
The Decline of Wikipedia: As More People Rely on It, Fewer People Create It - uladzislau
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/?
======
owenmarshall
Interesting read, and it reminds me of a really annoying experience I once had
with one of the StackExchange sites.

There was a question about Emacs, and the answer was a chunk of elisp that was
wrong - one of the closing parens was in the wrong place, so it caused an
error. OK, easy fix! But I don't have enough karma to edit answers on
StackExchange and have them submit cleanly, so I submitted an 'edit
suggestion' or whatever they're called.

Unfortunately edit suggestions can't be submitted unless they have at least
_five characters_ of difference - seems like a fair rule to prevent tiny
changes but five characters of difference can be a world of difference in
elisp.

So I pad out the edit suggestion with a comment that added some value, only to
have the suggestion rejected by a user who freely admitted to having "no emacs
experience" because he "didn't think it looked valuable".

\--

It also reminds me of a conversation I had with a professor of mathematics
that taught one of my classes. He said he started and stopped editing
Wikipedia the same day - when one of his changes to a graph theory article was
reverted by someone who was "a computer repair technician" because of some
Wiki-rule.

It's very possible that he _did_ break the rule and his edit _should 've_ been
undone, but at the same time he's the editor that Wikipedia _desperately needs
to attract_.

\--

Sites like this have Harrison Bergeron's Handicapper General ensuring that all
contributions are seen as "equal", so it's not at all surprising that the
article identifies one of the more comprehensive Wikipedia articles as "List
of Pokemon".

Wikipedia needs to figure out how to say that the guy who wrote a paper with
Erdös gets more leeway on mathematical articles than a guy who repairs
computers all day.

~~~
brianpgordon
I bet that your professor tried to write content from his own knowledge rather
than strictly from published sources.

The problem is that anyone can claim to be a math professor with expertise on
graph theory. For this reason, everyone - even experts - need to cite sources
in order to add content to Wikipedia.

~~~
ISL
Physicist here: I stopped making contributions to Wikipedia after a few edits
and reversions, I stopped too. Furthermore, the danger that something I'd put
a lot of time into could be replaced meant that it's not worth sinking a lot
of time into it. The citation policy makes a ton of pragmatic sense, and I
understand why it's there. It's an unfriendly way to meet the Wikipedia
community. (an alternative way to address a "citation needed" concern is to
presume that the editor is correct, and go looking for the citation)

In addition, I'm not aware of any way to be compensated, even by citation, for
putting time and care into Wikipedia. As academics, we give a lot away for
free (want to know some of our most-clever trade secrets? Just read our
papers, where we detail everything we do so you can replicate it), but our
compensation ultimately comes from what we can show others as our contribution
to society. To anyone considering me for a job, promotion, or tenure, a well-
written introductory article on precision tests of gravitation isn't worth a
hundredth of one precision test of gravity published in Physical Review
Letters.

For a single contributor, Wikipedia is ephemeral, but the academic literature
is effectively permanent.

~~~
fluxon
Please come back and make suggestions on Talk pages, rather than directly
edit. There, you can actively discuss, cite sources (your own and hopefully
others), and make real contributions which will last. Experts have a special
kind of conflict of interest: their possible bias when directly editing.
Discussing will moderate and ameliorate that bias, before it gets into the
article. This approach will help as science advances and understanding deepens
and changes: recent advances in physics prove this. We need your help; just
not in direct editing. Your contributions in Talk will be real and welcomed
(and maybe disputed, but never deleted) by our more experienced, sane,
editors. (typo corrected)

~~~
barrkel
Frankly, I'd rather not have the Talk page or the "editors", and a lot more
actual data input.

The barrier for entry to writing articles has to be way, way lower than it is;
it shouldn't require a negotiation with a bunch of self-important petty
bureaucrats.

What those self-important guys (they're mostly guys) miss is that the best is
the enemy of the good. Their misguided approach to quality actively prevents
improvement.

Outside the high-edit-count word-shufflers, I'd classify contributions to WP
in four buckets: (a) substantial contributors who know a lot about a little
and are able to significantly add or improve content; (b) trivial fixers, who
fix grammar / spelling mistakes, or otherwise make tiny casual edits; (c)
mindless vandals, who work some adolescent scrawl somewhere in the text, with
varying degrees of visibility; and (d) the really sneaky stuff; well-written
fakes, PR companies, reputation massaging, etc.

