Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in
order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions
by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active
contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp
decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that
several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face
of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed
to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control
mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes
of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm
articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by
newer editors.
Eh, it went from a interesting novelty, to a incredible community, to a petty bureaucracy.
My personal experience is that under the crowdsourcing model the well meaning non experts outnumber the real experts and it's hard to police them while treating all as equals. In short, democracy brought content toward mediocrity.
Now it's dangerous to use it but for a cursory introduction to any in depth content, while non factual content is polarised toward whatever the bureaucrats decide it's a neutral tone, which may or may not work.
Wikipedia has problems, but I think it's worth noting that Wikipedia has enough content to fill 2,200x volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica[1], or, a small library.
I don't think it's necessarily an existential problem that the public image of Wikipedia's relevance is reaching a sort of "trough of disillusionment" due to some of its governance issues. It has simply reached a scale where it faces a new set or hurdles to overcome.
Personally, I've learned more from Wikipedia than I did in high school and college combined, and considering that, despite all of Wikipedia's problems, the content therein is more accurate and verifiable than the corrupted corpus whence our primary and secondary educations are derived, I really appreciate its existence.
How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.
I'm suggesting that there hasn't been as much of a decline in community as there has been a decline in the available encyclopedia-relevant information left in the world that isn't already published on Wikipedia.
Also, the public perception is related to the drop of users and vice versa. There has been a lot of negative press lately, specifically related to problems in the community.
The decline in number of editors seems to have started at 2007 given figure 1. I wouldn't tie the amount of negative press to the decline in editors.
The point about there being less new stuff to write about seems apt, what do you think about the counter points that the article had?
"First, as noted above, the vast majority of articles in Wikipedia are still below community standards for “good” articles. Second, underrepresented groups still find it challenging to join. For instance, one study found that only 9% of edits are made by female editors, and that articles of particular interest to women are shorter than articles of interest to men (Lam, 2011). Until editors are representative of the population of potential
contributors, it is difficult to argue that the socialization practices are sufficiently effective."
1. Isn't this a moving target? In the beginning, all you had to do was throw up text; standards evolved (and probably continue to, I don't follow it), and now you have to cite references, adhere to standards, etc. As more articles are reviewed, more probably "become" substandard.
2. Is this really a decline issue? I guess it is if you are considering decline not as failure to maintain but failure to grow.
I contributed to several Wikipedia articles over the years (~50-100). It's gotten to the point where it's pointless to improve even terrible articles like stubs as basically everything is automatically reversed. At best a mod may decide to add your content back, which means at this point it's basically stopped being a public wiki.
Which is fine, IMO they should just change the name to Webpedia or something if they don't want new edits.
Just to say that this is not my experience. Have made highly contentious edits and created entirely new articles on topics from Hoplomachus through Corpse Paint to planning law in the UK. None of my good edits have been reverted, but some of my poor edits have been manually reverted after review by a human editor.
It's a shame, but any public forum seems to degenerate to this point. Stack exchange is another great example... The bureaucracy that emerges distracts from the original mission.
Interestingly lots of people seem to have a negative view of forums and fear that stack-sites will go the way of the forums if they don't continue their bureaucracy.
Yet I cannot remember one technical forum that was as unhelpful as stack-sites sometimes turns into.
What sort of shape would you expect from the number of active editors?
I'd imagine an S-curve for editors. A few, early adopters in the beginning, then a surge of editors filling in the bulk of articles, then after the majority of articles have been written, a slow decline of need for editors.
I'd imagine the remaining work to be completed would be editorial defense of existing articles and the new amount of articles generated by current events/technology/politics.
> How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.
Well, in fairness, the declining number of active editors is likely linked to the public perception of Wikipedia.
Teachers and professors hound into students Wikipedia is not for academic use and is full of nonsense and other wrong information.
Most of the time, this is not true.
We would be better off teaching students Wikipedia isn't an appropriate source to cite, but rather a great research tool which links to it's proper sources, which you may cite.
The stigma the education system has built up around Wikipedia is surely effecting the number of people contributing to it.
This is a bug, not a feature. A huge proportion of that content is crap (eg it's perfectly reasonable to have entries for popular anime shows, but we don't need hundreds of stub pages for every character in the show), and even a lot of the good content is poorly curated. A lot of the math articles articles are very poorly written, for example, but attempts to improve them are often reverted on the grounds that 'Wikipedia is not a textbook,'
Is that really true? I'd rather Wikipedia contain all the character pages than have to go to a wikia that is even more poorly maintained, ad-written, and destined for death at an unknown point in time. The reason these articles exist are because there are more people available to provide feedback and write them. It is much harder to contribute to the Yoneda Lemma article than the Spike Spiegel article.
>A lot of the math articles articles are very poorly written
This is emphatically not the case in my experience. I believe I wrote a runge-kutta numeric solver using the wikipedia articles as the source. It was sufficient for my purposes. And yes, Wikipedia is not a textbook. You might want to be more specific what "improvements" were attempted. If you mean something like exercises and lengthy, worked out examples, then that's right, I'm not sure that fits in wikipedia more than it fits in a book.
> it's perfectly reasonable to have entries for popular anime shows, but we don't need hundreds of stub pages for every character in the show
You know what grinds my gears? Pages upon pages of 'useless'[1] anime guest-characters, and yet when I tried to add pages for real-life artistes from my (3rd world) country, I had the pages deleted for "lack of notability". This must have happened a decade ago, but I told myself "never again". Now I ignore Wikipedia's pleas for content under their "Wikipedia loves X" campaigns because I know they don't mean it. I doubt Wikipedia's cultural bias can ever be cured with the current editorial structures.
1. Useless to me! This is very much tongue-in-cheek
Did you have citations for those artists? We're you hindered by the lack of citations possible for artists who weren't written about?
Sadly, wikipedia doesn't support the notion of citing "art installed at so and so location, viewed by so and so people" unless someone wrote it down in a western publication.
In a real sense, an encyclopedia is a history of books, not a history of the world. This is an unfortunate consequence of writing's special "viral" place among forms of communication, and the medium is the message etc
I think Wikipedia will become the best case study in how bureaucracy cripples a working society. 80% of the effort of creating new content is following byzantine processes and procedures.
While I admit that these processes work for consistency of content, I cannot in the least observe any noticeable quality improvements, and the reason is that valuable contributors with deep domain knowledge will not invest the time to satisfy the OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.
> OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.
Is it really necessary to use mental illnesses in a pejorative way to make your point ? How do you think it makes people feel who legitimately suffer from those illnesses ?
It should make them aware that they should refrain from holding any position where they have to deal with people. I am sure you have never edited Wikipedia; the amount of users and admins that more than obviously suffer from autism spectrum disorders and OCDs is very, very high, and they are crippling the bureaucratic processes of the wiki.
I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct" but I think just looking the other way is not helping anybody.
Aw, come on, lighten up, it's just an online forum. Maybe people develop Asperger traits from working in this field. Like one time I asked a college did he know what the time was, he replied YES and walked off :)
> I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct"
It's not about PC. It's about violating their rights. Please, post your full medical charts, prescription lists, and any mental health counseling notes or treatments for addiction you've ever undertaken, so I can use them to mock you.
> Is it really necessary to use mental illnesses in a pejorative way to make your point ?
He's not. That is, actually, the real problem. He's not just using it as some sort of insult but explaining the specific problem.
