

Wikipedia is a wild success and an utter failure - stdbrouw
http://stdout.be/2011/10/19/a-wild-success-and-an-utter-failure/

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jonnathanson
The problem with Wikipedia -- one that stems from, and compounds, all of the
problems mentioned in this piece -- is that the wilderness has been cleared.
The fun, groundbreaking contribution work is done. Much of -- if not most of
-- the big, foundational, crystallized knowledge base on the site has been
written. All that remains now are small(er) updates to limited subfields, rote
listmaking, current events updates (never Wikipedia's strong suit in the first
place), and editing. Plenty of editing.

None of those things is inherently fun for most people. Your average internet
user -- someone who would have loved contributing a fresh article ten years
ago -- probably has little desire to devote an appreciable amount of time to
curating and categorizing other people's work. But yet, there's a vocal
minority of users who _do_ enjoy such things, and those are the "procedural
whackjobs" of which you speak.

Call this the rise of the Editorial Class. Wikipedia is now dominated by a
small percentage of editors, who revert new work by contributors, and whose
arcane rules, lists, procedures, politics, and supercillious disdain make
contributing fresh material more a labor than a labor of love. And, lest we
think this is noble work put forth by self-sacrificing custodians of
knowledge, let me say that my encounters with such people have rarely left an
impression of maturity, or even competence. No, for a lot of them, it's a
petty power trip. (To wit: one of my articles -- thoroughly researched and
painstakingly written -- was eventually lobbied for deletion, successfully, by
a little clique of editors calling itself the "Counter Vandalism Unit." As far
as I could tell, this is a group of grown-ass adults playing "24" dress-up on
Wikipedia, complete with their own badge-like logo, who sadly wield a decent
amount of editorial control over the site).

On the flipside, as you point out, some of this works in Wikipedia's favor.
More timely sources of knowledge, like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, search
engines, etc., can beat out Wikipedia's relatively antiquated categorization
systems and contribution mechanics fairly handily. But, by and large, most
people contributing "content" or "information" through such channels are not
really cognizant that that's what they're doing (witness the big uproar over
Facebook's data collection; people are inherently surprised that they've been
contributing data to any sort of repository of such). Rarely does someone
tweet, or post an FB status update, thinking he's contributing to the grand
collection of all human knowledge. So the sum total of all the knowledge-data
generated outside of Wikipedia, more current and possibly even more
interesting though it may be, is still a lot more flab than muscle. That will
change eventually, as data mining and contextualization technologies improve.
For the time being, however, the lack of an organizing principle similar to
Wikipedia's, outside of Wikipedia, will keep Wikipedia relevant. Not
indefinitely, but for quite a few years to come.

~~~
yread
>current events updates (never Wikipedia's strong suit in the first place)

I disagree. Whenever there is something big happening, after a couple of days
it gets really difficult to follow just from the news (e.g. the Japanese
tsunami, Arabian spring). I always go to Wikipedia and get a reasonably good
overview with up to date information. I guess it only works for the really
high profile events which interest the editors though...

~~~
tommorris
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events>

------
jessriedel
If there's one piece of framework Wikipedia needs, it's a centralized database
for citations. That database should contain every book, article, poem, etc.
that's cited in any Wikipedia article, and I should be able to re-cite an
entry with a single number or tag... _without_ having to re-enter the name of
the darn publisher myself.

How much money would it take to make this happen?

~~~
wpietri
Part of the problem here is that Wikipedia has traditionally had way more
labor than money. So the notion of spending money to save labor -- common
everywhere else -- isn't really the default Wikipedia reflex. That seems to be
changing some in the last few years, but between the code and the data there's
a lot of inertia there.

~~~
Thrymr
In this case, what's really needed is high-level labor (organization, and
maybe programming), and not low-level labor (typing in the damn references by
hand). I guess it's easier to get volunteers to do the latter, and the "high-
level" volunteers are mostly editors and wiki-policy wonks, not thinking about
appropriate data structures and implementation.

