

Wikipedia’s Emergency - chrbutler
http://www.markbernstein.org/May13/WikipediasEmergency.html

======
gnu8
_I’ve been pointing for years to the fundamental rhetorical problem of wikis —
that making the link target and the link label the same, as Ward’s Wiki did,
moves all links to nouns and noun phrases with disastrous impact on the link
structure. Wikipedia no longer uses WikiLinks, unfortunately, but almost every
link remains anchored to a noun and almost no editors use links intelligently
or creatively._

I don't see a problem with most links being nouns and noun phrases. Wikipedia
is a reference, not a literary masterwork, and so consistency and the
principle of least surprise should be followed. There's also no guideline that
I know of that forbids the use of links creatively or intelligently for non-
nouns, as long as they wouldn't negatively impact readability.

I also don't believe Wikipedia/Mediawiki has required link labels to match
link targets in something like ten years. It's often desirable or necessary to
do that purely for semantic reasons.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Using nouns rather than verbs in links does not specifically relate to wikis
and WikiWords. See this more general advice from the W3C in 2001:
<http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere.html.en>

> we do not recommend putting verb phrases in link text

More generally, links should identify what they link to, and more often than
not that will mean a noun phrase, not a verb phrase.

------
languagehacker
Categories suck in general because they're basically tags. That is, they're
not structured. I find the category system for MediaWiki in general pretty
useless specifically because it is impossible to create a taxonomy and apply
it in a structured or hierarchical way across your document set.

Wikipedia's core admins are pretty notorious for lording over the content they
consider their domain in pretty unforgiving ways. Luckily, Wikipedia is an
implementation of a specific type of platform, of which many free hosting
options are readily available for your own wiki.

I think it's pretty naive to think that editorialization hasn't happened in
some flavor throughout the history of the encyclopedia, as far back as
Diderot. Those biases just happened to be engrained in different ways:
platonism, the academy system, ethnic or national bigotry, etc.

As human knowledge expands, so comes the need for all willing people to
contribute to our collective intelligence. There will always be stories of
people gaming the system for their own end. MediaWiki as a platform has a
revision system that allows us to review specific changes made by authors and
revert them if they are in some way problematic or unacceptable.

So without getting around to the inscrutability of facts in general, I think
it's preposterous to claim that Wikipedia faces an insurmountable problem due
to its issues with taxonomy (a non-primary concern) or sexism (a concern
relating to specific members of the community, and not of the knowledge being
produced). So that being said, what's the point of this post?

~~~
derleth
> I think it's pretty naive to think that editorialization hasn't happened in
> some flavor throughout the history of the encyclopedia, as far back as
> Diderot.

Everyone has a bias. That much is taken for granted, right?

Now, the questions:

Is everyone equally biased?

Can anyone overcome bias?

Are all biases equally severe?

Are all biases bad?

Is it futile to attempt to overcome bias?

How you answer these questions will determine whether you think encyclopedias
are even a valid enterprise, let alone your ideas on how to construct one. The
point remains, however, that none of these questions are new, and bringing all
of them up at once, implicitly or explicitly, every time the topic is
discussed does nothing to move anything forwards.

It seems fundamental and exactly the kind of thing we _need_ to get hammered
out before anything else can begin, but it's really a pointless waste of time,
like arguing about whether the physical world really exists every time you
want to decide what to eat.

~~~
JamisonM
I think it is pretty clear that not everyone is equally biased or that every
bias is equally bad or good. It does not seem like a useful question unless
you plan on engaging in a lengthy exercise it justifying Wikipedia from first-
principles or something.

I would ask this question instead: Is the editorial environment of Wikipedia
specifically a place where the worst biases can flourish? Subtle edits over a
long period of time from a malicious actor are one thing, but the same from
someone who is simply oblivious to their bias on a set of topics is quite
another. If the answer is yes, how in the heck can it be fixed?

~~~
glenra
The answer is yes, Wikipedia _is_ specifically a place where the worst biases
can flourish. It only takes a couple of cranks to keep the biases in, and
there are more than enough cranks around.

I don't know that it _can_ be fixed.

The good news, though, is that there's enough transparency to in most cases
make it clear to the careful observer what's going on. On any politically-
sensitive topic, the experienced wikipedia user eventually learns that you
_need_ to check the talk page and see what points of view are being
deliberately and actively excluded from the main page. Checking the page
history helps too - bad pages tend to have a lot of reverts with angry check-
in comments.

