
Wikipedia: We’ve won. Now what? - davidgerard
http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2014/05/22/weve-won-no-tail-lights-now-what/
======
jballanc
Wikipedia is, at this point, truly "encyclopedic" in that it covers all manner
of topics, but I think it still has a loooong way to go before it can consider
itself _the_ universal reference.

The primary problem, as I see it, is consistency of voice/target audience. For
example, many math topics read as if they are the intro section of some
Mathematics graduate student's thesis, whereas most biology topics read like
some high school biology student's book report. Compare the article for
"Markov Process"
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_process](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_process)),
which starts with a nice introduction but quickly devolves into foreign
symbology, to the article for Caspase 9
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspase_9](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspase_9)),
one of the most important components in the process of apoptosis, itself one
of the most importent processes in growth, development, disease, cancer,
etc...which has barely 4 sentences and a dozen references.

~~~
beams_of_light
I'm guessing other encyclopedias have similar weak points. Wikipedia is a
truly fantastic resource, not just for academia, but for the world, and we
need to hold it up instead of beat it down.

~~~
akozak
The blog post invited feedback.

------
troymc
I've noticed a phenomenon happening quietly on Wikipedia: articles are being
copied to Wikia and then removed from Wikipedia.

For example, there's an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation titled
"Unfriendly Skies". Once upon a time, there was a Wikipedia article for that
episode. I know, because I contributed to it. Well, that articles is now
_gone_ from Wikipedia and the text I wrote is on Wikia.

[http://csi.wikia.com/wiki/Unfriendly_Skies](http://csi.wikia.com/wiki/Unfriendly_Skies)

I'm fine with Wikia copying what I wrote. The CC-BY-SA license allows it. I am
_not_ fine with Wikipedia deleting it.

Wikipedia needs to decide what it is. Is it the sum total of all knowledge or
is it just the subset that the deletionists deem "worthy" (or "notable" in
their jargon)?

~~~
sparkzilla
Actually, _you_ need to decide what Wikipedia is. An episode of CSI should not
be detailed in an encyclopedia. Do you really think that Wikipedia is the best
possible place to display that content on the whole internet? I'm not saying
that Wikia is much better, but at least it is targeted to the fans of the TV
show. So much of this "It's information so it should be on Wikipedia" appears
to be driven by ego, rather than what is good for the reader.

~~~
wpietri
Why shouldn't an episode of CSI be detailed? I'm an (inactive) Wikipedia
admin, and that meets my criteria. I don't care at all about the show, but
it's factual material that can be described neutrally from reliable sources
and verified by anybody who cares to take the time. It's also the kind of
thing that people provably refer to.

More broadly, I think pop-culture topics are great material for Wikipedia
because they serve as a gateway to deeper editing. Most people find editing
Wikipedia intimidating. But if you ask, "Hey, can you improve something about
the article on your favorite show?" that's a lot less scary, because a)
they're comfortable with the material, and b) it's pop culture, so they're not
as worried about getting it wrong.

~~~
tptacek
Some shows do have that level of coverage. Look at The Sopranos, for instance.

So it's useful to compare The Sopranos to CSI. One difference that is apparent
to me is that for any episode of the Sopranos, encyclopedia editors have a
much richer body of source material to draw on.

Gateways to editing are good, but gateways to "original research" editing are
just painful for the whole project; also, if you attract someone to an editing
task and them smack them over the head with how they're doing it wrong, you've
probably lost that editor forever.

Just a thought. I'm not sure about the distinction between CSI and The
Sopranos.

------
vezzy-fnord
_Wikipedia has won. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone actually consults,
ever. In fact, it’s the first in history that everyone actually reads, rather
than just having fond high school memories of._

This is a curse. The sheer power that Wikipedia has over shaping public
thought is disturbing. I'm curious if anyone has actually done studies on
this, and whether it's feasible to shape public interpretation of history by
making very subtle factual edits over long periods of time.

People don't really "read" Wikipedia, either. Not frequently. They primarily
skim through it, and very few actually follow the linked references, which, as
it turns out, do not always overlap with Wikipedia's summarized content.

As a practical example, although a minor one (it's the first that comes off
the top of my head), take the Nuwaubian Nation. They're an underground new
syncretic religious movements with some very colorful beliefs. For a long
time, their Wikipedia article was titled "Nuwaubianism". There was no such
thing as "Nuwaubianism," it was a completely made up term. Yet it has since
memetically spread throughout places such as the SPLC and RationalWiki,
despite Wikipedia long correcting it.

