Are you (or am I?) reading the changelog right? Your edits (while harmless, in my opinion) don't match up with your edit messages. The bot you name isn't the one that reverted you (but Cluebot does get involved later). The bot reverted two anonymous edits, so I can't truly tell if they're yours, but you yell at the bot, so I presume so.
Edit 1: anonymous IPv6 addr removes the word "also"; article makes sense with and without it. No edit message.
Edit 2: anonymous IPv4 addr changes the word "disruption" to "shifting"; article makes grammatical sense either way, unclear to me which is better. Message is "Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been." This is the change that the message doesn't seem to match up with the content, specifically, this diff[2].
Edit 3: "Monkbot" reverts the previous two edits. Perhaps a tad strange, but the edits were strange and from IP addrs.
Edit 4: You log in, and yell at the bot[3], "Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been. Thank you for undoing my last edit you stupid bot, I'm trying to removed page defacements NOT ADD THEM." However, this edit again doesn't match the message, and (again) changes the word "disruption" to (this time) "shiftingting" (an honest typo which you correct immediately), and also changes the minus sign on a temperature to a hypen.
I have a hard time parsing those logs, but from what I can tell you kept trying to change "disruption" to "shifting". I even went to a year-old version of the article (you said the typo had been there since 2009) and did a search on the page for "shi" and couldn't find it, but "disruption" was still there.
I suspect you had some sort of toy browser extension that swapped words, a la Cloud to Butt [1].
Can you point to the specific edit you made that has been reverted by the bot? I can see [1] that your first edit to the article "Thermohaline circulation" was a one-word edit and was introducing a non-existent word 'shiftingting', thus being incorrect.
Ah. Part of the problem is that you haven't registered for a Wikipedia account. ClueBot NG, which is a machine learning system, uses information from your track record as an editor as one of its inputs. Editing anonymously, you have no reputation.
changed "disruption" to "shifting", an edit inconsistent with the edit comment. The word "bullshitting" did not appear. That was reverted by human user "Vsmith" (a user with over 100,000 edits), not a 'bot.
Then, this edit by user "Valarauca":
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been. Thank you for undoing my last edit you stupid bot, I'm trying to removed page defacements NOT ADD THEM.)
changed an em dash to an en dash, and "disrupting" to "shiftingting".
That botch is fixed in the next edit by user "Valarauca":
Are the comments being deleted here on HN a meta joke about deletionist misbehavior on wikipedia? Depending on the answer maybe a meta joke would be to revert any changes I make to this post.
One interesting way to summarize the problem is wikipedia provides tools designed to make it easier to destroy than to create and then rewards destruction. No great surprise what results.
I'm pretty sure they were just deleted because the poster is terminally embarrassed at discovering that his edits were reverted because he was inadvertently vandalizing them due to a browser plugin, rather than fixing problems like he thought he was.
I would have to guess latter? Monitoring all of Wikipedia would be a huge task, and most people (and therefore bot operators) only care about certain articles.
I have, more than once, by children using Twinkle.
I left a polite message on the talk page of one, and they apologised (which was nice, I didn't expect them to) and they re-reverted the edit.
I left a polite message on the talk page of another; and was templated with a vandalism warning. I left polite messages on the Twinkle page and they removed twinkle from that user and spent some time making sure I was welcome etc.
Wikipedians seem to be aware of the dangers of rapid Twinkle or roll-back use, especially by people racking up some score to use to gain adminship, and they seem to have made changes to reduce the fallout.
The need is too great to have the service that wikipedia provides, if people are becoming less willing to keep it accurate then that is interesting. If people are consistently finding inaccurate or uninformative articles then they will search for their information somewhere else
I found this page where you can listen to the 'sound of wikipedia', basically a different guitar string is plucked at a different pitch when certain changes are made to wikipedia articles. It is pretty cool in the sense that it shows a lot of changes are being made, however you are able to see and hear the amount of changes made by bots, which is surprisingly few
That link is great! Watching the page gives you a much more visceral sense of how wikipedia actually works, and ~all the things in the world that people might care about. Click "about" to read the key. (e.g. purple blobs are bots)
It is also especially fascinating to watch during a time with realtime news you care about. I've seen edits to Rosetta and Philae while just watching briefly!
This claim keeps coming up. Reality is that Wikipedia is mostly done. All the important article were done years ago. Now it's just maintenance. Look at incoming new articles - spam, minor politicians and sports figures, etc.
Paper encyclopedias followed the same pattern. Creating Encyclopedia Britannica was a huge job. Annual maintenance was done by a small staff.
(As a reader of Wikipedia) I frequently see opportunities to improve quality, clarity and readability.
Agreed. But I stopped contributing ages ago, because all of my contributions were almost immediately reversed.
It's pretty obvious that most pages are monitored by people with a stake in the content of those pages, and they are much more energetic in pitching their story than I am in trying to make some small improvements.
Not even close. If you're interested in a particular area of history and you've read a few books on the subject, you'll know that Wikipedia is missing reams of useful information.
Maybe Wikipedia is ok for current stuff and the 20th century, but it barely scratches the surface for most of medieval Europe, for example. There's absolutely no need to be constrained to the terse articles and limited scope of a traditional encyclopedia in this respect. In fact, Britannica has substantially more information on certain topics.
There's the problem with a generic encyclopaedia extended to include news and current affairs to leverage the dynamics of the web: policies that are good for some usages are bad for others.
I don't think Wikipedia should base its policies to be suitable for pop culture and sports fact checking if this conflicts in the slightest with good coverage on science, research, and well established philosophy and culture.
I can imagine how hard was it to get Wikipedia where it is today, therefore I will trust their judgement moving forwards.
Agreed. Most obvious modern stuff, especially things that are well-known in popular or tech/geek culture. But I'm constantly surprised how many topics, including technical ones, are little more than stubs or are actively bad. Mind you, there's a lot of material that doesn't follow these generalizations but it's very inconsistent.
By its very nature, the "popular stuff" is the stuff that more people are interested in. If the "popular stuff" is done, then there's going to naturally be fewer people interested in fleshing out the "unpopular" stuff.
That seems to assume things not in evidence -- maybe the other entries would be more popular if they were referenced more, and they'd be referenced more if they were more fleshed out.
You could reference "Vacri's cheese preferences" on every page on the web, and it still wouldn't be as well fleshed out as the topic of WWII on Wikipedia, particularly if vacri and his close associates weren't particularly interested in providing the info. Frequency of reference follows popularity more than popularity follows frequency of reference.
Or perhaps another example: most politicians have some sort of twitter or facebook account listed on their promotional material. It doesn't make those twitter accounts particularly popular, despite being frequently referenced.
Wikipedia has fairly strict notability guidelines that's going to prohibit adding a lot of historical information. As a rule of thumb if it's not already in there it's probably not notable enough to add.
I'd be interested in seeing if Wikipedia has analytics to back up this claim. I'm sure it would be fairly easy to track new article creation by day versus article editing over time.
It would be nice to see a graph where new article creation was declining exponentially now, with article turnover (editing) increasing exponentially.
I used to contribute to wikipedia. I stopped after a number of articles I created were deleted by "notability nazis". There is a strong favoritism of what people think is notable over what actually is. The rules are not followed and many things that should be removed aren't while things that should stay are removed.
I am not interested in participating in a system where my hard work is discarded regardless of excuses.
Even if I understand why the rule/criterion exists, notability is a particularly problematic Wikipedia rule. Just about everything is notable if you get local enough (whether in terms of location, field, community, etc.) And the proofs of notability, such as they are, end up being (ironically) rather rooted in things like publication in dead tree periodicals or books even if that makes actual verification difficult.