I've run into editors like that (they even proudly boast about it on their user page, so I'm not just projecting). I've had enough run-ins with them, and people like them, that I gave up on editing.
It's enough that it's some, to make it impossible to edit anything. In fact it can even be a small minority, but given that they spend (as far as I can tell) almost their entire day on it, a small number can have a huge influence.
I know exactly what _pmf_ means. I used deal with a self declared Asperger who was top class in his field. The thing is whenever I asked him do you know how to fix this problem. The answer was invariably, 'sorry I don't know how to do that'. Of course I should have phrased it as, I am having difficulties in solving this problem and was wondering if you would advise me on finding a solution.
Wow, one anecdotal piece of evidence. Your postulate must now be proven. Tell me some of your anecdotes about black people or mexicans while you're at it. Remember, by your logic, any single sample speaks for the whole population. This should be interesting! :)
Having worked with and directed people of differing ethnic backgrounds, I would pick the Chinese as best to work with. The worst who shall remain nameless, were either augmentative dishonest or lazy and some were as thick as two very thick planks glued together. You had to speak to them in very short sentences and not use big words and still they didn't get it. I didn't experience a large enough sample to form an opinion as to whether it was environmental or genetic.
> I used deal with a self declared Asperger who was top class in his field. The thing is whenever I asked him do you know how to fix this problem. The answer was invariably, 'sorry I don't know how to do that'.
From your comment above:
> The worst [group of people] who shall remain nameless, were either augmentative dishonest or lazy and some were as thick as two very thick planks glued together. You had to speak to them in very short sentences and not use big words and still they didn't get it.
So...how do you know that either:
A. The "self-declared Asperger" is actually quite reasonable and you just happen to be in his "worst" group of people...I don't mean that you necessarily have those qualities, just that he's chosen to treat you as if you did, based on his past experiences with people of your kind?
B. That you yourself don't have the stereotypical behavioral symptoms Aspergers and that this "worst" group of people may not really deserve your harsh judgment?
I don't think so, I'm always willing to share the knowledge. It also seems to be stereotypical Aspergers to hoard information. Doesn't matter as much in other professions but I have been in places where if the chief techie were to be thrown under a bus the place would be out of business, as no one else understood his system.
If you care about how you come across: You sound as ignorant as someone saying "I want my accountants to be Jews. They're good with money". (Although I accept that this level of ignorance about OCD is very common.)
>> Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is described as an anxiety disorder. The condition has two main parts: obsessions and compulsions.
>> Obsessions are unwelcome thoughts, images, urges or doubts that repeatedly appear in your mind; for example, thinking that you have been contaminated by dirt and germs, or experiencing a sudden urge to hurt someone.
>> These obsessions are often frightening or seem so horrible that you can’t share them with others. The obsession interrupts your other thoughts and makes you feel very anxious.
[...]
>> Compulsions are repetitive activities that you feel you have to do. This could be something like repeatedly checking a door to make sure it is locked or repeating a specific phrase in your head to prevent harm coming to a loved one.
>> The aim of a compulsion is to try and deal with the distress caused by the obsessive thoughts and relieve the anxiety you are feeling. However, the process of repeating these compulsions is often distressing and any relief you feel is often short-lived.
Thanks for the enlightening comment; i wasn't really trying to offer a definition of OCD. Yes , it's common that people talk to OCD to refer to this thing specifically: "Compulsions are repetitive activities that you feel you have to do.", even when the action is not repetitive.
> 80% of the effort of creating new content is following byzantine processes and procedures
You literally just press edit, make your changes, and then press save. There is zero bureaucracy in adding content. The bureaucracy comes into play with there is unresolved conflict and disagreement, when there is a controversy over how an article is written. In that case, there are definite, objective(ish) standards and rules by which those arguments can come to a resolution of some kind. I suppose in a more hierarchical structure there would be less bureaucracy when there are disagreements and the next person in charge would simply decide which view he thought was more correct. But the traditional structure of writing an encyclopedia is filled with gatekeepers who have the final, single decision without much of a need to reach consensus. Depending on your view this could be good or it could be bad.
You literally just press edit, make your changes, and then press save.
You literally just press edit, make your changes, press save, and then wait a few minutes to an hour for your edit to be reverted.
Seriously, though, it's disingenuous to suggest that editing is so simple - to be pedantic, yes, the edit itself is free of bureaucracy, but in the majority of cases I've observed, the real effort is in making an edit (not even a controversial one) stick.
Almost none of my edits ever get reverted, including even fairly major changes, other than in contentious articles or when it comes down to an editorial decision.
Generally I'm either making minor fixes (basically nothing you would dispute), or when I add something, it's cited.
When there is a conflict, it's probably beyond most people to figure out how to handle the conflict resolution process (which generally, in my experience, is fruitful), but if you're adding high quality content, that rarely comes up - it's just that when it does it takes up a disproportionate amount of your time.
I tried once or twice to edit articles but was quickly rejected by editors that usually believe they sort of "own" the content.
I've quickly become demotivated as explained in the analysis and never contributed again. Another problem is that when you think you've made an important and useful update you're never sure when someone will roll it back.
Some are spending a very big chunk of their time to make sure articles stay as they wish to. Being a former or an active editor on an article is not always related to how much you know about the topic but Wikipedia favorites the biggest editors. There is very little chance to convince if you're new unless you commit to spend a lot of your valuable time contributing which is not possible for everyone and not a good idea for most.
A very hard problem to solve.
Wikipedia is still great though with no real better alternative.
I have learned that in order to actually contribute to Wikipedia, you have to treat it less like a collaboration and more like a battle.
You can't just contribute and consider it done. You have to be prepare to fight your way through, engage in edit wars, learn about the battlefield (the bureaucracy, the article sourcing) and in the end, if you fight long enough, you usually win.
You have to repeatedly, over and over, show that the other person (who 'owns' the article) is wrong, he will revert it, so you do a little dance of reverting and back, then you have to try to dig up some rule from the ruleset, and as I said, you will usually win because the other person gives up. Or he doesn't, but then some higher editor stumps him.
You are correct, and you know what happens? The people LEAST qualified to contribute contribute the most. Why? Because they have too much time on their hands, and can battle endlessly.
People with real knowledge usually have better things to do.
It is indeed a problem to not have enough time. Just throwing in some facts in an article is often not good enough, it must fit with the flow of the article and not repeat things that has already been said and be in order, and with references etc etc. Some people might not have the time for that additional work to make the contribution "good enough".
I haven't followed Wikipedia for a while but I assume that some rejected changes are due to that people throw in some changes that might be correct but are not worked on enough to fit in with the rest of the article. And one can't in general assume that someone else will do that work for you. Than the easy way out is often a revert instead of leaving a more unfinished article live.
I did most of my contributions to Wikipedia when I had that extra time.
I see the exactly opposite. There's so many poorly written wikipedia entries which read as "Fact. Other Disconnected Fact. Another Random Fact (except for fact, fact and fact)." I've made attempts at smoothing out the language in various articles, and it often gets reverted because someone's precious trivia was removed. If anything, it seems that wikipedians are loath to have anything "edited down".
right, and the problem is the people who are willing to engage in such a battle are a self-selecting group of people. the final product we see on the site, ends up being largely contributed by that group of willing fighters, and less those that have the most domain expertise.
Yes that's exactly what I experienced.
A knowledge repository built upon who fights harder and who gives up first (in most cases due to lack of time arguing for every sentence) is kind of broken.