~~~
davidgerard
>This is a curse. The sheer power that Wikipedia has over shaping public
thought is disturbing. I'm curious if anyone has actually done studies on
this, and whether it's feasible to shape public interpretation of history by
making very subtle factual edits over long periods of time.

For anything important, the dialectic (i.e., edit-warring) produces something
that at least covers everything, even if the resulting article has awful
prose.

>Nuwabianism

Thankfully we killed "analogue disc record" before Wikipedia got popular.

~~~
glenra
> _For anything important, the dialectic (i.e., edit-warring) produces
> something that at least covers everything, even if the resulting article has
> awful prose._

That's not really true unless you include the talk page. On any sufficiently
contentious topic where there are two or more sides, what happens quite often
is that one faction has more persistent editors _successfully_ adding slant
and sources in their direction and keeping out slant and sources in the other
direction. You have to look at the talk page to see what facts and points of
view are being actively omitted from the main page.

A true NPOV is hard to maintain, because people often tend to think their own
point of view is "fact" and the other side is "fringe". People also seem to
fear that to allow a point of view to stand and be explained legitimizes it.

I've noticed this phenomenon most in articles involving climate or medicine.

~~~
davidgerard
Wikipedia's epistemology is shitty, shallow and brittle and it's trivial to
find cases where it breaks.

However, it's observably true that it's almost always enough almost all of the
time, and certainly enough to have won utterly and not have even many readers
complaining.

~~~
glenra
Hmm, I just did a spot-check and medicine (including alternative medicine and
supplements) seems to be getting better - the articles I recalled being
terrible have improved. Climate is still pretty broken - the article on
"climategate" is exhibit A - but maybe that'll come around eventually too. One
can hope.

~~~
davidgerard
WikiProject Medicine has come down _hard_ on anything even tangentially
medicine-related, including alternative medicine practices. (Although
wikiprojects don't "own" content areas, obviously sensible application of the
content rules in a manner anyone not stupid would support is likely to pass.)

~~~
glenra
Right, that might have been the problem. The thing I had noticed as an issue
is that if you walk down the "supplements" aisle at Whole Foods or whatever,
you'll find hundreds of pill bottles with cryptic labels (eg, "Tonalin CLA" or
"Garcinia Cambogia") with recommended dosage info ("take twice a day before
meals!"), and _no info whatsoever_ explaining what the product is _for_. If
it's on the shelf, thousands of people must think this product is good for
_something_ but the FDA won't let the manufacturer say what.

So you might think you could type the product name into wikipedia and see
what's up. When I do that, what I want to know first of all is:

(1) What is this product _for_? Why do people take it, what benefit do they
expect to obtain?

(2) What _evidence_ supports the claims that advocates make for this product?
What's the backstory behind how this product came into the public eye?

(3) Last but not least, what does mainstream medicine have to say about it?

When you actually look up these products in wikipedia, most of what you get is
(3). (2) is nonexistent and (1) is at best given short shrift.

I'm sure the editors who want to keep any claims related to what they see as
"quack" products out of wikipedia are well-meaning but I think they are
misguided and thereby do more harm than good. It'd be better if wikipedia
pages reliably told both sides. Then supplement enthusiasts would learn to go
to wikipedia first where they might _see_ the medical caveats alongside the
info they originally seek. But if wikipedia only tells one side, the
nuts/enthusiasts just learn to avoid wikipedia and instead seek out
alternative sources that DO include info of type (1) and (2), even at the cost
of omitting (3).