So you end up with notability being rather arbitrarily decided by admins who see nothing wrong with long articles on obscure pieces of geek fandom while being unconvinced about the notability of people like influential executives at major companies, journalists, and the like.
The "deletionist" argument is essentially that, absent a notability requirement, Wikipedia would become this dumping ground for articles whose facts would be difficult to verify and which interested so few people that maintaining any sort of quality would be difficult. I'm much more on the inclusionist side but but I also appreciate the concerns if it were taken to an extreme. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
Perhaps simply have a indicator on articles of whether or not it meets notability then? If you don't want to see "unnotable articles" then you can simply shut off including them in searches.
Well, the idea is that something has to be notable to have its own entry, not to be in the encyclopedia at all. If the page on something is only one paragraph, maybe that one paragraph should be on a different page. If you have it in both places, now you have duplication, and duplication leads to errors.
In the words of Douglas Adams: [I got it revised, it now says] "Mostly Harmless".
I think the it's a good idea, but it's not a good fit for wikipedia as it exist today. I think it's grown to the point that for good or bad, it needs to be managed more like the Google corpus, than a traditional encyclopaedia. I'm not advocating abandoning human editing all together, but I think a new ideas are needed: wp's success has made it into a fundamentally new thing. It exists in the conceptual space between the sum of all newspapers and scientific journals, traditional encyclopaedia and the whole World Wide Web.
Arbitrary decisions are a huge problem in Wikipedia. We get round this problem at Newslines by replacing notability with newsworthiness. If someone has news written about them then it is suitable for inclusion.
Does replacing the word really make it less arbitrary though? What's the threshold for something being considered news? An "official" news outlet? A blog? Does being quoted in a couple of news stories count? How about, say, a blogger who is reasonably well-known within a specific community--and may even be quoted by other bloggers--but doesn't write about things that would necessarily be picked up by news outlets?
Yes, it does actually because it avoids situations where links from entire news sources are declared invalid because the mob doesn't think they are reliable. For example, The Daily Mail is counted as an unreliable source on Wikipedia. "Good" news sources can be wrong (Rathergate), while "bad" sources like the National Enquirer can break stories (John Edward's affair and child).
The problem arises on Wikipeida because its editors act as fact checkers. But your idea of what a fact is can be quite different from mine. On Newslines we create the archive and let the reader decide what is true, by marking claims as claims.
Very few bloggers break original news. If they do we can add it as a source.
The trouble is, of course, that people will game that system to be included in Wikipedia. What is news? 20 years ago that meant being written about in some regional city's newspaper. Now? It's some half-assed blog. Anyone can finagle that trick if they're motivated enough.
And getting into Wikipedia has some obscure benefits that make it worthwhile.
That's far too easy to game, though, and even works on Wikipedia. Just the other day, I searched for a particular boutique marketing firm, and found they had a Wikipedia entry, complete with 20-30 references.
All of which were basically from the same small, inexpensive PR campaign.
Wikipedia runs a serious risk of becoming a commercial echo chamber (if it hasn't already).
What're you guys doing at Newslines to prevent it from turning into a vehicle for self-promotion?
It's only a problem on an encyclopedia because it's not relevant to its mission. As primarily a news archive we don't care as much about PR (Almost all company news is PR anyway), and if it became a problem we would flag it so it could be seen by those who are interested in it (There's value in having a PR archive too), and hidden by those who don't want to see it. The user should be in control. One man's PR is another man's news.
Here's a fun anecdote a friend of mine told me. He's a researcher in an obscure field so he's a primary source, well published etc. He corrected something on a WP page that he happens to be an expert in, it was reverted. There was a war over notability. He didn't count as a source since he was primary. So he had one of his grad students put it in and cite some research on his academic webpage. After a couple automatic reverts it finally stayed because it was now coming from a secondary source.
So basically, if you publish a blog with some information about a topic, then have "your friend" make the change and cite your blog, it's good. But try to do it yourself and it's no good.
This, all of this. My impressions of it are that arbitrary notability wars basically killed Wikipedia's chance at any kind of completeness - and that has killed any desire I have to become involved in it, if it'll just throw my efforts in the bin. It's as good as it'll get on what it has because it's camped by editors who don't allow changes, even for the better; and it just doesn't want any contributions on anything it doesn't already have.
I don't buy the argument that there isn't enough space on the internet. Wikis are at their worst on high-profile, contested topics, and at their best in minutiæ Wikipedia's entrenched cabal passionately hates.
Curious, as a social experiment. It's interesting it became as good as it did, but it's firmly in maintenance mode now and that won't keep the cobwebs off forever. I wonder how much it's being gamed by PR companies and governments now.
Wikipedia has so many rules and restrictions around editing an article that the only people who can invest enough time to learn them are people whose time is otherwise worthless.
I once saw a great example when a notable athlete was traded from one team to another... I think it was a famous basketball player, but can't remember who. On a whim I checked the article history page and saw the same pattern: a new user to Wikipedia would make the edit, and it was quickly reverted by one established editor.
When I looked at the talk page, the WP editor made it clear that it was Official Wikipedia Policy that even though both clubs had announced the trade, and news was being carried on multiple outlets, the trade wasn't official enough until the NBA released a daily transfer list with his name on it. All five new editors were threatened with WP:3RR and WP:yaddayadda instead of encouraged. But hey, when the list was officially released twenty-five minutes later the editor who got the page locked got to make the edit. Great job guys! Way to add value to the project!
This same behavior happens on every site where authority is meted out based on activity, not ability. I once tried to correct an elisp entry on a Stack Overflow answer: my edit was autorejected because it had less than five characters difference. So I added a fairly pointless comment to get past the automatic rejection, only to have someone reject it because the comment wasn't sufficiently useful (go figure). I was finally able to get someone to make a correction by going into the Stack Overflow chat and trying to explain things... except the user, who freely admitted to never using emacs before, messed up and made things worse. Whatever. My give-a-fucks were all out. It's probably still wrong!
I experienced the same thing. Nothing is as demotivating as seeing an edit you spent hours researching and writing deleted for some obscure reason and then rewritten a few days later by the very same guys who deleted your entry.
Yes, I remember reading that they prefer info that can be referenced, even when the reference itself doesn't have references. I suppose I understand why, but it leads to situations like what you describe.
Overall it seems to be pretty fiercely territorial, so no surprise why they have trouble attracting new contributors.
I had something similar happen, where I offered details on a fix, and provided a link to more details. Someone removed part of my fix text, then someone else removed my link (it wasn't relevant without the fix text), and then a third person removed the comment entirely because it didn't offer a fix (without the link and the text, it was basically worthless).
So stackoverflow went from "having a useful answer" to "having no answer at all" because folks abused their use-granted power.
I am personally fond of the "king for a day" form of crowd-sourced moderation, where folks who are granted moderation say don't get to keep it long enough to get used to it, and learn how to abuse it.
I've said this before, but it's always funny to me how many proposed fixes end up sounding a lot like /.'s metamoderation system.
Slashdot was far from perfect, but I still think the system of temporary moderators followed up by temporary metamoderators is pretty elegant compared to most of the alternatives I've seen.
The counter argument would be that 100 people are going to go to wikipedia and try to update the team for a popular player. But who's going to do it for the last man off the bench? A system that makes sure all updates are made properly, if a little less timely (and we are probably talking one day later), is not a bad thing.
This works for the NBA articles. But there are other more obscure subjects that if you stifle the edits when they happen, they may not be attempted again for a long time. Or never.
I don't see how making sure are made properly should forbid that 100 people are going to go to wikipedia and try to update the team for a popular player.
The Problem with Wikipedia is that Wikipedia does not want to reflect truth, or reality or facts or objectivity however one might call it, but verifiability.