I do not think you are at all lying. However, why in the name of all that is holy would I ever do that? Literally, cleaning my toenails is a better use of my time than that. Doing my neighbor's taxes is a better use of my time. Getting high and watching the news is better use of time. It just seems so utterly hopeless and pointless to even try from what you say.
Because you want the truth on Wikipedia, basically. When I want something to be written there, I am willing to push it through, dig up all the necessary references on Google Scholar (ultimately, references to papers are the best munition you can have) and argue about it.
But it isn't for someone who just wants to write a bit of his knowledge and let it go.
trouble is on some articles where the science is still up fo debate or sensitive you run up against the older editors whose word is law. Got to love a source being rejected as not credible when the same reference existed elsewhere.
It is a great site for facts or information where there is no ability to debate or need too, like top 40 songs, videos, and anime.
It would be premature to get to that stage, given the vast gap in quality (even in the english wikipedia, articles in many domains have glaring errors / omissions and nonsense in them). First you build the world, and only when it's become a zero sum game you fight over it.
Umm you're right that whoever cares more will usually win, but edit warring is a quick way to get yourself banned. There's a talk page right next to the "Read" tab. Use it and come to a consensus like a reasonable person. If you treat Wikipedia like a battleground, of course people are going to assume you aren't there to build an encyclopedia.
Also I don't really want to do that. It's just a necessity, otherwise your text gets immediately reverted. While when you stick with it and revert it back, you actually have a chance
> You can't just contribute and consider it done. You have to be prepare to fight your way through, engage in edit wars, learn about the battlefield (the bureaucracy, the article sourcing) and in the end, if you fight long enough, you usually win.
And this is why only fundamentalists and paid editors edit Wikipedia. I spent days with such battles on a certain Wikipedia page only to have one "senior" editor come around and essentially say that I was wrong (no explanation given) and revert the changes. It's a completely useless waste of time. :)
Perhaps editors should have their status revoked after a random period of time, to keep things fresh?
I suppose the problem with that is ensuring that the system 'promotes' enough normal users to fill the gap; again, random assignment might work. Sort of like an online equivalent of Athenian democracy.
People might be keener to be active editors if they receive an unexpected invitation to participate, but with the understanding that it might only last a week.
This is something Jerry Pournelle used to complain about. He edited some pages relating to the US space program. Events in which he took part or knew the people involved. Then he'd come back a month later and find the page had been edited again with the incorrect information re-inserted. Eventually he just gave up.
And then there are political problems. The Tyson affair is a good example - Neil deGrasse Tyson spent many years spouting made-up quotes supposedly uttered by political opponents (Like this one, for instance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jG5kKfacY). Eventually someone compiled all the nonsense and it was something of a mini-scandal. The wiki editors refused to allow any mention of it on his page, so the whole affair is mostly down the memory hole now, just like they intended.
Wikipedia is good for historical references (pre 1900 or so), and a good place to start if you just don't know anything about the thing you're looking up. But to rely on it for anything that's the slightest bit controversial is daft.
> Wikipedia is good for historical references (pre 1900 or so), and a good place to start if you just don't know anything about the thing you're looking up.
Whenever I see people say stuff like this I mentally replace what they said with "Wikipedia is a general-knowledge encyclopedia." Not a dig at you, but this should have always gone without saying.
IIRC research has shown that this isn't true. Britannica had a higher error rate. It is flatly absurd to claim that wikipedia is less complete than any other encyclopedia,which are all under 1% its size. Wikipedia's isn't 99% anime junk.
The "famous person tried to contribute to stuff they were involved in" thing comes up a lot.
The wikipedia answer is that they want published sources that people can cite and review.
This seems a bit crazy when the famous person is someone you respect and trust, but as soon as self-publicists, frauds and quacks get involved, this becomes a useful guideline. And of course you can't have one rule for some and another rule for the rest.
> This seems a bit crazy when the famous person is someone you respect and trust
Bingo. Just because the person in question may even be the topic of the article, it doesn't mean that person can't be biased or want to spin things a certain way. By requiring citations and sources, you're providing some validity and "proof". Granted, sources can be faked too, but the level of separation works to minimize much of that. The faking of sources isn't something that would be very common anyways.
It sort of falls back on the Perfect Solution fallacy. You can never have a perfect solution so you have to choose the "least bad" option. The option with the least drawbacks or negatives.
"And of course you can't have one rule for some and another rule for the rest."
We can (and do) have recognition only for some (and not just for everybody, i.e. "the rest"). It may be a flawed solution, but that is how things work in the real life.
"I tried once or twice to edit articles but was quickly rejected by editors that usually believe they sort of "own" the content."
I have experienced this as well. It is difficult to believe and truly inexplicable, but there is some perceived status related to editing articles and making contributions to wikipedia.
It is very safe to generalize the young, white, male keyboard commandos who are staking out their turf in this way.
In the meantime, actual adults with real contributions to make (and normal, grown-up lives to lead elsewhere) cannot do so. In response to a child comment, below, No, no I will not learn to play the game and learn the tactics needed to bully my edits through.
They explicitly don't want original research, so knowing about the topic is only helpful for judging primary and secondary sources. Most experts should be writing primary sources rather than Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia is a hit and miss. After contributing, some things stick, but others can be removed without good reason, and wasting one's time on bureaucratic fights to restore that content is simply very tiring and after some point it becomes annoying enough, so I stopped trying to restore such things most of the time.
should be titled "The rise and decline in Wikipedia editor counts".
Wikipedia may have its political issues, but to say it is "in decline" seems off. There is only so much that can be written and only so many new things can happen to document. Obviously no hard limit exists, but still.
If it was to be in general decline as the title conotates, I'd expect to see overall traffic lower over time and while I searched in earnest for 10 minutes, I couldn't find that data (alexa is pay service now, wtf?). But have a hard time seeing actual traffic declining.
I find it hard to believe that Wikipedia is "in decline" when the article I wrote about the niche area of CS I worked in during undergrad has a life of its own now. People continue to add to it and now it has a fair deal of content and information that I was unaware of. If that's what decline looks like, I'm fine with it.
Wikipedia used to be a large part of my web experience. Now I might end up on Wikipedia 2 or 3 times a week. That said, DBPedia (RDF data derived from Wikipedia) is useful and I rely on it.
Actually most of the popular articles for readers and editors are news-based. However, the site, while barely adequate as an encyclopedia, is terrible for news presentation.
In 2006-2007, there was an organized push on Wikipedia by pro-Israel editors to make Israel-related articles favorable to Israel. This provoked some major controversies, especially because at least one of the pro-Israel editors was a Wikipedia admin and abused their authority. (Eventually, they were "desysopped" for that, but it took years.) For a sense of this, see [1], including all the archived talk pages.
Wikipedia dealt with the problem by strictly applying the "reliable sources" rule. It became the practice that every single fact in Israel-related articles must be cited to a reliable source and properly footnoted. Anything that wasn't was deleted as "uncited" or "synthesis" by one side or the other. Until that time, articles often had text which wasn't cited to a specific source. The tough citation requirements anchored the dispute to factual information, and, though the process was painful, worked. The controversies settled down and the edit warring slowed to a crawl.
Those strict standards gradually spread to the rest of Wikipedia. Now, everything had to be footnoted like a doctoral thesis. Few people outside of academia write that way. This results in a big hammer coming down on someone new wanting to write an article about their new favorite DJ. Does he have mainstream press coverage that isn't from a press release, and did you cite it? If not, he's out of here.