The guys in (a) need to be preserved at all costs. I think the editors are
concerned about (d), but the trouble is that they're doing it in a rules-bound
way, but because knowing the rules and right WP:INCANTATIONS is a source of
power, the rules become a thing in themselves, rather than a last resort for
eliminating (d).

I'd much rather have a more complete, comprehensive WP than one that's even
90% correct.

~~~
mjn
New contributions to established articles should often be discussed on the
talk page _because_ of (a) though, and the fact that people sometimes just
come in and start making major changes without looking at the work that's
already been done is one thing that actively drives experts away. After a few
history experts discuss the conflicting sources and an article reaches a semi-
stable state after considerable discussion and additional research, someone
will come in and make major changes to the article without reading any of
that, usually based on an incomplete-at-best understanding of the historical
sources, and sometimes reintroducing popular myths that had been previously
removed after library research turned up good sources on the subject.
Sometimes there are legitimate objections and an article should be changed.
But also, sometimes, certain questions or disputes or uncertainties have
already been discussed in previous versions of the article (often by
historians who work in this field!), and it's worth understanding the work
that's already been done to get the article to its present state, before
rehashing the same issues.

A number of historians have given up on Wikipedia because it's _too_ easy for
people to edit articles without discussion. An expert will spend a bunch of
time working out a solid, cited article that integrates the best current
understanding, often in discussion with other people, then come back 6 months
later and find their work has basically bitrotted. In which case, why bother
doing the hard work of hashing out a good article in the first place? Some
academics therefore prefer a much _more_ bureaucratic encyclopedia model,
where all changes must first be proposed and then vetted by an expert in the
subject who "owns" the article; Citizendium and Scholarpedia are two attempts
to build that model of encyclopedia.

~~~
kstenerud
In that case, would it not make sense to have metadata associated with a
particular section, detailing the final consensus and how it was reached? Kind
of like a comment describing a non-obvious section of code. Otherwise you have
the equivalent of telling someone "Before you modify this code, look through
the entire git history to see why it's the way it is today".

~~~
mjn
Yeah, there have been some discussions of that, but nobody has put together a
MediaWiki plugin to do it afaik. Better annotation of regions in general is a
longstanding wishlist, so discussions or even citations (or requests for
citations) could be attached to a region of text. But then there are problems
like how to handle annotations and arbitrary editing/splitting/moving of
regions.

As a low-tech solution, you can actually put HTML comments in the source code,
which people occasionally do, but it doesn't seem to be a very well-known
option. <!-- Do NOT change birth date to XX/XX/XXXX, see talk page --> kind of
things sometimes appear in the source. I haven't seen them used for longer
discussions, though, just one-line "hey, watch out before you do X" things.

On contentious articles with a long history of debate people will sometimes
write a summary on the talk page, so you don't have to read through the whole
history of the discussion. On most articles, though, the talk page isn't huge,
so I find it easy to glance at before making changes.

~~~
sesqu
If you have a problem with experts disagreeing about facts, arguing over them,
reaching a consensus, and then other "experts" starting up the argument again
- it really sounds like you're doing a poor job of communicating the
researched consensus in the relevant article.

When that sort of stuff happens, I think you should make sure the incorrect
information is referenced in the article as a misconception, or just have the
correct information associated with citations. False information should only
be erased if it is not "in the wild", so to speak.

------
muaddirac
An ex of mine edited a wiki article and added false information to it. I think
that sort of thing is very harmful, so I removed it. A day later the edit was
reverted. I tried a few months later. It, too, was reverted.

I had someone else try. It was reverted. I tried once more, probably two years
later (after the "fact" had time to propagate throughout the internet), and it
too was reverted.

The reason it was reverted every time? Apparently I didn't sufficiently
explain the edit. It didn't require explanation: it was an uncited,
demonstrably false fact. It asserted the existence and publication of a book
(in recent history) that was never published. It is impossible to find a copy
of it. It does not exist. I didn't know how to explain it any better than
that.

