Piss]

it's hard to keep unpaid volunteers interested in doing the drudge work for any length of time.

Baloney. It's hard to keep unpaid volunteers interested in putting up with the incredibly stupid politics that permeate Wikipedia...

Re:Baloney

[Anonymous Coward]

No, read this slashdot discussion. The stupid politics is a small group of editors who like to delete people's contributions. The quickest way to make a volunteer stop volunteering is to repeatedly destroy all the work they volunteered.

It's basic respect, and incredibly simple: if you want an open source project to not fail, all you have to do is not prevent people from contributing. No money required, just simple human respect.

Why even bother, your edits get reverted anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I went to edit some Wikipedia articles, putting in actual content, the pages got reverted with little to no explanation why. A few months later, mysteriously, the identical content, word for word, I added (which was yanked) was present, put there by another editor.

still happening.

[Gravis Zero]

Back in 2007, when the project was really last active, Wikipedia was a much different place. One user who occasionally edited "stub" articles -- those with little to no content, often the first on the chopping block for deletion because of their lack of "relevance"

There are still users (like Cahk) that suggest articles for deletion (within one hour) if they don't have enough content, even if there are many other articles already pointing to the article.

This kind of bullshit will never end.

Re:Wikipedia killed by abusive admins

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Wikipedia is held hostage by abusive admins like Closedmouth and Bsadowski1. Also there are the twinkle using minions like Sro23 and Chrissymad who revert editors.

This is exactly the kind of thing that drove me away from adding and editing pages. Not these guys specifically, but people just like them. They're basically griefers who orbit Wikipedia day and night looking for the opportunity to fuck with people, wreck their work, or just act like authoritarian assholes.

After a few utterly pointless go-arounds with them and their power-mad dick-waving, I just gave up. Life is too short to waste screwing around with people like them.

Re:Once more socialism has failed

[HiThere]

I think you've got the wrong problem. ISTM that the problem (which *may* have been fixed) is that people who know the subject matter keep getting their edits reverted by those who don't have a clue, but who have an investment in making a lot of edits. I've heard many complain that they were never going to bother editing a Wikipedia page again, because it was like writing on the wind. Nothing they wrote would be preserved, so why bother.

Unfortunately Wikipedia now has such a bad reputation that there are many experts who will not only never contribute to them again, they will, if asked, strongly recommend against anyone else so wasting their time.