Until you learn to write in that strict style, you can't contribute much to Wikipedia. For people used to blithering on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, this is hard. That's what's discouraging new editors.
Writing for Wikipedia is now like contributing to a major open source project like the Linux kernel. There's a big body of code, and your changes have to fit in well and be justified. That's necessary. Wikipedia faces a constant incoming stream of PR, vandalism, and general crap. (Check out the ever-changing list of recent changes.[2]) The petty vandalism is mostly reverted by AIs now; ClueBot, driven by an ANN and trained on known vandalism, is quite good. The other problems take human attention, by volunteers tired of seeing similar annoyances over and over.
For the other extreme, of writing about anything with no quality control, see 4chan.
It would be a big help to see those tired people work in a positive way. Someone with clear domain knowledge gets met with hostility, and can clearly see there is no time to on board them, or take a swing at improving the contribution.
The default is, "go away, we have better things to do mere mortal" and while that may not be the intent, that is the impression a new contributor is often left with.
Then comes the funding page... really? Now, maintaining what is there is worth finding, but the negatives do impact the perception of this.
I think that's the best you can do with crowdsourcing. To go beyond you would need a structured community. My bet is, however, on an AI that will build the articles automatically.
You can do a lot more with crowdsourced models. Crowdsourcing content != wiki. My site (see bio) is a more structured way to build news and biography content that IMHO gives better presentation and less editor stress than the equivalent Wikipedia pages.
I rely on wikipedia like everyone on hacker news but I can't help thinking that changing their status to benefit corporation like Kickstarter would improve the structure and also their finances. Non-profit closes a lot of doors, especially growth opportunities. A renewed status could bring new mobile apps, tie-ins with media companies, perhaps an open API available to third-party developers etc.
I think the reason for decline (and bureaucracy) is actually a lack of democracy. For example, there is no way to recall administrators. Also, opinion of majority is sometimes dismissed as not being good consensus, which only helps people in established cliques. Democracy is a rule that ensures fairness, but senior administrators do not always want it.
Secondary problem is IMHO the caste nature of administrator privileges. I think if the privileges were more separated and it would be possible to recall them, this would reduce the ossification of the hierarchy.
I also think Wikipedia could benefit from having a stable branch into which the changes from unstable branch could be regularly reviewed for addition. It would be nice if unstable branch could return to the idea that someone can add things even if they are not perfect or immediately sourced; IMHO experts can always add sources later for content that is already present, and it would give them some incentive to contribute.
That being said, Wikipedia is amazing! I would really like to thank to people who put some work into it.
I'm not so concerned about recalling administrators. Administrators who do blatantly bad things sometimes end up losing their position, and sometimes just end up with enough people angry at them that they leave.
What I'm concerned about is that there's no way to get new administrators, which is what it would take to bring in new ideas that break up the unnecessary bureaucracy.
The process that used to create them got entirely paralyzed, both by ridiculous inflation of metrics (I saw the edit count requirements -- they call them suggestions but they're requirements -- increase by a factor of 20 while I participated), and by the requirement to convince a supermajority of long-standing editors to vote for you.
I became an administrator in '06, and by '08 I would never have been considered. Basically, you have to edit every part of the encyclopedia while upsetting nobody, then inflate your already prolific accomplishments to get your foot in the door, without looking like a liar. This is impossible.
Old administrators (like me) lose interest. New ones don't take their place. The work is being increasingly done by the most obsessive people, and by faceless bots.
An interesting paper that basically says that the number of editors is declining due to the difficulty in keeping and retaining new users. Any person who has tried to edit Wikipedia will know that aggressive rule-wielding wikifanatics immediately try to kill newcomer edits using whatever tools they have to hand. But it's important to realize that Wikipedia's ambiguous rules and arbitrary decisions are not a bug, but a feature, giving power to incumbent editors. While most new editors just give up, the ones who do stay on and fight become the same kind of fanatics.
Many people say that the toxic community is the problem, but the community issues IMHO are actually a symptom of poor software design. The wiki's open structure and article-based format, which allows the most powerful groups of editors to "own" pages, gives power to people who are interested in keeping and retaining control, rather than those who are interested in sharing knowledge. The power is centralized in these gatekeepers, leading to all the problems we see on the site.[1] This is also the reason the Gender Gap exists.[2]
The solution is to redesign the software to devolve power from entrenched groups, but this will never happen because there is no leadership, and the people who have the power are the survivors/fanatics that actually like the current system. Because they write the rules they will not give their power up easily.
As for the quality arguments below: without new users and continuous evolution in software development, content presentation, and editorial review processes, the site cannot maintain quality. I believe that it is impossible for any wiki system to maintain a high quality anyway: the amount of time to improve articles to high quality is exponential, while the number of editors and work available is linear. Even in the best circumstances, something has to give. If the number of editors is actually declining then quality problems may also increase exponentially.
Comparing wikipedia to openstreetmap, it seems to be a community problem, not a software problem.
An open structure means that you have to watch what others are doing constantly. But that doesn't explain the huge number of stories where reasonable edits are reverted. That can only happen because the wikipedia (editor) community is ok with that.
My conclusion is that wikipedia forgot to redefine itself. Originally, wikipedia was a summary based on existing literature. But pretty soon users took wikipedia way beyond that. Using it to document stuff, instead of summarising stuff documented else where.
Most wikis are a tool to collectively create documentation. And somehow wikipedia is stuck in older world, and not what most wikipedia users expect it to be.
My conclusion, until the project reforms and allows original content, I won't contribute.
There is a finite pattern whenever one relies on volunteers. Most will come and go, but a few hang around and rise to the top. Lacking renumeration, they tend towards self-gratification. Some handle extra responsibility well, but others start building their own little castles from which to berate all below. This process is inevitable once you have multiple ranks of volunteers.
I've seen this with charities, open source projects, and it was a constant problem when I worked in film/tv (interns). Things always go south when you have volunteers bossing around other volunteers. Newcomers show up eager but depart quickly, normally after some dressing down by a more senior volunteer. Without pay in dispute, they rarely make complaint. They just stop showing up. And who can blame them?
The answer is to keep all volunteers equal. That's probably impossible for a project like wikipedia, but they could certainly do more to ensure new volunteers are not so bullied by the old guard.
This should get more attention. I'm almost certain you have the source of the problem right. I just wouldn't be so sure and quick about your solution.
It would be really nice to have more extensive work on how to mitigate these kinds of dynamics as I'm certain we will see more and more of these projects and I'd like them to be healthy for a change.
Write up what? Sandworm's syndrome of the progressive dysfunction inherent to hierarchical volunteer communities? Talk to anyone who has worked as a volunteer coordinator. They see this all the time.
As for keeping volunteers equal to avoid the problem, that need not mean keeping everyone identical. Leadership roles can rotate, with finite term limits. That way every leader today knows they will be the underling tomorrow. (This also keeps everyone interested and motivated as nobody is every stuck on one task/job).
> "VestedContributors think the rules can be bent for them because they've been around so long and done so much good work."
But is that inherently a bad thing? The way you state it, I'm getting that you're implying that it's bad 100% of the time. If you're looking at it in terms of black and white, I guess just hearing "rules can be bent" is bad, but I don't think it's that simple.