A few months ago, I saw that someone finally noticed it was fake and removed
it for good.

~~~
fluxon
Thank you for the effort. Good edit summaries are really helpful to other
editors - that fact is not well explained as you're trying to save an edit.
It's a frequently thankless job. Now (thanks to concerted effort by the
Wikilove project) thanking an editor for a specific edit is now easy and tidy
with a single click of "thank" in the edit history. They're notified by an
upcount in their red notification box - no messy Talk page spam. My point is
that little things are gradually improving. Most people needing live help
editing Wikipedia can access IRC easily using this freenode webchat link:
[http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikipedia-en-
help](http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikipedia-en-help) . You really
don't have to wonder about why edits are reverted - you can ask in real time.
This help channel is intended for new editors, but edit warring is certainly a
topic well asked about.

~~~
gscott
I edited a Wikipedia page yesterday, gave a very strong reason in the edit
comment. 20 hours later my edit is still there... The system isn't totally
broken just many people watching the new edits for spam and other things and
they might get a bit overzealous sometimes.

------
ilamont
_The results paint a numerical picture of a community dominated by
bureaucracy. Since 2007, when the new controls began to bite, the likelihood
of a new participant’s edit being immediately deleted has steadily climbed.
Over the same period, the proportion of those deletions made by automated
tools rather than humans grew. Unsurprisingly, the data also indicate that
well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still be editing Wikipedia
two months after their first try. ... One idea being tested offers newcomers
suggestions about what to work on, steering them toward easy tasks such as
copyediting articles that need it. The hope is this will give people time to
gain confidence before they break a rule and experience the tough side of
Wikipedia._

People want to create content, not fix other people's grammatical mistakes.

Here's another idea: Instead of figuring out new processes, badges, sandboxes,
help zones, and polite ways of saying "your contribution doesn't meet
notability requirements and needs at least n media citations. Please refer to
Policy X before resubmitting", why not attack the hydra head on? Determine how
to eliminate bureaucracy. Don't keep adding to it.

~~~
swalling
_People want to create content, not fix other people 's grammatical mistakes._

Hey, I'm the product manager for that work (also quoted in the article). I
thought I might mention that we've A/B tested our task suggestion workflow
extensively, and the answer is definitively that Wikipedians want to do both
things. I can share links to all our research, which is public, if you want.

There are basically two kinds of people who sign up for Wikipedia: those with
something to do in mind, and those who want a suggestion of where to start.
The evidence we've gathered so far shows that many new contributors like being
able to get started and learn the ropes doing something that's easy and not
intimidating. They have a positive first experience editing, and then they
typically move on to other tasks, having gained more confidence. We are giving
people options, not requiring anyone to do N number of grammatical fixes in
order to earn badges, privileges or anything of the sort.

I should also note that among more advanced editors, there is actually a
popular Guild of Copyeditors that does highly-coordinated copyediting drives
on Wikipedia. Not to mention all the peer review for quality that happens in
other places. Never underestimate the interest of grammar nazis in fixing your
comma usage. ;)

------
vlasev
Look at the Wikipedia article on the Russian Armed Forces[1]. Look at the
budget of 907 billion dollars (44% GDP) for 2013. That's ridiculous isn't it?
I tried changing it to the proper 90.7 billion (4.4% of GDP) but it reverted
back. I tried again and same thing happened. I rest my case.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Armed_Forces)

~~~
jamesbritt
I think you won. I see 90.7.

~~~
vlasev
A small but important victory

------
brianpgordon
Well all of the low-hanging fruit is taken. A contributor has to resort to
increasingly obscure topics in order to have editorial control of an article.
Otherwise they're editing a page where each paragraph has an active editor who
likes it exactly as it is.

~~~
ctdonath
This. Wikipedia has reached a point where most of what people are interested
in writing about _has_ been written about, or has been staked out by more
active participants, leaving the bulk of remaining work either obscure or
maintenance, neither of which is motivatingly interesting to most people.

Hence a recurring theme: the great failing of FOSS products (free as in beer)
is precisely that a non-trivial amount of work which needs doing doesn't get
done because there is no incentive to do it: it is hard, boring,
unappreciated, and/or expensive to the point that the _only_ way to get it
done is to pay someone to do it. Unless Wikipedia pays somebody to round
things out and constantly polish content, it will suffer stagnation.