That is why they revert to false statements, even if they know so.
Is that such a bad thing really? Wikipedia already has a terrible reputation in research and academics, most people simply refuse to accept any information off it because "anyone can edit it."
Insisting on verifiability is a necessary evil if Wikipedia wants to have even a modicum of credibility. Maybe the standards are far too stringent, but verifiability is tangible, and the 'truth' isn't.
Wikipedia will never, ever be accepted by the academic community, no matter what kind of rules are implemented, als long as it stays a wiki.
And once one accepts that one can drop this stupid principle. For me it seems the only reason it exists is to pander the academic community. But it's a hopeless and one sided love.
It does not improve quality, it does not improve credibility, the best thing about it that is produces funny feedback loops.
What other system would you propose that would ensure that articles are as uniformly objective and factual as possible? It's all right to claim that anyone should be allowed to edit an article, but the fact is that internet communities have consistently shown that without extremely heavy-handed moderation to uphold standards, they can quickly devolve into echo chambers where only one opinion or one set of facts is heard.
Articles about NBA players are not a good example of this, but I can easily think of plenty of other topics which would involve extremely loud and opinionated fringe communities who are very motivated to broadcast their views to the world. I can't think of any way to limit the influence of these communities except by insisting that every article have impeccable sources.
The cost of this insistence on sources is that sometimes utterly obvious edits may be reverted unless they can be properly sourced, but I think it is an acceptable price for maintaining consistent standards of quality across the wiki.
Also, I don't agree that the system only exists to pander to academia. Every encyclopedia in the world has standards of quality to which their articles must conform. The only difference between these other encyclopedias and Wikipedia is the speed with which they are updated.
Now I don't know about you, but I don't go to Wikipedia to get the latest news. I go there to learn stuff with the belief that this stuff will be correct. I don't care if players' teams are updated hours instead of seconds after a trade. I care much more about whether this information is correct. Verifiability builds trust, and I don't see how Wikipedia could continue to exist without it.
How is that a counter argument? You're saying that at any given time either the entire team rooster is wrong, or it is more correct, except for the unpopular players.
Maybe WPs process (speaking as someone that's not edited WP here) need to change more towards the distributed VCS workflow: everyone can make changes, but changes gets voted in. Not sure if that is scalable either -- but perhaps what is need is a three-tier system: default to open (like any wiki, just make the change, done); somewhat moderated (anyone can suggest an edit, votes (with comment field) need to pass/accept the vote [essentially making the talk page a vote to pass/fail], and locked (protecting popular articles against spam, as today).
Or maybe what is needed is to accept that WP is "everone's wiki" (eg: it's a great source for tv series episode dates and synopsis -- not really something that should go in a traditional encyclopedia) -- in other words, classify some pages/sections as "not encyclopedia grade". It's hard to see how one can have one process that both accommodates NBA transfers, tv series episode synopsis, modern history of Palestine and Ukraine, and articles that document the current state of photovoltaics and quantum physics.
Note the search results helpfully give a word count - there are several hundred thousand extra words there.
Dash-discussion was not limited to the style guide and its talk page, or to the village pump. Disputes were escalated to ANI (a notice board where incidents for administrator attention can be raised); finally ending up at arbitration. (This is pretty severe level of dispute.) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...
And that's about –,— and -. Now imagine how editors behave over contentious issues. (What are those islands called and who do they belong to? is a good example.)
I have privs on the Scifi SE... I've never rejected edits for lack of comments or minor corrections.
Anything that resembles good faith effort and isn't flagrantly wrong gets ok'd (though others have complained about me doing that... I'm supposed to at least verify it or something).
With all the rules I'm amazed at the amount of stuff that's simply wrong. And it's pointless to try to fix anything, because your edits will be rejected on technicalities (like the NBA trade you mentioned) or at some later point in time the section will be rewritten with incorrect information added back by people referencing the same erroneous sources.
I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. There's no restriction to doing so, is there? To avoid having super high server costs, it could even be a "soft-fork", where only the pages which are edited are stored locally, all other content is fetched from the original.
If these restrictions are really affecting the quality of the articles in Wikipedia, we'll see the quality of the articles on the fork grow, at which point they can be merged back by Wikipedia.
Forking is not enough, the whole thing has to get out of it's wiki format and be transitioned into some kind of purpose built system, the wiki approach was great for growing fast but is hell to maintain or understand when used for content and administration in parallel. The best thing I could think of would be a streamlined kind of git with repositories for every article and an easy to understand ticketing system and maybe the possibility to have concurrent versions of articles one branch for the deletionist and notability enforcing kind and another inclusive one.
See my comment above. We have solved most of the problems for crowdsourced news-based pages and biographies at Newslines. We cut out almost all Wikipedia's problems by focusing on newsworthiness as the standard of inclusion; letting users create posts based on news events, not long-form articles; and using a standard post approval process.
I suspect the alternative is really just more material on "long-tail," open-contributor sites that cover many of the topics that Wikipedia does, but in more detail and with different policies. For instance, the http://newslines.org site linked above, or the non-profit that I help run, LocalWiki (https://localwiki.org). Let Wikipedia just be a really great general-purpose encyclopedia -- it's not supposed to replace the entire web.
I've contributed a bit to Wikipedia, including a couple recent new articles, and I have never experienced this. Maybe I'm so extraordinarily skilled that nobody would inflict ham-handed moderation on me, but I don't think that's the case. Probably it's just that I'm not so glaringly awful that I should be discouraged from contributing again.
I think the drop in new-contributor retention is an intended effect, an example of the system succeeding.
One possible solution is for Wikipedia to have two versions - one with a very conservative editorial policy, and a second with a very loose, liberal one. Occasionally material that has proven it's worth in the second gets merged into the first.
I've seen a lot of complaints about Wikipedia here on Hacker News over the years. Yet I also see a lot of comments and even submissions of new stories that come straight from Wikipedia. This love-hate relationship suggests that Wikipedia has plenty of strengths along with its weaknesses. May I ask a question of everyone here? Suppose an Elon Musk or another philanthropist established an Online Encyclopedia X Prize, setting up a financial incentive to try to build something better than Wikipedia. If there were a prize for a new-and-improved free, online encyclopedia, what criteria should be used for awarding the prize? What could a new project do to show it is building a good encyclopedia, and that it deserves a cash prize to keep its growth going as it wins user acceptance? What specific goals would show that the project passed a reasonable "finish line" in a race to build a viable competitor to Wikipedia?
I am a Wikipedian. My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia's administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias) will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the article topics. A new effort to build a free, online encyclopedia with lots of user input (which I would enthusiastically support) would have to figure out how to deal with this problem.
In respectful disagreement with some comments posted earlier in this thread, I think that most Wikipedia articles on many subjects are terrible, actively misleading and very poorly sourced. I am trying my best to fix articles on the topics for which I have the most reliable sources. (I have an office full of reference books for writing projects I do for my paid work.) It has been a long, slow slog since 2010 for me to improve the sourcing and make more neutral in point of view some of the most-read articles about the psychology of human intelligence, for example. Many Wikipedians don't read books, but only look up information on Google University, and think that anything that isn't found in an online source is not a verifiable fact. That makes the editing process very slow.
It should not involve humans in its aggregation and moderation. Needs to be intelligent enough to gather information and categorize it without the biases of a human being.
This would presumably use automatic systems developed by humans, who'd also judge the ability of the systems to gather and organize accurate and relevant information according to human standards. Doesn't that just push the biases into a less obvious domain?
They already have a prize: The Wikimedia Foundation raises $50 million in donations each year. They have 200 or so engineering staff. Surely they should be able to fix it themselves.
1) Having a large staff is the opposite of radical change.