I think there are times where the rules can be bent which creates an outcome that is beneficial to all. Times where the rules don't account for certain variables/situations and those incidents need to be handled differently (or with care). I think it's a complex problem and it may need a complex solution.
The best, and I mean absolute best volunteer teams I've been a part of have always had a leader at the top with absolute authority. However, he or she never abused their power, and rarely flexed their absolute authority, preferring to take up the mantle of "benevolent dictator". In those cases, some amazing things happened. We got our work done ahead of time, group moral was sky-high, and the projects were a massive success. Things "just worked".
Wow. I feel like an abuse victim that has just had an intervention. Now that you mention it, I've seen this phenomenon at almost every open source project I've peeked into over the years. I need to sit down for a bit.
I agree with your analogy to other volunteer projects, but Wikipedia is certainly a special case. For a given article that is connected to an academic discipline, there is a good chance that it has at least one professional "babysitter" who is notified when changes are made. I can imagine that scholars have a portfolio on Wiki in the same way programmers do on GitHub.
Point being that it's much easier for them to maintain high quality with low effort.
> Things always go south when you have volunteers bossing around other volunteers.
You showed this well. Thank you for finding this pattern and telling about it clearly.
> The answer is to keep all volunteers equal.
(Un)Fortunately this would break. Logically, how can you have one group of equals enforce their rules with unequal power? Naturally, influence (roles(?)) emerge(s). For social animals to want to stick together over the long haul, (1) an elder's view needs to carry a good bit of weight. This makes it possible to retain experience and membership, because these elders are our gateway to the past and they get tired and battle worn. The young learn from those with the experience and use it to build their future. (2) Members need to both use influence and limit it. Mocking leaders and their work, behind their backs and in-front of them, joking with them over the flaws in their work help them to keep their heads from filling with hot air. When someone takes on more responsibility, people will naturally and comfortably give them uneven support if they mutually respect and believe in eachother. This means some have more influence than others. When this flowing power gets a kink in it and builds up in any one place, then it will flood the basin. As long as work gets done and individuals cultivate good relationships, then a community will stick together and most everyone will feel like the community has good balance.
My experience with this: studied this a bit within anthropology and sociology, lived with these dynamics in and among Drupal (a self-described do-ocracy, perhaps a holocracy) community members for over ~10 years, and have a deep interest in natural processes that contribute to social order.
A related snippet from you guessed it with several links to springboard into related research:
Anthropologists maintain that hunter/gatherers don't have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.[13][14][15] In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies, there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well.[13] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.[16] Postmarital residence among hunter-gatherers tends to be matrilocal, at least initially.[17]
The other advantage of true hunter/gatherer activities is that their physical nature allows people to rotate in and out of roles naturally.
If you are walking in the woods, everyone has down/slow days. Hiking/climbing groups know this and so rarely have dedicated leaders. Look at the military groups that occasionally climb mountains (ie wounded warriors on everest). On day one they throw the entire "rank" thing out the window. They know it doesn't work for mountaineering. Instead decisions are generally made by the person least tired/hungry/dehydrated at the time. That's how a hunting party would work: If Bob's got a sore foot today, he isn't going to be the one flushing the deer and instead might be today's planner/leader.
Is this specific to volunteerism? The problem you describe sounds like the famous "middle management" nonsense of the corporate world. People who are neither the owner/dictator nor independents or line workers, justify their existence by pushing people around to self-gratify/justify
Somehow OpenStreetMaps has managed to remain democratic, welcoming to newcomers and yet remarkably accurate without much (any?) moderation, despite being almost as old as Wikipedia. I've always wondered how it manages that.
For instance, do you refer to a particular group of uninhabited islands as "Senkaku Islands, Japan", "Diaoyu Islands, People's Republic of China", or "Diaoyutai Islands, Republic of China"? Some people are very passionate about the answer.
Is the political entity on Formosa "Taiwan", "Taiwan Province, Republic of China", "Taiwan Province, People's Republic of China", or "Taiwan, Province of China"?
Political contention isn't as big a problem, as spam and inaccuracy. Those are the problems that make such sites generally unwelcoming towards newcomers. Both Wikipedia and Google Maps demonstrate this. OSM doesn't.
It's not 100% objective, but for simple things, it mostly is. If you hop on the mailing lists you will find all sorts of people bickering about whether it should be `shop=ice_cream` or `amenity=ice_cream` or `restauraunt=ice_cream` as they fight over their self-made taxonomies.
At some point, I think, things will inevitably change. But for the moment, there's so many obvious things to work on that the confusing/subjective things don't really pop up too much.
Discussions about shop= vs amenity= are sometimes frustrating, but I bet they don't come anywhere near the discussions over using –,—, or - in page titles.
I used to contribute a lot when I was younger and had more free time but I might have kept that up if not for the change that happened in the late 00s when the higher ups decided that wikipedia has too much content and started streamlining by simply deleting whole sections. I am not talking about when citations became a stricter requirement and the quality in general became more of a focus - that came later. I think it's more sane nowadays but I'm too disillusioned now. I hate its approach of "if it's not intelligible to or of interest to a layman then it needs to be streamlined".
It would be cool to have a Wikipedia spinoff but articles have to be explained like I'm five. You might get a lot of contributors from that. It's important because some articles have a lot of jargon and feels like it was written by a bureaucrat. SOME people are only willing to invest a few minutes of their time.
The article raises an important point that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere in the comments: revert bots can be terrible.
For example, I was once reading about a song, and at the bottom there was a link to a youtube video. The link was broken, so I replaced it with a working youtube link.
The edit was immediately reverted by a bot that was anti-all-links-to-youtube. Fine, maybe that is a problem. But it's also a problem that the anti-youtube bot replaced my youtube link with a youtube link.
When I went to the bot's page, it was filled with comments from dozens of others who had made similar edits that were blindly reverted. The bot author, who took a "it's me against the world" stance, proclaiming that his bot was doing the only sensible thing, and that he was "sick of arguing". As the paper proclaims, this immediate negative reinforcement had long term consequences of turning away many good faith editors.
It's easy to dismiss this as "oh well, it's not perfect". The problem arises when you see something that is factually incorrect but cannot change it, and you know others rely on it. I've noticed a number of wrong, or just not precisely correct, things on Wikipedia, so I seldom click on those links when they appear in a search result.
I've never used it all that much, to be honest, but the information hiding aspect is what makes it so dangerous. Allow incorrect information to appear on the site and then explain why it's incorrect. Allow information on the site that might be incorrect, so that others can investigate further. But presenting the material as if it is correct, because there is a quality control mechanism in place, is simply dishonest.
If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, it would not bother me at all. No information would be lost. It would reappear elsewhere on the internet.
155 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadOpen collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.
My personal experience is that under the crowdsourcing model the well meaning non experts outnumber the real experts and it's hard to police them while treating all as equals. In short, democracy brought content toward mediocrity.
Now it's dangerous to use it but for a cursory introduction to any in depth content, while non factual content is polarised toward whatever the bureaucrats decide it's a neutral tone, which may or may not work.
One line summary of the history of the United States ?
High quality, large system, lightweight dev process: choose at most two.
I don't think it's necessarily an existential problem that the public image of Wikipedia's relevance is reaching a sort of "trough of disillusionment" due to some of its governance issues. It has simply reached a scale where it faces a new set or hurdles to overcome.