------
lwf
The "Wikipedia's Bureaucracy" chart is sort of frustrating.

It used to be that being in the "Administrator" group was basically the only
granularity we had to differentiate users. People complained that they only
wanted to work on some things, like vandalism patrolling, or file maintenance,
or creating accounts on behalf of other users.

So we unbundled, so that people could get the rights they wanted to do a
particular task.

And in other cases, like with Checkuser, the Bureaucrat group, and Oversight,
the advanced privileges are in fact dangerous and therefore are appropriately
restricted.

Actual _governance_ is pretty simple: the only things that are truly binding
are community consensus (as determined by a sufficiently public discussion,
closed at its end by one or more administrators) and decisions of the
Arbitration Committee, which conducts its business on public Wikipedia pages.
Administrators have some leeway in terms of blocking and closing discussions,
but everything is subject to review.

NB: I'm part of the system, granted. I'm an administrator, Oversighter, and
CheckUser. But these roles exist for good reasons, and I think the unbundling
helps _increase_ participation, by letting people help out without requiring
full community trust in all matters.

~~~
jaysonelliot
As a part of the system, I hope you'll work with the rest of the Wikipedia
High Priests to address the problem that so many people have pointed out for
years.

The ability to contribute to Wikipedia is based more on one's expertise
navigating the insular secret-handshake culture of Wikipedia than upon actual
expertise or knowledge.

Naturally, Wikipedia needs safeguards to protect against the vandalism,
manipulation, and inaccurate information that would flood the site if left
unchecked. But in doing so, it's grown into a secret club where only the
people with time to learn its byzantine customs and rules participate. Some
effort should be made to contribute, but the majority of one's time should be
spent on subject matter expertise, gathering quality citations, and good,
clear writing—not on learning the intricacies of entering said content.

I expect there's a certain badge of honor that comes from being a part of the
system. Once you've put hundreds of hours into learning a system and joining a
community, outsiders and newcomers are viewed with suspicion at best. Why let
some latecomer barge in and just start _writing_ when everyone already in the
community had to work harder to get there? But it's that "community consensus"
you talk about that makes Wikipedia the closed culture it is today. As long as
a small, demographically homogeneous group holds the keys to participation,
Wikipedia will suffer.

It's like the Catholic church, centuries ago, when the liturgy was in Latin,
and only the initiated could have access to the scriptures—everyone else had
to rely on their interpretations. Wikipedia needs its Martin Luther.

~~~
chris_mahan
I earned a barnstar in 2004, and was an admin from around 2003 to 2011. Heck I
even ran for a board election (got 30+ votes too!)

I agree with everything you said.

------
Contero
What I think wikipedia needs more than anything is a new way to propose an
edit without actually committing it, and to be able to solicit feedback or
have others fix it for you before having it finally approved and submitted. It
needs to be something where an inexperienced editor can make a good edit
proposal without having to be completely versed in wikipedia's editing
policies.

Talk pages are a horrendous way to implement this. Making an edit proposal
should be extremely new-user friendly.

I think a proposal and dialog format would do a much better job at absorbing
new content than what happens currently, which seems to be a revert if you run
afoul of any editing policy.

~~~
swalling
Yes, this is an idea we definitely want to try at Wikimedia.

Right now, some of our most popular articles in English are perpetually semi-
protected, meaning anonymous or brand new contributors can't edit. That means
millions of pageviews are on articles that don't even have an edit button
visible. :(

Some Wikipedias, like German, Polish, Russian and others already use a system
called "Flagged Revisions", which is an obtuse name for software that instead
of protecting a page, delays edits and makes them subject to approval from
someone experienced. Unfortunately the workflow for this software is clunky
and it doesn't seem to be helping German and other Wikipedias stay vibrant.

I'd really like to A/B test a very easy "suggest an edit" as an alternative. I
think it could work, because Wikipedians are already pretty good at staying on
top of the request queue, if you manage to make a request on the Talk page.
One thing we'd need to be careful of is not garnering suggestions by
cannibalizing the people who would otherwise have just edited.

~~~
Contero
I would keep all the normal editing methods in place, but just add this as a
friendly alternative for new users.