2) As a former WMF staffer - let me tell you they are well aware of the issues mentioned by Halfaker. They've been commissioning and releasing studies like this since 2009. They all had the same conclusion, that 2007 was the point where the community shifted, from collaboration to make cool stuff, to defense against vandalism.
It's not clear what the WMF can do to change this, without engaging in a "takeover" of the community or completely changing the model of how the wiki works. The former would alienate everybody, even the editors who want change. The latter is technically infeasible; even if they wrote new tools from scratch, Wikipedia interacts with everyone else's tools and plugins. Even if you change the id of a div you'll probably have a thousand people screaming at you the next day.
The WMF can propose that people be nicer, or write tools that are more welcoming to new users, but all that means is that you get to have your edit rejected with a prettier icon. The main problem is in the edit cycle itself, not the tool that's used.
Many editors think that Wikipedia is basically done, and repelling new users is actually a good thing. They aren't bad people -- they just think that encyclopedia quality is far more important than growing the community. So when they see something that seems wrong to them, they revert. Reversion, for Wikipedians, is really how they open the discussion. You're expected to keep going if you think your edit is good. But because we have a linear edit history, with only one live copy of the article, it feels like a slap in the face to the new user. Things that would pass muster for weeks or months, in the past, are reverted instantly. Often times the criticisms of the new edit are justified, but the standards are ludicrously high now. You'd better be ready to cite everything rigorously and be familiar with a zillion policies.
Not all of them are like this, but enough to make a gauntlet for new users. And those new users just go somewhere else.
I think one thing that people could do, as they could all over the internet, is be encouraged to spend more time in the new section. One wonders if perhaps users who have been slapped by an immediate revert should be encouraged to take up the new-page patrol.
As an aside, the first and only time I came across a bug in Mediawiki, back when I was pulling the nightly trunk, it turned out to be induced by a change of semantics in the minor version of PHP I had (which was well ahead of what Wikipedia was using at the time). Tim Starling not only weighed in, but took PHP to task. That semantic change in PHP was promptly reverted!
After my experience in DMOZ, I have carefully NOT joined Wikipedia as an editor. However, I make minor spelling, grammatical and/or stylistic changes when I notice the need. I also correct obvious factual errors. I usually don't introduced NEW facts, but I delete false existing ones if I notice them.
And hey -- if I'm not perfect by the standards of "No Original Research" or even "Neutral Point of View", I don't have a role that allows me to be punished. I just move things in the right direction (by Wikipedia's standards as I understand them) as far as I can be bothered to, then go on with my life.
Well here's another useful correlation: the first iphone launched mid 2007, the peak of the active editors graph. Perhaps the rise of mobile is the true cause here.
As someone building a direct competitor to Wikipedia for crowdsourced biographies and news-based pages [1], I have come to the conclusion that the wiki software while responsible for the site's success, is also the cause of its inevitable decline.
The software causes almost every problem that people complain about, mainly because it lets real or imagined experts have too much power over the page. It's simply easier for an editor to reject new information, than to go through the pain of adding it. In one case, I struggled for weeks to try to get a simple sentence into the site, only to be harassed by the site's administrators, when I challenged a particularly ambiguous rule. Entrenched editors such as William Connolley [2] on Global Warming, act as guardians for whole sections of the site, and do not allow any dissenting opinion, censoring and minimizing views that do not suit their agenda. So much of this is simply unnecessary in a better designed system.
As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information, which makes it increasingly difficult to add new information. Many of those rules, such as those for notability, conflict of interest, and reliable sources are ambiguous and arbitrarily applied, giving even more power to editors and admins, instead of content creators. This means that the site has become rigid and nobody wants to maintain it. The quality of pages is declining rapidly. It is also very easy to harass other people on the system, so much so that women and minorities are virtually excluded.
We have taken a different approach with great results. By avoiding the page-based metaphor and giving better tools to our editors have created a system that makes it easy to add information without being harassed. We also pay our writers and editors, and are implementing a revenue share system so they can actually get some benefit from their work. So far our writers have added 25,000 posts without a single edit war, and zero harassment. 80% of them are women.
How come the Getting Started page link from the Newslines front page[1] returns a 404 error? A different link that has the link text "Click here to get started"[2] from a different page does work. Why aren't the link targets consistent?
I run a mediawiki based information site, and I disagree the following statement:
>The software causes almost every problem that people complain about
The real problem is:
>As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information
Wikipedia is not longer a place setup so people contribute information, it's a place set up to reject the addition of information (as you point out).
It's been a goal of my wiki to be the precise opposite, and it's been very interesting to see people go from "I hate wikis b/c of Wikipedia's stupid rules" to "huh, my edit was accepted" to "wow, this is extremely useful and collaborative".
I believe a wiki is not inherently bad, it's all the rejection rules they've built on top that are the problem.
Hi, I checked your site out. It's a useful resource. However, it appears you are making it by yourself mainly. When you get a lot of users on your wiki you will have to make a lot of rules, or ban a lot of users. I used to run my site on MediaWiki too and moved to WordPress. I don't know if that would work for your content though.
> When you get a lot of users on your wiki you will have to make a lot of rules, or ban a lot of users
I'd like to hear your reasons why you think this will be needed?
As long as the edit is something useful to traveling overland, it's allowed. That's the only rule, and I think it's the only rule that will ever be needed.
The objective of any crowdsourcing system is to find people who know more about the topic than you. However, oftentimes those people are dicks. You need rules that will allow you to get their content without them causing you (or them) a lot of grief.
>As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information
It's useful to note that this problem relates more to wiki-encyclopedias, and perhaps not as much to non-encyclopedic wikis. If you take a look at the C2 wiki or MeatballWiki, rejecting information make less of a problem even though they share the principle of anyone being able to edit anything on any page.
MeatballWiki states that it is not an encyclopedia, but rather a set of pages which feature discussion. Because of this, there is less grounds to refuse or revert edits with the reason of being "off-topic" (because discussion usually means merging several related topics) or for being "biased" (again, a feature of discussion is to get one's personal viewpoint across).
In short, I don't think this is a problem due to wiki software or the open nature of wikis, but rather wikis-as-encyclopediae or even Wikipedia specifically. "Encyclopedia" places a huge set of rules as to what can be added and what not.
I wanted to know more about my representative to the state legislature. First I went to Wikipedia. It had a stub page, with only basic biographic information. Checking elsewhere, I found that the FBI and IRS raided his office, home, and business some time ago. His chief of staff, his business partner, and and a former staffer that became a judge were all convicted of fraud and/or tax evasion. Other than this, his political career was a whole lot of nothing.
So, having done this research, I put it into the relevant Wikipedia article, with appropriate references to news articles and legal documents, carefully noting that he himself was never charged with anything. Reading between the lines, I realize that the authorities tried to get his subordinates to roll over on him, but failed - but that kind of subjectivity doesn't belong in an encyclopedia article.
Anyway, less than a minute later, the change was reverted because of "vandalism". Whoever reverted it had either not even glanced at the change, or was a supporter of this politician, protecting his page from negative information. Probably the former, but who knows?
This was the last, and worst, example of me wasting my time trying to contribute to Wikipedia. I have had every single change I have ever made to Wikipedia reverted (going back years). Sometimes I have done it anonymously, sometimes I have logged in; it doesn't make any difference in my experience. What seems to matter is if you're willing to put in the time to master Wikipedia's bureaucratic procedure, which I am not. I just don't bother anymore. So to me, this article makes perfect sense.
But I have to admit that I still read Wikipedia all the time. It is without question, the most useful web site there is. It's not as comprehensive as I would like, and for subjective information it's actually quite bad, but I think that in general it seems to be getting better over time, on both counts. So I don't know if you can say it's declining.