Personally, I've learned more from Wikipedia than I did in high school and college combined, and considering that, despite all of Wikipedia's problems, the content therein is more accurate and verifiable than the corrupted corpus whence our primary and secondary educations are derived, I really appreciate its existence.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes
Also, the public perception is related to the drop of users and vice versa. There has been a lot of negative press lately, specifically related to problems in the community.
The point about there being less new stuff to write about seems apt, what do you think about the counter points that the article had?
"First, as noted above, the vast majority of articles in Wikipedia are still below community standards for “good” articles. Second, underrepresented groups still find it challenging to join. For instance, one study found that only 9% of edits are made by female editors, and that articles of particular interest to women are shorter than articles of interest to men (Lam, 2011). Until editors are representative of the population of potential contributors, it is difficult to argue that the socialization practices are sufficiently effective."
1. Isn't this a moving target? In the beginning, all you had to do was throw up text; standards evolved (and probably continue to, I don't follow it), and now you have to cite references, adhere to standards, etc. As more articles are reviewed, more probably "become" substandard.
2. Is this really a decline issue? I guess it is if you are considering decline not as failure to maintain but failure to grow.
Which is fine, IMO they should just change the name to Webpedia or something if they don't want new edits.
PS: As to being 'full' they have 2.7 million stubs, that's a lot of missing content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
Those problems were recognised and so things are a bit better now, but still.
Yet I cannot remember one technical forum that was as unhelpful as stack-sites sometimes turns into.
Was onerous enough that I quickly found other things to do with my time.
In am extremely small geek bubble. Your non-HN/Reddit neighbors aren't aware of such press.
I'd imagine an S-curve for editors. A few, early adopters in the beginning, then a surge of editors filling in the bulk of articles, then after the majority of articles have been written, a slow decline of need for editors.
I'd imagine the remaining work to be completed would be editorial defense of existing articles and the new amount of articles generated by current events/technology/politics.
Well, in fairness, the declining number of active editors is likely linked to the public perception of Wikipedia.
Teachers and professors hound into students Wikipedia is not for academic use and is full of nonsense and other wrong information.
Most of the time, this is not true.
We would be better off teaching students Wikipedia isn't an appropriate source to cite, but rather a great research tool which links to it's proper sources, which you may cite.
The stigma the education system has built up around Wikipedia is surely effecting the number of people contributing to it.
I do not have time to write a well written concise article, so I have just copypastaed some stuff I don't understand.
This is emphatically not the case in my experience. I believe I wrote a runge-kutta numeric solver using the wikipedia articles as the source. It was sufficient for my purposes. And yes, Wikipedia is not a textbook. You might want to be more specific what "improvements" were attempted. If you mean something like exercises and lengthy, worked out examples, then that's right, I'm not sure that fits in wikipedia more than it fits in a book.
You know what grinds my gears? Pages upon pages of 'useless'[1] anime guest-characters, and yet when I tried to add pages for real-life artistes from my (3rd world) country, I had the pages deleted for "lack of notability". This must have happened a decade ago, but I told myself "never again". Now I ignore Wikipedia's pleas for content under their "Wikipedia loves X" campaigns because I know they don't mean it. I doubt Wikipedia's cultural bias can ever be cured with the current editorial structures.
1. Useless to me! This is very much tongue-in-cheek
Sadly, wikipedia doesn't support the notion of citing "art installed at so and so location, viewed by so and so people" unless someone wrote it down in a western publication.
In a real sense, an encyclopedia is a history of books, not a history of the world. This is an unfortunate consequence of writing's special "viral" place among forms of communication, and the medium is the message etc
While I admit that these processes work for consistency of content, I cannot in the least observe any noticeable quality improvements, and the reason is that valuable contributors with deep domain knowledge will not invest the time to satisfy the OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.
Is it really necessary to use mental illnesses in a pejorative way to make your point ? How do you think it makes people feel who legitimately suffer from those illnesses ?
I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct" but I think just looking the other way is not helping anybody.
That's not even a disorder, it's just plain stupid.
It's not about PC. It's about violating their rights. Please, post your full medical charts, prescription lists, and any mental health counseling notes or treatments for addiction you've ever undertaken, so I can use them to mock you.
And I'm not violating the rights of somebody by pointing out they have an illness, sorry.
He's not. That is, actually, the real problem. He's not just using it as some sort of insult but explaining the specific problem.
I've run into editors like that (they even proudly boast about it on their user page, so I'm not just projecting). I've had enough run-ins with them, and people like them, that I gave up on editing.
So all wikipedia editors have Asperger's and OCD ? That seems astronomically unlikely, don't you ?
It's enough that it's some, to make it impossible to edit anything. In fact it can even be a small minority, but given that they spend (as far as I can tell) almost their entire day on it, a small number can have a huge influence.
> I used deal with a self declared Asperger who was top class in his field. The thing is whenever I asked him do you know how to fix this problem. The answer was invariably, 'sorry I don't know how to do that'.
From your comment above:
> The worst [group of people] who shall remain nameless, were either augmentative dishonest or lazy and some were as thick as two very thick planks glued together. You had to speak to them in very short sentences and not use big words and still they didn't get it.
So...how do you know that either:
A. The "self-declared Asperger" is actually quite reasonable and you just happen to be in his "worst" group of people...I don't mean that you necessarily have those qualities, just that he's chosen to treat you as if you did, based on his past experiences with people of your kind?
B. That you yourself don't have the stereotypical behavioral symptoms Aspergers and that this "worst" group of people may not really deserve your harsh judgment?
"PC hypersensitive" coward
If you care about how you come across: You sound as ignorant as someone saying "I want my accountants to be Jews. They're good with money". (Although I accept that this level of ignorance about OCD is very common.)
http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-h...
>> Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is described as an anxiety disorder. The condition has two main parts: obsessions and compulsions.
>> Obsessions are unwelcome thoughts, images, urges or doubts that repeatedly appear in your mind; for example, thinking that you have been contaminated by dirt and germs, or experiencing a sudden urge to hurt someone.
>> These obsessions are often frightening or seem so horrible that you can’t share them with others. The obsession interrupts your other thoughts and makes you feel very anxious.
[...]
>> Compulsions are repetitive activities that you feel you have to do. This could be something like repeatedly checking a door to make sure it is locked or repeating a specific phrase in your head to prevent harm coming to a loved one.
>> The aim of a compulsion is to try and deal with the distress caused by the obsessive thoughts and relieve the anxiety you are feeling. However, the process of repeating these compulsions is often distressing and any relief you feel is often short-lived.
You literally just press edit, make your changes, and then press save. There is zero bureaucracy in adding content. The bureaucracy comes into play with there is unresolved conflict and disagreement, when there is a controversy over how an article is written. In that case, there are definite, objective(ish) standards and rules by which those arguments can come to a resolution of some kind. I suppose in a more hierarchical structure there would be less bureaucracy when there are disagreements and the next person in charge would simply decide which view he thought was more correct. But the traditional structure of writing an encyclopedia is filled with gatekeepers who have the final, single decision without much of a need to reach consensus. Depending on your view this could be good or it could be bad.
Seriously, though, it's disingenuous to suggest that editing is so simple - to be pedantic, yes, the edit itself is free of bureaucracy, but in the majority of cases I've observed, the real effort is in making an edit (not even a controversial one) stick.
Generally I'm either making minor fixes (basically nothing you would dispute), or when I add something, it's cited.
When there is a conflict, it's probably beyond most people to figure out how to handle the conflict resolution process (which generally, in my experience, is fruitful), but if you're adding high quality content, that rarely comes up - it's just that when it does it takes up a disproportionate amount of your time.