------
stephp
I wonder if this is more a matter of would-be participants being turned off or
of a higher volume of readers giving individuals the sense that the site
doesn't need them. (Probably an equal amount of both.)

I can't remember if there's a formal psychological term for the latter, but
it's like how a person in trouble is better off being seen by one person than
many (the many assume someone else is helping).

While I don't mean to sound ungrateful to the Wikipedia team and community for
providing such a great resource, I've personally been turned off by all the
calls for donations because they won't implement a few measly ads. It just
seems kind of stubborn to me-- shifting the problem onto each individual user
when money could be generated so painlessly. Even a little ironic considering
the calls for donations get in the way of the user experience more than
regular ads would.

------
rhizome
What a coincidence that a story about the decline of WP comes out right after
they delete a bunch of PR agency accounts!

~~~
mathattack
In the spirit of Wikipedia, can you provide a citation? :-)

~~~
nraynaud
I hope here we have the right to original thinking.

------
chris_mahan
I did 3000 edits, starting in 2002, but I essentially stopped in 2008, because
of the infighting and the self-appointed regulators.

------
booop
Is it really that bad? I had contributed to some articles a few years ago and
didn't encounter a 'crushing bureaucracy', but a very welcoming community.

~~~
mjn
It's big enough that you can have pretty different experiences in different
kinds of articles. I mostly write history stuff, and my experiences there are
pretty good. People seem to appreciate new articles on stuff like a Greek
archaeological site, a 19th-century politician, etc., or expansions to
existing articles, as long as the information has references. [Actually that's
my own theory for part of the decline: around 2007 it became much more
necessary to include citations for your additions, which raises the barrier to
entry.]

In history articles, things mostly get contentious around subjects that seem
inherently contentious for non-Wikipedia-related reasons. The archives of the
talk page for "Armenian Genocide" are rather extensive and not always cordial,
because people have very different ideas about what should go in it, some of
them strongly held. But it's at least converged on a decent article imo.

When there aren't the same passions around the historical disputes, I've found
the environment pretty supportive. I worked on a biography of an ancient Roman
politician where there was quite a bit of inconsistency between what different
classicists had written about him, but the discussion was just trying to
figure out how we should deal with that in the article, and where the
mainstream historical consensus lay (if anywhere), not hugely partisan or
anything.

------
rcthompson
Whenever I hear warnings about the pace of change slowing down on Wikipedia, I
have to wonder to what extent this is explained simply by (parts of) Wikipedia
being "finished", in the sense that it is now only updating to keep up with
current events as they happen, and not working on filling in gaps on subjects
that are relatively static. For example, the articles on most well-known laws
of physics are effectively "done", and, barring a major breakthrough in
physics, aren't going to change much. This doesn't mean that they are somehow
"dead".

So what fraction of articles on Wikipedia are "finished", and does this
explain the apparent decline of Wikipedia in terms of
contributors/contributions? I don't know if there's an easy way to answer
this.

~~~
hyperpape
I don't know how it differs by field, but in the field I know best
(philosophy), it's pretty hit or miss. Consider
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism).
That's a pretty fundamental topic, and it has cleanup tags that are four years
old.

~~~
bane
It doesn't help that when you try and fix obviously broken stuff, or even
provide desperately needed citations, the majority of the time you'll get
insta-reverted and flagged as a vandal.

------
sytelus
I've burned enough midnight oil trying to add content in Wikipedia just to
discover it frequently gets deleted next day. The worst part is that even if
it doesn't, it always feels like that it's a question of when rather than if
it would get deleted. And I'm not talking about silly content. For instance I
tried to add content on properties of different grades of gortex material and
someone deemed it not useful on the page _about_ gortex!

Lot of restrictions, if you think about it, are silly. Why can't I create a
wikipedia page about my mom or my high school teacher? Why can't I add
interesting details on techniques to solve high school math problem or even
add exercises like textbooks? However "non-useful" it is, it's still
_information_ and it's all electronic. Why wikipedia should restrict itself to
articles of types that only traditional paper-based encyclopedia would
potentially allow (well, mostly)?

Would it be so hard to design it so we can add ~infinite amount of information
on any given topic while allowing users to dive in from 10ft to 100,000 ft
level? My dream would be to have wikipedia or an active website like that
which catalogs almost every imaginable information available to any human at
any point in time. May be they can add "draft" mode for content that is not
fully baked yet. Or pages that are only visible if you opt-in. There has to be
better way than enforcing silly bureaucracy.