~~~
davidgerard
Sounds like a good idea to me. If you think third-party sources for this stuff
are findable, then
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:MED](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:MED)
might be a place to suggest it, with negative and positive examples (something
that would inspire volunteers to take on your idea).

~~~
glenra
I'm positive third-party sources are findable to answer at a minimum "what is
this supplement supposed to do and who is supposed to take it and why do
people think it's useful". I'd expect to find that stuff best laid out in
books like this:

[http://www.amazon.com/NutriSearch-Comparative-Nutritional-
Su...](http://www.amazon.com/NutriSearch-Comparative-Nutritional-Supplements-
Professional/dp/097325386X/)

Thanks for the link suggestion - I might go ahead and do that.

------
andrenotgiant
Something that worries me - Checking facts in Wikipedia articles becomes more
difficult as it gets more popular. An incorrect fact on Wikipedia can get
picked up and dissipated out into articles and reports.

That FIRST time it happens, the error is traceable: You can confirm that the
error was published on Wikipedia BEFORE the external Article, and invalidate
it as proof.

BUT the external article never disappears. Years later a new Wikipedia editor
may come along and re-insert the incorrect fact into Wikipedia based on the
article.

~~~
stephengillie
How is this different from an incorrect fact being written in a research
paper, then referenced again and again for centuries? The battle against
incorrect facts is yet another struggle we're always facing.

With this tool, people have at least _some_ information. Which is worse,
incorrect data or no data? With incorrect data, at least the mental framework
gets established.

~~~
pliny
Incorrect data that you think is correct is obviously worse than no data:

a) You're likely to stop looking for better data once you have it.

b) You're more likely to act on it than acting on no data, and the work you do
based on your incorrect data is likely to be either be less useful than is
acceptable (otherwise you would have acted on no data at all and gotten a
similar result) or it could even be harmful/counterproductive, depending on
how wrong the data is.

c) Worst of all, you might help disseminate the incorrect data (and perhaps
even argue against the correct along the way), compounding the damage
demonstrated above.

------
fredsted
I'm not part of the Wikipedia community, but a thing I don't understand about
wikipedia is the excessive deletionism. Plain text is not that expensive to
host. Keeping this in mind, if an article is not vandalism, spam or nonsense
what reasons are there to deleting it? If there is actually a vote happening
to delete an article, why not just keep it: there are actually people who care
enough to vote on it. I don't think that form of authoritarianism belongs on a
website like Wikipedia. It's very demoralising for new users seeing the
article they care about and spent time on getting deleted by a single click
from an administrator. Even administrators quit after working on Wikipedia for
years due t frustration with deletionism and similar issues. In my opinion,
"too much" information wins by default. Before wikipedia is "all information"
and not "information others find notable", there's still work to do.

~~~
wpietri
Hosting cost is the very least of the concerns.

One important one is impact. Most people treat Wikipedia content as "probably
true", so any time where the truth of something matters, zero content is
better than bad content. That's true for all sorts of scientific, medical, and
commercial content.

Another is impact on living people. The folks who wrangle the rules for
biographies of people still alive [1] have put a lot of thought into
recognizing the impact that Wikipedia articles can have on people. Having
nothing is often better than having a bad article.

A third is self-promotion and vanity. People are willing to write endlessly
about themselves. Bands formed by teens in their garages, companies trying to
promote themselves, blatant spam, subtle commercial manipulation: Wikipedia
doesn't need that.

A fourth is maintainability. The number of active Wikipedia editors is modest.
Some sorts of content attract new editors. But quite a lot won't. I think it's
often better for Wikipedia to have no article than a bad article that isn't
going to get better soon.

And that points toward a fifth thing: the value of the Wikipedia brand.
Wikipedia won the reference race because of its quality. It is enormously
valuable for the world to have a single, high-quality factual resource. The
brand should be maintained. People can (and certainly do) disagree on where to
draw the line between crap and not-crap. But almost nobody disagrees that
there is quite a lot of non-encyclopedic material (e.g., [2], [3]), and that
the Internet is plenty big enough to host that somewhere other than Wikipedia.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not)

~~~
alecdbrooks
I think you're absolutely right on impact and self-promotion, but I don't
think Wikipedia's brand is about quality. Or at least, not primarily about
quality.

>Wikipedia won the reference race because of its quality.

Weren't convenience and quantity important factors and more important ones? To
me the value of Wikipedia is that virtually any topic is discussed reasonably
consistently with reasonable quality. If I specifically need quality, I'll
look to the article's sources or find my own.