Why contribute when the idea of others actually seeing the benefit of doing it is so painful?
Some are spending a very big chunk of their time to make sure articles stay as they wish to. Being a former or an active editor on an article is not always related to how much you know about the topic but Wikipedia favorites the biggest editors. There is very little chance to convince if you're new unless you commit to spend a lot of your valuable time contributing which is not possible for everyone and not a good idea for most.
A very hard problem to solve.
Wikipedia is still great though with no real better alternative.
You can't just contribute and consider it done. You have to be prepare to fight your way through, engage in edit wars, learn about the battlefield (the bureaucracy, the article sourcing) and in the end, if you fight long enough, you usually win.
You have to repeatedly, over and over, show that the other person (who 'owns' the article) is wrong, he will revert it, so you do a little dance of reverting and back, then you have to try to dig up some rule from the ruleset, and as I said, you will usually win because the other person gives up. Or he doesn't, but then some higher editor stumps him.
People with real knowledge usually have better things to do.
I haven't followed Wikipedia for a while but I assume that some rejected changes are due to that people throw in some changes that might be correct but are not worked on enough to fit in with the rest of the article. And one can't in general assume that someone else will do that work for you. Than the easy way out is often a revert instead of leaving a more unfinished article live.
I did most of my contributions to Wikipedia when I had that extra time.
Why do you do this?!
But it isn't for someone who just wants to write a bit of his knowledge and let it go.
It is a great site for facts or information where there is no ability to debate or need too, like top 40 songs, videos, and anime.
Also I don't really want to do that. It's just a necessity, otherwise your text gets immediately reverted. While when you stick with it and revert it back, you actually have a chance
And this is why only fundamentalists and paid editors edit Wikipedia. I spent days with such battles on a certain Wikipedia page only to have one "senior" editor come around and essentially say that I was wrong (no explanation given) and revert the changes. It's a completely useless waste of time. :)
I suppose the problem with that is ensuring that the system 'promotes' enough normal users to fill the gap; again, random assignment might work. Sort of like an online equivalent of Athenian democracy.
People might be keener to be active editors if they receive an unexpected invitation to participate, but with the understanding that it might only last a week.
And then there are political problems. The Tyson affair is a good example - Neil deGrasse Tyson spent many years spouting made-up quotes supposedly uttered by political opponents (Like this one, for instance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jG5kKfacY). Eventually someone compiled all the nonsense and it was something of a mini-scandal. The wiki editors refused to allow any mention of it on his page, so the whole affair is mostly down the memory hole now, just like they intended.
Wikipedia is good for historical references (pre 1900 or so), and a good place to start if you just don't know anything about the thing you're looking up. But to rely on it for anything that's the slightest bit controversial is daft.
Whenever I see people say stuff like this I mentally replace what they said with "Wikipedia is a general-knowledge encyclopedia." Not a dig at you, but this should have always gone without saying.
The wikipedia answer is that they want published sources that people can cite and review.
This seems a bit crazy when the famous person is someone you respect and trust, but as soon as self-publicists, frauds and quacks get involved, this becomes a useful guideline. And of course you can't have one rule for some and another rule for the rest.
Bingo. Just because the person in question may even be the topic of the article, it doesn't mean that person can't be biased or want to spin things a certain way. By requiring citations and sources, you're providing some validity and "proof". Granted, sources can be faked too, but the level of separation works to minimize much of that. The faking of sources isn't something that would be very common anyways.
It sort of falls back on the Perfect Solution fallacy. You can never have a perfect solution so you have to choose the "least bad" option. The option with the least drawbacks or negatives.
We can (and do) have recognition only for some (and not just for everybody, i.e. "the rest"). It may be a flawed solution, but that is how things work in the real life.
I have experienced this as well. It is difficult to believe and truly inexplicable, but there is some perceived status related to editing articles and making contributions to wikipedia.
It is very safe to generalize the young, white, male keyboard commandos who are staking out their turf in this way.
In the meantime, actual adults with real contributions to make (and normal, grown-up lives to lead elsewhere) cannot do so. In response to a child comment, below, No, no I will not learn to play the game and learn the tactics needed to bully my edits through.
Wikipedia may have its political issues, but to say it is "in decline" seems off. There is only so much that can be written and only so many new things can happen to document. Obviously no hard limit exists, but still.
If it was to be in general decline as the title conotates, I'd expect to see overall traffic lower over time and while I searched in earnest for 10 minutes, I couldn't find that data (alexa is pay service now, wtf?). But have a hard time seeing actual traffic declining.
In 2006-2007, there was an organized push on Wikipedia by pro-Israel editors to make Israel-related articles favorable to Israel. This provoked some major controversies, especially because at least one of the pro-Israel editors was a Wikipedia admin and abused their authority. (Eventually, they were "desysopped" for that, but it took years.) For a sense of this, see [1], including all the archived talk pages.
Wikipedia dealt with the problem by strictly applying the "reliable sources" rule. It became the practice that every single fact in Israel-related articles must be cited to a reliable source and properly footnoted. Anything that wasn't was deleted as "uncited" or "synthesis" by one side or the other. Until that time, articles often had text which wasn't cited to a specific source. The tough citation requirements anchored the dispute to factual information, and, though the process was painful, worked. The controversies settled down and the edit warring slowed to a crawl.
Those strict standards gradually spread to the rest of Wikipedia. Now, everything had to be footnoted like a doctoral thesis. Few people outside of academia write that way. This results in a big hammer coming down on someone new wanting to write an article about their new favorite DJ. Does he have mainstream press coverage that isn't from a press release, and did you cite it? If not, he's out of here.
Until you learn to write in that strict style, you can't contribute much to Wikipedia. For people used to blithering on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, this is hard. That's what's discouraging new editors.
Writing for Wikipedia is now like contributing to a major open source project like the Linux kernel. There's a big body of code, and your changes have to fit in well and be justified. That's necessary. Wikipedia faces a constant incoming stream of PR, vandalism, and general crap. (Check out the ever-changing list of recent changes.[2]) The petty vandalism is mostly reverted by AIs now; ClueBot, driven by an ANN and trained on known vandalism, is quite good. The other problems take human attention, by volunteers tired of seeing similar annoyances over and over.
For the other extreme, of writing about anything with no quality control, see 4chan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israeli_West_Bank_barrier [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Midd...
The default is, "go away, we have better things to do mere mortal" and while that may not be the intent, that is the impression a new contributor is often left with.
Then comes the funding page... really? Now, maintaining what is there is worth finding, but the negatives do impact the perception of this.
Secondary problem is IMHO the caste nature of administrator privileges. I think if the privileges were more separated and it would be possible to recall them, this would reduce the ossification of the hierarchy.
I also think Wikipedia could benefit from having a stable branch into which the changes from unstable branch could be regularly reviewed for addition. It would be nice if unstable branch could return to the idea that someone can add things even if they are not perfect or immediately sourced; IMHO experts can always add sources later for content that is already present, and it would give them some incentive to contribute.
That being said, Wikipedia is amazing! I would really like to thank to people who put some work into it.
What I'm concerned about is that there's no way to get new administrators, which is what it would take to bring in new ideas that break up the unnecessary bureaucracy.
The process that used to create them got entirely paralyzed, both by ridiculous inflation of metrics (I saw the edit count requirements -- they call them suggestions but they're requirements -- increase by a factor of 20 while I participated), and by the requirement to convince a supermajority of long-standing editors to vote for you.