~~~
e12e
I'm not a "wikipedian" \-- but I do think the focus on sibling-projects,
allowing wikipedia to be an encyclopaedia, is good. Contribute to wikibooks if
you want to write text books (on math or some other subject) -- I don't think
it makes sense for wikipedia to host all content everyone ever wants to
create. That's what _the Internet_ is for. It shouldn't be the goal of
wikipedia to be the wiki to end all wikis. More wikis with different focus
would be more manageable, I think. Both wrt quality control and translation.

Text in a wikipedia is much like source code for a program -- it will be read
many times more than it is written -- and after a certain point, it should
largely _stop_ changing, unless bugs are found. "Bugs" in the case of text are
the obvious: grammar/spelling, somewhat subtle: use of language, wording
(contrast eg: articles written in "simple English" wikipedia vs "normal"
English) -- and external change: Hiroshima has lots of beautiful wooden houses
> Hiroshima is one of two cities to have ever been bombed with a nuclear
weapon (For a rather grotesque example).

~~~
lttlrck
I've often wondered this. There are many article categories that I'm unsure
belong in an encyclopedia.

\- Telecoms and networking protocols articles that I feel go into far to much
detail, they are like abstracts of the RFCs...

\- The same goes for programming languages.

\- Do ( e.g. web server) comparison tables belong in an encyclopedia?

I guess it's a hard line to draw though.

------
vacri
There seems to be a formula to hatchet-job articles about Wikipedia these
days. Point to pokemon and porn stars instead of the history and science, say
it's not quality (despite beating Britannica for accuracy), say there's a
dearth of new articles (despite the natural slow-down due to low-hanging fruit
being exhausted), and suggest that having to back up the things you say is
stifling bureaucracy, and that the community should just somehow psychically
know who is an expert and who isn't.

------
PaulHoule
I'd don't know why, but I haven't seen a single visual editor for wiki markup
or HTML that actually works.

I was really impressed with MailChimp, for instance, until I got to the visual
HTML editor where I could never figure out how to not get my whole message
screaming in <h1>

#fail

------
kevgnulldev
Related (albeit a bit dusty):

[http://www.advogato.org/article/1069.html](http://www.advogato.org/article/1069.html)

------
gwern
I've been arguing something similar since 2009:
[http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism](http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism)

------
Paul_S
I think it's pretty clear why this is. I used to contribute a lot and then my
content was repeatedly cut because of streamlining and simplification or the
whole page got scrapped because it's not notable. When I read a wikipedia
article I often check the history to see if there wasn't a time when the page
was actually more complete before the article has been streamlined to the
lowest common denominator.

Fuck that.

------
tokenadult
It was calming to read the thoughtful comments here after reading the
interesting article submitted to open this thread. And I need some calming
today, because I spent a lot of what was meant to be my "free" time yesterday
evening in a rollicking dispute on my Wikipedia user talk page about one tiny
edit I did the day before. Indeed, the experience of being a Wikipedia editor
is usually not even fun, not to mention not rewarding.

The submitted article notes that "in July 2012, some editors started a page
called WikiProject Editor Retention with the idea of creating a place to
brainstorm ideas about helping newcomers and fostering a friendlier
atmosphere. Today the most vibrant parts of that project’s discussion page
have gripes about 'bullying done by administrators,' debates over whether
'Wikipedia has become a bloody madhouse,' and disputes featuring accusations
such as 'You registered an account today just to have a go at me?'" Yep, I
visited that WikiProject Editor Retention a while ago to see if I could pick
up some tips there on how to encourage conscientious editors to stay involved
in Wikipedia, but all I found was that kind of dispute and back-biting.

It happens that my main area of professional research is connected to topics
that are among the ten most edit-warred topics on Wikipedia.[1] So from the
beginning of my involvement on Wikipedia in 2010, I've seen lots of reverts
and lots of article talk pages that go on and on and on and on to waste time
about petty disputes. Because I used to a professional periodical editor, and
later an academic journal editorial assistant when pursuing my postgraduate
degree, I have a sense of what a collaborative editing looks like, and I try
to suggest to Wikipedians[2] how we can all collaboratively built an even
better free, online encyclopedia.

It's slow and pains-taking work to edit articles on controversial topics. I
have found it helpful to compile source lists,[3] because Wikipedia always
needs new sources, and then post links to the appropriate source lists to the