By the way, despite him either being a crook, or merely employing crooks on his staff, I voted for him anyway, just last week. I really don't have a vendetta against this guy.
Got link to article/your version? It's easy enough to restore your edit, and/or raise it on the talk page. WP has lots of ways to deal with people protecting pages from 'negative' info, although they do unfortunately require a fair bit of bureaucracy and patience.
This page just cries out for a date. When was it written? I can't tell. The latest reference is 2012, but that leaves a 2-year period. I tried the PDF. No date there, either. Try the citations. Finally: 2013. But that's 'way too much work to answer an obvious question.
So, everyone -- including Mr. Halftaker -- when you publish anything, put a date on it!
Fixing WP is simple. Edits should go through a formal draft->pink->red review cycle. Right now they go through a edit->immediate rejection cycle.
By policy anybody should be able to submit draft edits, and these edits should hang around in a review queue for a large-ish group of reviewers to look them over and thumb-up, thumb-down them in a "pink" review. Any acceptance or rejection should require 3 or 4 thumbs up or down. If a thumbdown is given, the reviewer must state what's wrong with the edit (bad spelling/grammar/poor citation, whatever).
If the edit is ultimately rejected, the person who submitted it now has 3 or 4 pieces of feedback, hopefully one of them useful. Now they can fix the edit, resubmit and now it goes to the red review.
If the edit passes it goes to the red review.
Red review is the same, but if it passes it becomes "published" and the change is made. Red reviewers should be the top editors of WP. Because the pink review should filter out most of the crap, they'll hopefully be dealing with higher level stuff and their rejection rates should be lower. Only in cases where the edit somehow was really bad, should they reject it.
Now here's the other thing. If a red review results in a rejection, the submitter has to start over, but the editors that passed it in the pink review are penalized in some way. Perhaps a Karma system (e.g. to become a red reviewer, you must have pink reviewed correctly 500 edits or something, to become a pink reviewer you must have 200 edits succeed). Red reviewers with too high of a rejection/pass ratio may lose their editing powers as well in case some power-mad editor starts bulk deletionist policies.
This way people can both submit edits and be engaged as editors (so they can both see the crap that editors have to deal with and participate in improving WP at the meta-level).
Problem editors can also be flagged by contributors, an editor with some number of flags (say 10) by different submitters should be reviewed. After each review, the number of flags that will cause the next review should increase (maybe double or something). This will keep high quality editors in place and not waste time reviewing editor's work.
You've pretty much described "Flagged revisions" (1), which has been in testing since 2008 or thereabouts and has been adopted by a bunch of non-English Wikipedias, most notably German. Despite years of debate about the pros and cons, it has not been adopted on the English WP, although a very watered down version called "Pending changes" has been live since Dec 2012 (2).
An important feature of my proposal is also to hold reviewers accountable...a notable feature that's missing in the current WP world. (I'm sure there's some purposefully byzantine process to do so today, but hell if a casual contributor can figure it out).
Kind of reminds me of Twitter banning all my games that let users tweet scores using their APIs as being too much like a full Twitter client. It's pretty obvious Twitter just aimed a bot at everyone and didn't actually look at who they were banning.
I agree with the submission: I think there is potentially a problem of test edits, or unsourced edits, being reverted automatically or in an unpleasant manner, and that newcomers can easily be discouraged from contributing. I think part of it is a problem with the culture, and part of it is a necessary evil: when articles achieve higher quality overall, there is bound to be less adding and more discussing about what to add, so more changes will not make their way to the article. (This is the case for any document, you start with a lot of writing and then there is a lot of painful editing, I don't see why it would be different here.) Also, the more you try to structure and source the articles, and the harder the syntax is going to be, compared to the time where you could just write anything and add it to the article.
Yet, for all of this, I have never been able to understand why, whenever a discussion about Wikipedia comes up on HN, so many people complain about getting all their changes reverted. I have edited Wikipedia for years and I think at most 3 cases did I see something reverted for no good reason. Maybe this is because I edit in less controversial areas (computer science), or because most of my edits are just typographic fixes, or because I also edit on different Wikipedias (especially the French one), or because I'm vaguely familiar with some of the customs or policies?
It would be really nice if people complaining about bad reverts could provide links to the diff of their edits, the reverts, and the subsequent discussion if any. One nice thing about Wikipedia is that the history is always public, so if something valuable has been reverted for bad reasons, it can be seen, and added back; if someone seems to be discouraging new users from contributing, anyone can see it and let them know; and if there was a misunderstanding, maybe we can see that the two sides were of good faith.
It's a bit frustrating to see everyone complain but never have links to objective facts where you can see what went wrong and try to understand why.
* I knew personally that a regionally important corporate lobbying group was funding a ballot measure. (For the moment assume I am correct: this was not a 'secret': everyone in local politics knew this. It just wasn't 'official')
* I edited the organizations wikipedia page to state that the group was promoting the ballot measure.
The edit was reverted.
Was I going to spend time trying to track down obscure articles on local newspaper websites to prove this to wikipedia? No.
It just wasn't worth it.
I have come to the conclusion that the really interesting information is still in peoples heads.
I rarely find wikipedia turning up in my searches any more - in particular anything "controversial" or anything where there is moneyed interests involved who are interested in suppressing the other side.
I actually don't see a solution for Wikipedia. It is trying for some sort of 'objective' encyclopedia. This is well and good for questions like what is an atom in the 21st century. However, lets pretend that it is a 1901. "What is an atom?" was controversial and the back and forth that would have been interesting to know as a 1901 reader would be edited out of the 1901 version of Wikipedia.
Quite simply for me:
* something is interesting if it is "controversial" (global warming, health care, etc.)
* I am not interested in an "objective" sanitized view. I have a bias and I am not interested in hearing about the "controversy about global warming". Therefore I am biased toward sites predisposed to my perspective.
* Others have different preferred bias.
* Trying to come to a group decision where both sides are convinced that their side is correct is impossible ( in particular if one side is paid to not change their mind )
* If something is really important (i.e. job critical) I want to go to a source expert that I trust irregardless of what the 'crowd' thinks. I know what the standards I am applying to determine who I regard as the expert.
* rarely search for important things and find the wikipedia article interesting
Therefore:
* Wikipedia as a common community encyclopedia only works for the uninteresting 'factoids' that are not important
* I filter out wikipedia when looking at the google results when I am looking for something I really care about getting correct.
128 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 92.7 ms ] thread(ass -> butt)
and then Monkbot changed it back to "disruption", not ClueBotNG.
Cluebot actually reverted someone else's vandalism and restored your version (your spellcheck'd version) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ...
Maybe the problem is that the changelog is too hard for casuals to parse?
Edit 1: anonymous IPv6 addr removes the word "also"; article makes sense with and without it. No edit message.
Edit 2: anonymous IPv4 addr changes the word "disruption" to "shifting"; article makes grammatical sense either way, unclear to me which is better. Message is "Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been." This is the change that the message doesn't seem to match up with the content, specifically, this diff[2].
Edit 3: "Monkbot" reverts the previous two edits. Perhaps a tad strange, but the edits were strange and from IP addrs.
Edit 4: You log in, and yell at the bot[3], "Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been. Thank you for undoing my last edit you stupid bot, I'm trying to removed page defacements NOT ADD THEM." However, this edit again doesn't match the message, and (again) changes the word "disruption" to (this time) "shiftingting" (an honest typo which you correct immediately), and also changes the minus sign on a temperature to a hypen.
Edit 5: Your spell correction.
Edit 6: Someone experimenting (anon IPv4) adds "hello".
Edit 7: Same IP changes "hello" to "booooooooty"
Edit 8: Clue Bot NG reverts _to_ your edit, undoing the previous two edits (but leaves your changes) — definitely the correct action.