~~~
tptacek
When you think about "quality" on Wikipedia, don't just think about any given
article in isolation, but instead step back and look at the bigger picture:
for instance, how every Wikipedia article about a movie has a similar
structure, or how easy it is to hop from one species in _Hymenoptera_ to the
next. You also have to look at the things that _aren 't_ there to appreciate
the degree of work that goes into making the project coherent.

Another instructive place to start reading about WP quality is the Featured
Article process; in particular, try clicking into some of the discussions
about individual FA candidates.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles)

------
sparkzilla
Pride comes before the fall. Wikipedia is in terminal decline because the
software and design sucks, the number of editors is declining, and the core
structure of how information is treated is unreliable. For those interested,
check my series on the site's problems:
[http://newslines.org/blog/](http://newslines.org/blog/)

------
rsync
No idea who this commenter is, on the OPs page, but he says it very well:

"I don’t think that Wikipedia can be as comprehensive as you say unless and
until the significance requirement is lowered. There are lots of interesting
and relevant articles that are killed by exacting admins who think that
Wikipedia’s scope shouldn’t be quite as, well, encyclopedic, as others.
Wikipedia can be the place for well researched obscure knowledge as much as it
can be an accessible place to find the famous stuff.

Indeed, the more obscure information it supports, the more useful it will be
in the long term as an accretive force for knowledge. Once someone has created
a certain page for something obscure, over time others will add to that
knowledge and make it more valuable."

Inclusionism is something wikipedia needs to work toward. Deletionism is an
admission of failure - an inability to reasonably deal with information. I
hope they can find a way to fix this problem.

~~~
tptacek
Here is the AfD page for April 20, 2014 --- I went back a random ways so that
we could see an AfD log where most (all?) of the discussions had been closed.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2014_April_20)

So, what I'd be interested in is a discussion that drills into specifics.
Which of the deleted articles --- the ones headlined in red --- are
"admissions of failure, an inability to reasonably deal with information"?

~~~
dingaling
I spent some time reading through that list and it just depressed me even more
about the current direction of Wikipedia.

Other than the reasonable deletion of two promotional articles for books (
'Formation of Postcolonial Englishes: Theories' and 'Secret Fantasies' ) that
list consists of people arguing about 'notability'.

That is begging the question, since notability is what Wikipedia defines and
which is the core problem. What the outside World is saying is: remove the
notability test. It has become so abused by the administators that they should
forfeit it; they are not responsible enought to be trusted with it.

~~

Here's an example of one that was deleted for 'non-notability':

 _Former minor league baseball announcer. Has not received any well-known
award or honor nor has he made any widely recognized contribution to
broadcasting._

Which just illustrates how amorphous this 'notability' concept has become; it
can be redefined at will to sataisfy any argument. So that individual was
notable, but not notable enough on a global scale? Might as well rename
'notability' to 'is as famous as Tom Cruise' in that case.

~~

Here's another one, this individual had references in media but subjectively
someone felt that wasn't good enough:

 _The Plymouth article goes a bit deeper but its more of the "local boy living
the dream" variety which isnt enough to satisfy GNG._

There should be no opportunity for subjectivity. Was the individual referenced
by independent media articles? Yes? Good enough.

------
jchrisa
Quoted from the last comment on the article:

Wikipedia editing should be done within a set of work processes, which can be
semi-automated (a “requested article” collects citations, then becomes a draft
article, then is promoted to regular article status, with the software
preventing duplicate efforts, for example).

~~~
_delirium
There's sort-of a process like that, but the in-progress articles are still
articles, vs. being explicitly marked as drafts or not-yet-articles or
something of that sort. The progression is something like this (from needs-
most-work upwards):

1\. Articles explicitly tagged with a warning at the top (needs references,
might be biased, reads like an advertisement, doesn't represent a worldwide
view of the subject, is out of date, etc.). Here the reader is warned that the
article needs work and should be taken with a large grain of salt.

2\. Default "regular" articles. These are supposed to be at least passable,
free of the obvious problems in the previous category. Though sometimes they
just haven't been properly marked. The reader should treat them with
appropriate caution, looking for references for claims (especially any
surprising claims), corroborating with other sources, and assuming that the
article may be incomplete.

3\. Articles marked as "good articles" [1]. These have been reviewed by one or
more editors, and are considered to be well-referenced and reasonably
complete. They're marked by a little green plus in the upper-right. A
conservative use of Wikipedia could be to treat anything at a lower level than
this one as a draft article, in various stages of draftiness.

4\. Articles marked as "featured articles" [2]. These are supposed to be
checked by multiple editors, including at least one expert in the field, and
considered to be excellent examples of a Wikipedia article, with no obvious
deficiencies. They're marked by a gold star in the upper-right.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_articles)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles)