talk pages of articles. Sometimes I see sources taken up by other editors
months after I post such a link, gradually improving the quality of some
articles. And of course I continually add new sources to my source lists
whenever I learn about them from seeing them used in Wikipedia. I go to my
alma mater's academic library frequently to circulate reference books about
the topics I research (mostly for work, but also for Wikipedia), and I devote
a lot of time to verifying sources. About two hours of "free" time today were
devoted to transcription typing of quotations from reference books into
Wikipedia-format citations, which I hope to use in the next few months to
update articles.

To answer some questions that came up in comments posted before this comment,
Wikipedia does have a too-radical culture of not taking experts seriously, but
indeed that is partly because it is hard to verify who is an expert. Wikipedia
got badly burned once by a young guy who claimed to be an older guy with
academic credentials and actual expertise on certain topics, and that phony
not only pushed around a lot of other editors while editing articles, but even
got a job at the Wikimedia Foundation without his background being checked out
beforehand.[4] So now Wikipedia is once burned, twice shy about anyone who
claims to be an expert. Come with sources, and everyone will join in the scrum
of deciding whether or not you are an expert.

One person in this discussion thread claims to be an expert (and I believe
him) and he wonders how much of a detailed reference he has to give for a
widely known fact. There are a BUNCH of the 4,359,600 articles now on English
Wikipedia that cite no sources, or at best only cite the name of a book or
article without any page reference. So if you are really sure that a standard
reference book in your field backs up a fact you've just inserted in the
article, you can add a reference like <ref>Smith Handbook of Physics</ref> and
let other editors sort out what edition of the handbook, and what page of the
handbook, backs you up. I see that iterative process of improving references
happen all the time, sometimes over years.

We have frequent discussions of the defects of Wikipedia here on Hacker News.
I still wonder if there is space for a new effort to build a nonprofit, free,
online encyclopedia for the whole world. Is the current Wikipedia just the
AltaVista that will be replaced by a yet unknown Google? I think a more
healthy and professional editing environment could still let another effort to
build an online encyclopedia take off and surpass Wikipedia, if only it had
enough seed funding.

[1]
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23354613](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23354613)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Editing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Editing)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji#Source_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji#Source_Lists_to_Share_with_Other_Wikipedians)

[4]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.html?pagewanted=all)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy)

------
ag80
Is anyone surprised that an organization which created user classes called
"Bureaucrat" and "Oversight" has become difficult to manage?

To the extent that reform is possible, they'll have to figure out a way to
attract new, inexperienced editors who either don't care about or don't know
the organizational structure and technical requirements (will all due respect
to the software engineer quoted, wikitext is significantly more complex than #
or @ symbols, and is most definitely not user friendly).

Maintaining a complicated language of policies and procedures is not an
effective way to do this. It's all too easily used as a weapon by those who
understand it best.

------
smoyer
Well ... there was always a limited amount of information in printed
encyclopedia's, and since printing included incremental costs, the editors
were careful to make sure each article had enough value to be included.

Is it possible that all the important articles have been written and are, at
this point, well vetted? Perhaps there aren't enough topics left for all the
people that would be writing articles? Or perhaps the ones that are left are
boring, so volunteer writers won't address them?

~~~
justincormack
Thats not true at all, but the interests of the editors do not cover
everything. Also you need reference books for most stuff, online sources are
not that great. eg loads of historical subjects are not covered at all well.

~~~
Jtsummers
Another issue with online sources is the impermanence of URLs. Unlike the
original concept, things change over time. Domain names are bought and sold or
allowed to expire, site maintainers stop (other work or health), maintainers
change and decide on a new schema. Even if there were a valid URL for every
citation today (that is, every book, magazine, newspaper, etc was made
available online), in a year half of them could be 404'd or simply contain
different content.