I became an administrator in '06, and by '08 I would never have been considered. Basically, you have to edit every part of the encyclopedia while upsetting nobody, then inflate your already prolific accomplishments to get your foot in the door, without looking like a liar. This is impossible.
Old administrators (like me) lose interest. New ones don't take their place. The work is being increasingly done by the most obsessive people, and by faceless bots.
Many people say that the toxic community is the problem, but the community issues IMHO are actually a symptom of poor software design. The wiki's open structure and article-based format, which allows the most powerful groups of editors to "own" pages, gives power to people who are interested in keeping and retaining control, rather than those who are interested in sharing knowledge. The power is centralized in these gatekeepers, leading to all the problems we see on the site.[1] This is also the reason the Gender Gap exists.[2]
The solution is to redesign the software to devolve power from entrenched groups, but this will never happen because there is no leadership, and the people who have the power are the survivors/fanatics that actually like the current system. Because they write the rules they will not give their power up easily.
As for the quality arguments below: without new users and continuous evolution in software development, content presentation, and editorial review processes, the site cannot maintain quality. I believe that it is impossible for any wiki system to maintain a high quality anyway: the amount of time to improve articles to high quality is exponential, while the number of editors and work available is linear. Even in the best circumstances, something has to give. If the number of editors is actually declining then quality problems may also increase exponentially.
[1]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
[2]http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedi...
An open structure means that you have to watch what others are doing constantly. But that doesn't explain the huge number of stories where reasonable edits are reverted. That can only happen because the wikipedia (editor) community is ok with that.
My conclusion is that wikipedia forgot to redefine itself. Originally, wikipedia was a summary based on existing literature. But pretty soon users took wikipedia way beyond that. Using it to document stuff, instead of summarising stuff documented else where.
Most wikis are a tool to collectively create documentation. And somehow wikipedia is stuck in older world, and not what most wikipedia users expect it to be.
My conclusion, until the project reforms and allows original content, I won't contribute.
I've seen this with charities, open source projects, and it was a constant problem when I worked in film/tv (interns). Things always go south when you have volunteers bossing around other volunteers. Newcomers show up eager but depart quickly, normally after some dressing down by a more senior volunteer. Without pay in dispute, they rarely make complaint. They just stop showing up. And who can blame them?
The answer is to keep all volunteers equal. That's probably impossible for a project like wikipedia, but they could certainly do more to ensure new volunteers are not so bullied by the old guard.
It would be really nice to have more extensive work on how to mitigate these kinds of dynamics as I'm certain we will see more and more of these projects and I'd like them to be healthy for a change.
Humanity: Evolve! ;-)
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor
VestedContributors think the rules can be bent for them because they've been around so long and done so much good work.
As for keeping volunteers equal to avoid the problem, that need not mean keeping everyone identical. Leadership roles can rotate, with finite term limits. That way every leader today knows they will be the underling tomorrow. (This also keeps everyone interested and motivated as nobody is every stuck on one task/job).
But is that inherently a bad thing? The way you state it, I'm getting that you're implying that it's bad 100% of the time. If you're looking at it in terms of black and white, I guess just hearing "rules can be bent" is bad, but I don't think it's that simple.
I think there are times where the rules can be bent which creates an outcome that is beneficial to all. Times where the rules don't account for certain variables/situations and those incidents need to be handled differently (or with care). I think it's a complex problem and it may need a complex solution.
The best, and I mean absolute best volunteer teams I've been a part of have always had a leader at the top with absolute authority. However, he or she never abused their power, and rarely flexed their absolute authority, preferring to take up the mantle of "benevolent dictator". In those cases, some amazing things happened. We got our work done ahead of time, group moral was sky-high, and the projects were a massive success. Things "just worked".
Point being that it's much easier for them to maintain high quality with low effort.
You showed this well. Thank you for finding this pattern and telling about it clearly.
> The answer is to keep all volunteers equal.
(Un)Fortunately this would break. Logically, how can you have one group of equals enforce their rules with unequal power? Naturally, influence (roles(?)) emerge(s). For social animals to want to stick together over the long haul, (1) an elder's view needs to carry a good bit of weight. This makes it possible to retain experience and membership, because these elders are our gateway to the past and they get tired and battle worn. The young learn from those with the experience and use it to build their future. (2) Members need to both use influence and limit it. Mocking leaders and their work, behind their backs and in-front of them, joking with them over the flaws in their work help them to keep their heads from filling with hot air. When someone takes on more responsibility, people will naturally and comfortably give them uneven support if they mutually respect and believe in eachother. This means some have more influence than others. When this flowing power gets a kink in it and builds up in any one place, then it will flood the basin. As long as work gets done and individuals cultivate good relationships, then a community will stick together and most everyone will feel like the community has good balance.
My experience with this: studied this a bit within anthropology and sociology, lived with these dynamics in and among Drupal (a self-described do-ocracy, perhaps a holocracy) community members for over ~10 years, and have a deep interest in natural processes that contribute to social order.
A related snippet from you guessed it with several links to springboard into related research:
Anthropologists maintain that hunter/gatherers don't have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.[13][14][15] In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies, there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well.[13] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.[16] Postmarital residence among hunter-gatherers tends to be matrilocal, at least initially.[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_eco...
If you are walking in the woods, everyone has down/slow days. Hiking/climbing groups know this and so rarely have dedicated leaders. Look at the military groups that occasionally climb mountains (ie wounded warriors on everest). On day one they throw the entire "rank" thing out the window. They know it doesn't work for mountaineering. Instead decisions are generally made by the person least tired/hungry/dehydrated at the time. That's how a hunting party would work: If Bob's got a sore foot today, he isn't going to be the one flushing the deer and instead might be today's planner/leader.
Is the political entity on Formosa "Taiwan", "Taiwan Province, Republic of China", "Taiwan Province, People's Republic of China", or "Taiwan, Province of China"?
At some point, I think, things will inevitably change. But for the moment, there's so many obvious things to work on that the confusing/subjective things don't really pop up too much.
Discussions about shop= vs amenity= are sometimes frustrating, but I bet they don't come anywhere near the discussions over using –,—, or - in page titles.
Here's 15,000 words. At the end of that? No consensus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...
The type of dash to use in "Mexican-American War" got over 20,000 words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...
Dash wars even got to Arbcom: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...
[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org
For example, I was once reading about a song, and at the bottom there was a link to a youtube video. The link was broken, so I replaced it with a working youtube link.
The edit was immediately reverted by a bot that was anti-all-links-to-youtube. Fine, maybe that is a problem. But it's also a problem that the anti-youtube bot replaced my youtube link with a youtube link.
When I went to the bot's page, it was filled with comments from dozens of others who had made similar edits that were blindly reverted. The bot author, who took a "it's me against the world" stance, proclaiming that his bot was doing the only sensible thing, and that he was "sick of arguing". As the paper proclaims, this immediate negative reinforcement had long term consequences of turning away many good faith editors.
I've never used it all that much, to be honest, but the information hiding aspect is what makes it so dangerous. Allow incorrect information to appear on the site and then explain why it's incorrect. Allow information on the site that might be incorrect, so that others can investigate further. But presenting the material as if it is correct, because there is a quality control mechanism in place, is simply dishonest.
If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, it would not bother me at all. No information would be lost. It would reappear elsewhere on the internet.