It is striking how little Wikipedia has advanced technically since it started,
compared with its enormous growth of content.

~~~
wpietri
I think the enormous growth of content (and usage) is exactly why Wikipedia
hasn't advanced much technically. In its early years it was a total shoestring
operation, mainly focused on keeping the site up under incredible traffic.
Just surviving that is a titanic victory.

However, that victory came at a cost: the software fell way behind. The
community picked up the slack, making a fantastic reference site despite the
handicaps. But many of the ways they did that (e.g., duplicating references
all over the place) make improving the software even harder.

Now that Wikimedia Foundation staffing is starting to catch up, I'm sure some
of these things will get better. But it's definitely going to take a while.

------
DanBC
The article doesn't mention the huge number of adolescents using twinkle (and
other tools) to make very many changes very quickly.

Seeing editors being proud of the number of articles they've had deleted, or
the number of reverts they've made, is pretty sickening.

~~~
tommorris
A lot of articles get deleted because they're crap (CSD etc.). Yes,
deletionism can go too far, and crowing about how much one has deleted is
hardly the epitome of virtue, but keeping the site clean of spam, vandalism
and crap is a good thing.

~~~
hugh3
Sometimes when I'm really bored I read the Articles for Deletion. It's always
enough to satisfy myself that... yep, the articles being deleted really _are_
crap.

I admire wikipedia editors, the gnomes of our age, working tirelessly on a
boring, unglamorous task which gives them satisfaction.

------
jerf
Wikipedia's secret is that it manages to make the average contribution very
slightly positive on average, then makes up the rest in volume. When
everything is cumulative like that, the fact that the sum total of Wikipedia
contributions do indeed contain a lot of crap doesn't matter, since "good -
bad" still comes out quite positive.

It's a delicate balance, though.

------
twopounder
The true achievement of Wikipedia is not in its content, but its groundwork.
Every company should maintain its own internal and external wikis, even if
only employees can access or modify them.

It simplifies distribution of documentation and files in a very user friendly
way.

And let's face it. Whack jobs write books and news paper columns too.
Wikipedia has a surprising amount in common with college text books.

~~~
eru
We know that Wikis are useful. Wikipedia wasn't the first wiki.

~~~
twopounder
Unless its 2001 and your company's documentation is stored on a shared drive.
Heck, when I graduated in 2009, my college was still keeping all of its
documents in a maze of ntfs shares.

You don't have to be the first to lay the groundwork either.

------
hugh3
To me, wikipedia is like a dog walking on its hind legs (as Samuel Johnson
said of women preachers). The point isn't that it isn't done very well, the
point is that it works at all.

If you'd asked me, at the start of the wikipedia project, whether it would
ever grow to be a useful resource I'd have said "hell no, it'll just get taken
over by idiots, bad content will drive out good, you can never put together a
useful resource by collaborative editing, it's a pipe dream". And yet here we
are, in a situation where wikipedia is actually a damn good resource on just
about any subject of interest.

Almost all the people who complain about wikipedia are people who are
attempting to edit it. And some of them may have a point... while others are
attempting to insert stuff that doesn't fit the guidelines. But as long as
you're using it in read-only mode, what's to complain about?

~~~
nitrogen
_But as long as you're using it in read-only mode, what's to complain about?_

The deletion of noteworthy information about popular programming languages is
one example.

~~~
hugh3
Which one is that?

Anyway, like I said, wikipedia ain't perfect, but it's amazing how far from
terrible it is.

~~~
nitrogen
Alice
([http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+a...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+alice)),
plus other important pages:
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+d...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+deletion)

I realize there's a tremendous amount of spam, vanity pages, vandalism, and
useless content the editors have to deal with, but it's still disturbing to
read about the occasional outbreaks of deletionism that affect Wikipedia,
while corporate and political whitewashing goes apparently unchecked (I don't
have a specific reference in mind).

------
rmc
Wikipedia is Web 2.0. User generated content online, crowd sourced, the whole
lot. However for sources, they only look at early 20th centuary tech, like
newspapers or books. They don't value internet sources nearly as much.

~~~
tommorris
That's because however much people would like it to be otherwise, "I wrote it
up on my blog" is really not the same as "I had a book published by Cambridge
University Press".

~~~
rmc
But not all newspapers are the same as "Cambridge University Press". Here's an
article from the very popular UK 'newspaper' The Daily Mail saying that
Facebook gives you cancer:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1149207/How-
using-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1149207/How-using-
Facebook-raise-risk-cancer.html)