~~~
fluxon
There's a bit of a movement to encourage going back to Real Books(tm) for
sourcing. But lots of wikipedians know about and lament linkrot, site death,
and robots.txt hijacking (which can "disappear" an entire dead site from the
Wayback Machine behind a domain squatter's temp page). So we soldier on with
archive.org, WebCite, archive.is (new, and under indictment for bot spamming
at the moment), and several other archivers to save our citations. Still,
properly filled out references (author, title, publication, date, page) will
always be verifiable even if its link rots, and one must take a trip to the
library.

~~~
Jtsummers
I understand, and I've noticed what seems to be a trend in WP articles of more
"hard" sources. I think that's fantastic. My personal frustration as a would-
be editor came from 3 types of edits that I would make that would frequently
be reverted (years ago, and I haven't been back to edit since):

1\. Grammar/typos - for whatever reason correcting "then" and "than" ticked
some people off. "Could/would/should of", "intensive purposes", "loose/lose".
These are common mistakes that happen with either careless writing or non-
native speakers. The content can be good, but it feels like amateur hour and
cleaning it up should be _encouraged_. Most of my changes of this sort were
reverted within hours, even though I would include a comment in my commit
explaining the changes.

2\. Correcting based on the citations provided. Read an article, see something
that seemed off, go to the citation. The citation states the exact _opposite_
of the WP article (or some segment of the article), and I'd make changes based
on that (usually it was careful editing so that it was a paraphrase or quote
that dropped a "not" or something).

3\. New content. I was new to WP editing, so I didn't know all the arcana (the
process seems as esoteric to new editors as the old AD&D manuals seem to
modern RPG players). I'd write something, post it, have the citations, realize
I didn't put them in the day after. Everything was gone. I'd remake the
changes with the citations, and it'd still be reverted (I honestly can't
recall anymore which articles). I'm not doing research, there was no POV
issues, I was just fleshing out content that was barebones. I'm the sort of
person that could've been a good maintenance editor, filling in sparse
articles or rectifying the information in others. Instead, the community
seemed to actively reject my contributions. After a few starts like this, I
saw no reason to persist.

------
r0h1n
I know it isn't a direct comparison, but could this be the modern, Internet-
equivalent of "tragedy of the commons"?

Instead of degradation through overuse (as with real-world resources, but
meaningless in the context of Internet resources), we have degradation without
meaningful contribution.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

------
gremlinsinc
Is it me, or could we use a new wikipedia-- maybe even use git to push
changes, and track changes a gitopedia if you will.

~~~
DanBC
If I had the money I'd fork WP. I'd take the 100,000 most important articles
and get those vetted, corrected, written nicely, with better (and more
consistent) open source graphics, and with multiple good quality cites.

It'd go on the line, and people would be able to suggest edits and that page
would ask them to provide a citation.

This version would be suitable for children to use.

The ledes would be re-written to give an ELI5 intro to the topic for people
with little to no knowledge of it.

There'd be torrent downloads of it, so people could run it locally offline.

~~~
fluxon
100,000 is an admirable goal, but I do not envy that "most important"
selection process. Excluding episode and character articles (even the Good
Article-ranked ones) may be a good start, but the worst bloat may be
elsewhere.

------
peter303
the topicsin my field are pretty well fleshed out. and accurate

------
fragsworth
I'm not worried - if this becomes a problem, it's easy enough for them to
promote editing just like they promote donations.

------
cLeEOGPw
I think the western male tech-centric demographic partly boils down to the
fact that you just need to spend much time at the computer, spend much energy
for writing and editing and have to be passionate about it and the topic you
write about has to be provable/widely accepted (no personal stories, opinions,
etc.). The combination of these things is exactly as it is, maybe except for
the western part. I don't understand why easterners aren't participating more
actively.

~~~
mjn
> I don't understand why easterners aren't participating more actively.

Quite a few are, though it's highly variable between countries, and many
contribute in languages other than English. The Japanese-language Wikipedia
has about 4000 active editors in a typical month [1], and I believe the vast
majority of them are Japanese, though I'm having trouble finding solid stats
on that (if any exist).

[1]
[http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryJA.htm](http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryJA.htm)

------
ffrryuu
Well, they keep on reverting everything...