[1]: I'm starting from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ...
I suspect you had some sort of toy browser extension that swapped words, a la Cloud to Butt [1].
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Valarauc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ...
All the actions by ClueBot NG in that article in the last year applied to edits from unregistered users.
The edit by [173.14.38.69]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been.)
changed "disruption" to "shifting", an edit inconsistent with the edit comment. The word "bullshitting" did not appear. That was reverted by human user "Vsmith" (a user with over 100,000 edits), not a 'bot.
Then, this edit by user "Valarauca":
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Removed the word bullshitting, which was added where shifting obviously should have been. Thank you for undoing my last edit you stupid bot, I'm trying to removed page defacements NOT ADD THEM.)
changed an em dash to an en dash, and "disrupting" to "shiftingting".
That botch is fixed in the next edit by user "Valarauca":
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thermohaline_circ... (Spellling correction on previous change.)
"Shifting" then stayed in the article.
The Wikipedia processes and 'bots handled this just fine. The cause of the problem was a non-useful edit comment on an edit of marginal quality.
One interesting way to summarize the problem is wikipedia provides tools designed to make it easier to destroy than to create and then rewards destruction. No great surprise what results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Diederic...
I left a polite message on the talk page of one, and they apologised (which was nice, I didn't expect them to) and they re-reverted the edit.
I left a polite message on the talk page of another; and was templated with a vandalism warning. I left polite messages on the Twinkle page and they removed twinkle from that user and spent some time making sure I was welcome etc.
Wikipedians seem to be aware of the dangers of rapid Twinkle or roll-back use, especially by people racking up some score to use to gain adminship, and they seem to have made changes to reduce the fallout.
I found this page where you can listen to the 'sound of wikipedia', basically a different guitar string is plucked at a different pitch when certain changes are made to wikipedia articles. It is pretty cool in the sense that it shows a lot of changes are being made, however you are able to see and hear the amount of changes made by bots, which is surprisingly few
http://listen.hatnote.com/#fr,en
It is also especially fascinating to watch during a time with realtime news you care about. I've seen edits to Rosetta and Philae while just watching briefly!
Paper encyclopedias followed the same pattern. Creating Encyclopedia Britannica was a huge job. Annual maintenance was done by a small staff.
Maintenance doesn't quite capture that.
That sounds exactly like maintenance to me, as distinct from documenting new things from scratch
An unnecessarily complicated and difficult to read article isn't really done.
Agreed. But I stopped contributing ages ago, because all of my contributions were almost immediately reversed.
It's pretty obvious that most pages are monitored by people with a stake in the content of those pages, and they are much more energetic in pitching their story than I am in trying to make some small improvements.
Maybe Wikipedia is ok for current stuff and the 20th century, but it barely scratches the surface for most of medieval Europe, for example. There's absolutely no need to be constrained to the terse articles and limited scope of a traditional encyclopedia in this respect. In fact, Britannica has substantially more information on certain topics.
I don't think Wikipedia should base its policies to be suitable for pop culture and sports fact checking if this conflicts in the slightest with good coverage on science, research, and well established philosophy and culture.
I can imagine how hard was it to get Wikipedia where it is today, therefore I will trust their judgement moving forwards.
It's not the best at everything but that's okay.
Or perhaps another example: most politicians have some sort of twitter or facebook account listed on their promotional material. It doesn't make those twitter accounts particularly popular, despite being frequently referenced.
It would be nice to see a graph where new article creation was declining exponentially now, with article turnover (editing) increasing exponentially.
I am not interested in participating in a system where my hard work is discarded regardless of excuses.
So you end up with notability being rather arbitrarily decided by admins who see nothing wrong with long articles on obscure pieces of geek fandom while being unconvinced about the notability of people like influential executives at major companies, journalists, and the like.
I think the it's a good idea, but it's not a good fit for wikipedia as it exist today. I think it's grown to the point that for good or bad, it needs to be managed more like the Google corpus, than a traditional encyclopaedia. I'm not advocating abandoning human editing all together, but I think a new ideas are needed: wp's success has made it into a fundamentally new thing. It exists in the conceptual space between the sum of all newspapers and scientific journals, traditional encyclopaedia and the whole World Wide Web.
The problem arises on Wikipeida because its editors act as fact checkers. But your idea of what a fact is can be quite different from mine. On Newslines we create the archive and let the reader decide what is true, by marking claims as claims.
Very few bloggers break original news. If they do we can add it as a source.
And getting into Wikipedia has some obscure benefits that make it worthwhile.
All of which were basically from the same small, inexpensive PR campaign.
Wikipedia runs a serious risk of becoming a commercial echo chamber (if it hasn't already).
What're you guys doing at Newslines to prevent it from turning into a vehicle for self-promotion?
So basically, if you publish a blog with some information about a topic, then have "your friend" make the change and cite your blog, it's good. But try to do it yourself and it's no good.
I don't buy the argument that there isn't enough space on the internet. Wikis are at their worst on high-profile, contested topics, and at their best in minutiæ Wikipedia's entrenched cabal passionately hates.
Curious, as a social experiment. It's interesting it became as good as it did, but it's firmly in maintenance mode now and that won't keep the cobwebs off forever. I wonder how much it's being gamed by PR companies and governments now.
I once saw a great example when a notable athlete was traded from one team to another... I think it was a famous basketball player, but can't remember who. On a whim I checked the article history page and saw the same pattern: a new user to Wikipedia would make the edit, and it was quickly reverted by one established editor.
When I looked at the talk page, the WP editor made it clear that it was Official Wikipedia Policy that even though both clubs had announced the trade, and news was being carried on multiple outlets, the trade wasn't official enough until the NBA released a daily transfer list with his name on it. All five new editors were threatened with WP:3RR and WP:yaddayadda instead of encouraged. But hey, when the list was officially released twenty-five minutes later the editor who got the page locked got to make the edit. Great job guys! Way to add value to the project!
This same behavior happens on every site where authority is meted out based on activity, not ability. I once tried to correct an elisp entry on a Stack Overflow answer: my edit was autorejected because it had less than five characters difference. So I added a fairly pointless comment to get past the automatic rejection, only to have someone reject it because the comment wasn't sufficiently useful (go figure). I was finally able to get someone to make a correction by going into the Stack Overflow chat and trying to explain things... except the user, who freely admitted to never using emacs before, messed up and made things worse. Whatever. My give-a-fucks were all out. It's probably still wrong!
Overall it seems to be pretty fiercely territorial, so no surprise why they have trouble attracting new contributors.
So stackoverflow went from "having a useful answer" to "having no answer at all" because folks abused their use-granted power.
I am personally fond of the "king for a day" form of crowd-sourced moderation, where folks who are granted moderation say don't get to keep it long enough to get used to it, and learn how to abuse it.
Slashdot was far from perfect, but I still think the system of temporary moderators followed up by temporary metamoderators is pretty elegant compared to most of the alternatives I've seen.
The Problem with Wikipedia is that Wikipedia does not want to reflect truth, or reality or facts or objectivity however one might call it, but verifiability.
That is why they revert to false statements, even if they know so.
Insisting on verifiability is a necessary evil if Wikipedia wants to have even a modicum of credibility. Maybe the standards are far too stringent, but verifiability is tangible, and the 'truth' isn't.
And once one accepts that one can drop this stupid principle. For me it seems the only reason it exists is to pander the academic community. But it's a hopeless and one sided love.
It does not improve quality, it does not improve credibility, the best thing about it that is produces funny feedback loops.
Articles about NBA players are not a good example of this, but I can easily think of plenty of other topics which would involve extremely loud and opinionated fringe communities who are very motivated to broadcast their views to the world. I can't think of any way to limit the influence of these communities except by insisting that every article have impeccable sources.