~~~
im3w1l
Anyone can add a {{good article}}. I just did without even logging in. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox)

EDIT: permalink
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&oldid=610077870)

------
yiedyie
Encarta gave up arms, and Britannica is struggling. Wikipedia is more accurate
and rapid than a random search, but it definitely should not be the last word
on any matter but rather be a starting point to familiarize with terms and
what to search for, and that is the best way any encyclopedia can be anyway, a
starting point.

I also love that there are at least 2 solutions for offline use:

[http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/in...](http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index)

[http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page](http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page)

------
VLM
"This gives a conceptual model to work to: Wikimedia as the sum of all
university libraries."

I can't imagine a concise concept designed to cause greater offense amongst
the deletionists. That must be why I like it so much.

~~~
davidgerard
Wikimedia != Wikipedia.

~~~
marcosdumay
It will be funny if (not long in the future) Wikibooks had a more wide
coverage of topics than Wikipedia.

~~~
davidgerard
It'd be a DAMN FINE THING!

Commons is _amazing_. Its main problem in replacing Getty Images is that the
search isn't so good. is that (This is something WMF is seriously working on,
but I couldn't say the problem's cracked yet. There's also a cultural bias
against treating categories as tags rather than a ridiculously-specifically-
detailed twig of a category tree.)

------
e12e
> In fact, it’s the first in history that everyone actually reads, rather than
> just having fond high school memories of.

What an odd way of framing wikipedia. As a source of just information (the
articles themselves) -- wikipedia is entirely unremarkable[1].

The fact that it is the first encyclopedia everyone can look into the
editorial process of (history and talk facets), and _contribute to_ (edit) --
is what makes it interesting.

Sadly, I have the impression wikipedia has been largely unsuccessful in
challenging people to be more critical of what they read, and more confident
in what they observe -- than it by rights should have been. Everyone that has
a passing interest in encyclopedia knows that even Britannica contains errors
and that it, like any other text, is shaped by sometimes ulterior motives in
its editing process -- it's just that unless you go crazy with glue and
scissors, you'll have a really hard time "fixing" an error in Britannica. And
if you did, it'll be hard for readers to compare "your" version with earlier
versions.

Consider the fact that Britannica has been in print since 1768 -- imagine how
much many of the articles will have evolved since then -- and why. Now imagine
wikipedia around the year 2200. You could go back an have a look at how the
articles for "terrorism" and "surveillance" evolved from 2000 to 2050 for
example.

[1] Entirely unremarkable might be a bit strong, it certainly is very vast --
but so is the Internet.

------
tiquorsj
If Wikipedia becomes/is the source. How do you get around the 3rd party
primary source requirement?

~~~
davidgerard
The model does presume that primary and secondary sources will continue to be
created.

These days, what actually happens is that people create third-party sources
specifically to get things into Wikipedia. sigh.

~~~
marcosdumay
Because of its format, Wikipedia is not a good original research repository.

Creating a source just to cite it in Wikipedia is a good thing, not a bad one,
I think they are quite right on having that rule.

~~~
davidgerard
Sometimes it's good, more usually it's companies getting PR stories placed in
news outlets as evidence they warrant an article.

(This, by the way, is something that can sometimes not work out so well.)

~~~
saraid216
If only we had non-profit organizations getting fact-checking stories placed
in news outlets as evidence.

------
finin
Wikidata, a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by humans and
machines alike:
[http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page](http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page)