The cost of this insistence on sources is that sometimes utterly obvious edits may be reverted unless they can be properly sourced, but I think it is an acceptable price for maintaining consistent standards of quality across the wiki.
Also, I don't agree that the system only exists to pander to academia. Every encyclopedia in the world has standards of quality to which their articles must conform. The only difference between these other encyclopedias and Wikipedia is the speed with which they are updated.
Now I don't know about you, but I don't go to Wikipedia to get the latest news. I go there to learn stuff with the belief that this stuff will be correct. I don't care if players' teams are updated hours instead of seconds after a trade. I care much more about whether this information is correct. Verifiability builds trust, and I don't see how Wikipedia could continue to exist without it.
Maybe WPs process (speaking as someone that's not edited WP here) need to change more towards the distributed VCS workflow: everyone can make changes, but changes gets voted in. Not sure if that is scalable either -- but perhaps what is need is a three-tier system: default to open (like any wiki, just make the change, done); somewhat moderated (anyone can suggest an edit, votes (with comment field) need to pass/accept the vote [essentially making the talk page a vote to pass/fail], and locked (protecting popular articles against spam, as today).
Or maybe what is needed is to accept that WP is "everone's wiki" (eg: it's a great source for tv series episode dates and synopsis -- not really something that should go in a traditional encyclopedia) -- in other words, classify some pages/sections as "not encyclopedia grade". It's hard to see how one can have one process that both accommodates NBA transfers, tv series episode synopsis, modern history of Palestine and Ukraine, and articles that document the current state of photovoltaics and quantum physics.
I notice you use --. Discussion around dashes is extensive. Here's just one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...
That single discussion is around 15,000 words. Here's a search for some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...
Note the search results helpfully give a word count - there are several hundred thousand extra words there.
Dash-discussion was not limited to the style guide and its talk page, or to the village pump. Disputes were escalated to ANI (a notice board where incidents for administrator attention can be raised); finally ending up at arbitration. (This is pretty severe level of dispute.) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...
PEDIT: I mean, just look at the article talk for "Mexican-American War" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_... - roughly 21,000 words.}
And that's about –,— and -. Now imagine how editors behave over contentious issues. (What are those islands called and who do they belong to? is a good example.)
Wikipedia stopped being an encyclopedia long ago: now it's just Bureaucracy Simulator 2015 with the AI cranked up to nightmare.
Anything that resembles good faith effort and isn't flagrantly wrong gets ok'd (though others have complained about me doing that... I'm supposed to at least verify it or something).
Not everyone can down vote, flag, etc.
Irony isn't lost on me.
If these restrictions are really affecting the quality of the articles in Wikipedia, we'll see the quality of the articles on the fork grow, at which point they can be merged back by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia _was_ forked, several times. The reason you dont seem to know about them are:
1. The added utility was not sufficient to make an impact strong enough to pull people away from wikipedia.
2. The added no utility to the fork at all or made things bad at Wikipedia even worse.
Wikipedia is like democracy, it is the worst free encyclopedia we have, except all the others.
Who has the time to compete against something that is free and has mindshare?
I think the drop in new-contributor retention is an intended effect, an example of the system succeeding.
I am a Wikipedian. My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia's administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias) will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the article topics. A new effort to build a free, online encyclopedia with lots of user input (which I would enthusiastically support) would have to figure out how to deal with this problem.
In respectful disagreement with some comments posted earlier in this thread, I think that most Wikipedia articles on many subjects are terrible, actively misleading and very poorly sourced. I am trying my best to fix articles on the topics for which I have the most reliable sources. (I have an office full of reference books for writing projects I do for my paid work.) It has been a long, slow slog since 2010 for me to improve the sourcing and make more neutral in point of view some of the most-read articles about the psychology of human intelligence, for example. Many Wikipedians don't read books, but only look up information on Google University, and think that anything that isn't found in an online source is not a verifiable fact. That makes the editing process very slow.
Without the biases of human beings, articles might start to say very strange and unwelcome things.
2) As a former WMF staffer - let me tell you they are well aware of the issues mentioned by Halfaker. They've been commissioning and releasing studies like this since 2009. They all had the same conclusion, that 2007 was the point where the community shifted, from collaboration to make cool stuff, to defense against vandalism.
It's not clear what the WMF can do to change this, without engaging in a "takeover" of the community or completely changing the model of how the wiki works. The former would alienate everybody, even the editors who want change. The latter is technically infeasible; even if they wrote new tools from scratch, Wikipedia interacts with everyone else's tools and plugins. Even if you change the id of a div you'll probably have a thousand people screaming at you the next day.
The WMF can propose that people be nicer, or write tools that are more welcoming to new users, but all that means is that you get to have your edit rejected with a prettier icon. The main problem is in the edit cycle itself, not the tool that's used.
Many editors think that Wikipedia is basically done, and repelling new users is actually a good thing. They aren't bad people -- they just think that encyclopedia quality is far more important than growing the community. So when they see something that seems wrong to them, they revert. Reversion, for Wikipedians, is really how they open the discussion. You're expected to keep going if you think your edit is good. But because we have a linear edit history, with only one live copy of the article, it feels like a slap in the face to the new user. Things that would pass muster for weeks or months, in the past, are reverted instantly. Often times the criticisms of the new edit are justified, but the standards are ludicrously high now. You'd better be ready to cite everything rigorously and be familiar with a zillion policies.
Not all of them are like this, but enough to make a gauntlet for new users. And those new users just go somewhere else.
As an aside, the first and only time I came across a bug in Mediawiki, back when I was pulling the nightly trunk, it turned out to be induced by a change of semantics in the minor version of PHP I had (which was well ahead of what Wikipedia was using at the time). Tim Starling not only weighed in, but took PHP to task. That semantic change in PHP was promptly reverted!
If you see him, say hi. He'll never remember me.
And hey -- if I'm not perfect by the standards of "No Original Research" or even "Neutral Point of View", I don't have a role that allows me to be punished. I just move things in the right direction (by Wikipedia's standards as I understand them) as far as I can be bothered to, then go on with my life.
Edit: the first sentence of the abstract indicates that they don't mean a literal decline in pure numbers :)
The software causes almost every problem that people complain about, mainly because it lets real or imagined experts have too much power over the page. It's simply easier for an editor to reject new information, than to go through the pain of adding it. In one case, I struggled for weeks to try to get a simple sentence into the site, only to be harassed by the site's administrators, when I challenged a particularly ambiguous rule. Entrenched editors such as William Connolley [2] on Global Warming, act as guardians for whole sections of the site, and do not allow any dissenting opinion, censoring and minimizing views that do not suit their agenda. So much of this is simply unnecessary in a better designed system.
As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information, which makes it increasingly difficult to add new information. Many of those rules, such as those for notability, conflict of interest, and reliable sources are ambiguous and arbitrarily applied, giving even more power to editors and admins, instead of content creators. This means that the site has become rigid and nobody wants to maintain it. The quality of pages is declining rapidly. It is also very easy to harass other people on the system, so much so that women and minorities are virtually excluded.
We have taken a different approach with great results. By avoiding the page-based metaphor and giving better tools to our editors have created a system that makes it easy to add information without being harassed. We also pay our writers and editors, and are implementing a revenue share system so they can actually get some benefit from their work. So far our writers have added 25,000 posts without a single edit war, and zero harassment. 80% of them are women.
[1] http://newslines.org [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley
[1] http://newslines.org/getting-started/
[2] http://newslines.org/newslines-rewards/
>The software causes almost every problem that people complain about
The real problem is:
>As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information
Wikipedia is not longer a place setup so people contribute information, it's a place set up to reject the addition of information (as you point out).
It's been a goal of my wiki to be the precise opposite, and it's been very interesting to see people go from "I hate wikis b/c of Wikipedia's stupid rules" to "huh, my edit was accepted" to "wow, this is extremely useful and collaborative".
I believe a wiki is not inherently bad, it's all the rejection rules they've built on top that are the problem.
I'd like to hear your reasons why you think this will be needed?
As long as the edit is something useful to traveling overland, it's allowed. That's the only rule, and I think it's the only rule that will ever be needed.
It's useful to note that this problem relates more to wiki-encyclopedias, and perhaps not as much to non-encyclopedic wikis. If you take a look at the C2 wiki or MeatballWiki, rejecting information make less of a problem even though they share the principle of anyone being able to edit anything on any page. MeatballWiki states that it is not an encyclopedia, but rather a set of pages which feature discussion. Because of this, there is less grounds to refuse or revert edits with the reason of being "off-topic" (because discussion usually means merging several related topics) or for being "biased" (again, a feature of discussion is to get one's personal viewpoint across).
In short, I don't think this is a problem due to wiki software or the open nature of wikis, but rather wikis-as-encyclopediae or even Wikipedia specifically. "Encyclopedia" places a huge set of rules as to what can be added and what not.
I wanted to know more about my representative to the state legislature. First I went to Wikipedia. It had a stub page, with only basic biographic information. Checking elsewhere, I found that the FBI and IRS raided his office, home, and business some time ago. His chief of staff, his business partner, and and a former staffer that became a judge were all convicted of fraud and/or tax evasion. Other than this, his political career was a whole lot of nothing.
So, having done this research, I put it into the relevant Wikipedia article, with appropriate references to news articles and legal documents, carefully noting that he himself was never charged with anything. Reading between the lines, I realize that the authorities tried to get his subordinates to roll over on him, but failed - but that kind of subjectivity doesn't belong in an encyclopedia article.
Anyway, less than a minute later, the change was reverted because of "vandalism". Whoever reverted it had either not even glanced at the change, or was a supporter of this politician, protecting his page from negative information. Probably the former, but who knows?
This was the last, and worst, example of me wasting my time trying to contribute to Wikipedia. I have had every single change I have ever made to Wikipedia reverted (going back years). Sometimes I have done it anonymously, sometimes I have logged in; it doesn't make any difference in my experience. What seems to matter is if you're willing to put in the time to master Wikipedia's bureaucratic procedure, which I am not. I just don't bother anymore. So to me, this article makes perfect sense.
But I have to admit that I still read Wikipedia all the time. It is without question, the most useful web site there is. It's not as comprehensive as I would like, and for subjective information it's actually quite bad, but I think that in general it seems to be getting better over time, on both counts. So I don't know if you can say it's declining.
By the way, despite him either being a crook, or merely employing crooks on his staff, I voted for him anyway, just last week. I really don't have a vendetta against this guy.
So, everyone -- including Mr. Halftaker -- when you publish anything, put a date on it!
By policy anybody should be able to submit draft edits, and these edits should hang around in a review queue for a large-ish group of reviewers to look them over and thumb-up, thumb-down them in a "pink" review. Any acceptance or rejection should require 3 or 4 thumbs up or down. If a thumbdown is given, the reviewer must state what's wrong with the edit (bad spelling/grammar/poor citation, whatever).
If the edit is ultimately rejected, the person who submitted it now has 3 or 4 pieces of feedback, hopefully one of them useful. Now they can fix the edit, resubmit and now it goes to the red review.
If the edit passes it goes to the red review.
Red review is the same, but if it passes it becomes "published" and the change is made. Red reviewers should be the top editors of WP. Because the pink review should filter out most of the crap, they'll hopefully be dealing with higher level stuff and their rejection rates should be lower. Only in cases where the edit somehow was really bad, should they reject it.
Now here's the other thing. If a red review results in a rejection, the submitter has to start over, but the editors that passed it in the pink review are penalized in some way. Perhaps a Karma system (e.g. to become a red reviewer, you must have pink reviewed correctly 500 edits or something, to become a pink reviewer you must have 200 edits succeed). Red reviewers with too high of a rejection/pass ratio may lose their editing powers as well in case some power-mad editor starts bulk deletionist policies.
This way people can both submit edits and be engaged as editors (so they can both see the crap that editors have to deal with and participate in improving WP at the meta-level).
Problem editors can also be flagged by contributors, an editor with some number of flags (say 10) by different submitters should be reviewed. After each review, the number of flags that will cause the next review should increase (maybe double or something). This will keep high quality editors in place and not waste time reviewing editor's work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PC2012
An important feature of my proposal is also to hold reviewers accountable...a notable feature that's missing in the current WP world. (I'm sure there's some purposefully byzantine process to do so today, but hell if a casual contributor can figure it out).
Kind of reminds me of Twitter banning all my games that let users tweet scores using their APIs as being too much like a full Twitter client. It's pretty obvious Twitter just aimed a bot at everyone and didn't actually look at who they were banning.
Yet, for all of this, I have never been able to understand why, whenever a discussion about Wikipedia comes up on HN, so many people complain about getting all their changes reverted. I have edited Wikipedia for years and I think at most 3 cases did I see something reverted for no good reason. Maybe this is because I edit in less controversial areas (computer science), or because most of my edits are just typographic fixes, or because I also edit on different Wikipedias (especially the French one), or because I'm vaguely familiar with some of the customs or policies?
It would be really nice if people complaining about bad reverts could provide links to the diff of their edits, the reverts, and the subsequent discussion if any. One nice thing about Wikipedia is that the history is always public, so if something valuable has been reverted for bad reasons, it can be seen, and added back; if someone seems to be discouraging new users from contributing, anyone can see it and let them know; and if there was a misunderstanding, maybe we can see that the two sides were of good faith.
It's a bit frustrating to see everyone complain but never have links to objective facts where you can see what went wrong and try to understand why.
* I knew personally that a regionally important corporate lobbying group was funding a ballot measure. (For the moment assume I am correct: this was not a 'secret': everyone in local politics knew this. It just wasn't 'official')
* I edited the organizations wikipedia page to state that the group was promoting the ballot measure.
The edit was reverted.
Was I going to spend time trying to track down obscure articles on local newspaper websites to prove this to wikipedia? No.
It just wasn't worth it.
I have come to the conclusion that the really interesting information is still in peoples heads.
I rarely find wikipedia turning up in my searches any more - in particular anything "controversial" or anything where there is moneyed interests involved who are interested in suppressing the other side.
I actually don't see a solution for Wikipedia. It is trying for some sort of 'objective' encyclopedia. This is well and good for questions like what is an atom in the 21st century. However, lets pretend that it is a 1901. "What is an atom?" was controversial and the back and forth that would have been interesting to know as a 1901 reader would be edited out of the 1901 version of Wikipedia.
Quite simply for me:
* something is interesting if it is "controversial" (global warming, health care, etc.)
* I am not interested in an "objective" sanitized view. I have a bias and I am not interested in hearing about the "controversy about global warming". Therefore I am biased toward sites predisposed to my perspective.
* Others have different preferred bias.
* Trying to come to a group decision where both sides are convinced that their side is correct is impossible ( in particular if one side is paid to not change their mind )
* If something is really important (i.e. job critical) I want to go to a source expert that I trust irregardless of what the 'crowd' thinks. I know what the standards I am applying to determine who I regard as the expert.
* rarely search for important things and find the wikipedia article interesting
Therefore:
* Wikipedia as a common community encyclopedia only works for the uninteresting 'factoids' that are not important
* I filter out wikipedia when looking at the google results when I am looking for something I really care about getting correct.