~~~
derleth
> It only takes a couple of cranks to keep the biases in

The journal _Nature_ disagrees.

~~~
glenra
[citation needed]

------
Zweihander
Wikipedia has a failure which unearths some deeply embedded problems and then
proceeds to fix them. This has happened how many times now?

Until I can get the same level of information (quantity wise) from another
source, Wikipedia has immense value that fills a very large market gap -- even
if they can't get their taxonomy of American authors quite right.

To say "Wikipedia’s about over" ignores the actual value of the site and
greatly over-reacts to another mishap in the history of the user-run site.

------
jpatokal
_We don’t edit Wikipedia anymore. We don’t consult it for things that matter.
It’s merely a good resource for finding odd facts no one cares much about._

Snort. Explain this then: Wikipedia's getting more views than ever, more edits
than ever, and more editors than ever.

<http://reportcard.wmflabs.org>

There are plenty of things broken in Wikipedia alright, but none of them
fatal, least of all some misguided categorization (oh, the humanity!) by some
two-bit hack with an axe to grind. _Everybody_ on Wikipedia has their own
point of view, and while some people manage to game the system for a while,
Wikipedia's core strength is precisely that it's self-correcting in the long
run.

~~~
gojomo
Um, I'm looking at the charts on that page, and:

• 'active editors' are stagnant to slightly declining globally for the last 3
years – and definitely down in EN and DE (largest) Wikipedias

• 'pageviews' growth has been slowing for a while, and since the start of
2013, total pageviews are down for 'all', EN, and DE

• 'edits per month' (on the secondary page) seems stagnant-to-very-slightly-
improving globally, but definitely on the downtrend in EN

Sure, the the original article is an opinionated, possibly premature diagnosis
of crisis... but your confident assertion of 'more activity than ever' isn't
supported by those graphs!

~~~
jpatokal
You'll note that the primary graph on the first page is new editors per month,
which is fairly stable at ~20k/mo total and ~7k/mo English. As long as that
number doesn't start plummeting, there's fresh blood coming in and Wikipedia's
future is assured.

Also, I think edits per month on EN and DE are slowly down simply because
they're already so large and mature: these days most articles on most major
topics that are, from a functional point of view, complete. This wasn't the
case a few years ago, when even a layman could find things to fix everywhere
and Wikipedia's article and edit counts were rocketing.

As for page views, my theory is that Google's Knowledge Graph has reduced the
need for actually clicking through to WP, since most Google searches for basic
Wikipedia-type info now come up with capsule summaries (often extracted from
WP) that may well answer your question.

~~~
gojomo
I agree that Google's Knowledge Graph is likely the largest reason for fewer
visits.

New editors don't assure Wikipedia's future unless they stay around; as of the
last study I can find, 2010, retention had fallen to quite low numbers...

[http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Resul...](http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Results#Editor_retention_has_not_worsened_over_the_past_three_years_.28Finding_.234.29)

...and each year's cohort was sticking around less than the year before. I
recognize much of this may be that, in the more-established Wikipedias, the
core audience of potential editors has been found, and the fun/easy 'low-
hanging fruit' content has been finished (or made less fun/approachable by
policy).

But that means Wikipedia is in new territory, with fewer active and
experienced editors over time, doing less-exciting maintenance and defense
work, while search engines retain more 'reference' views and other competitive
sites (especially in the Q&A space) improve their coverage and depth.
Wikipedia needs positive attention to keep the forces of decay at bay; if the
attentional indicators have shifted in the wrong direction, even very slightly
for now, it risks nearing a tipping point into collapse.

------
azov
Wikipedia was never intended to be a formalization of semantic web
(wikidata.org is more along those lines, if that's what you're looking for).
So what's the emergency?

The decline in number/quality of editors is alarming, but what does it have to
do with taxonomy? And how do the links fit into the picture?

 _TL;DR A random set of barely coherent assertions followed by OMG, Wikipedia
is over_

------
needacig
Wikipedia, for better or worse, serves an indispensable role for millions of
people. So even if you disagree with its leadership and its editors with
biased agendas and would like to see its demise, a more realistic solution
seems, to me, to be to put on your writing cap and become an editor yourself.
In this case, it is actually very possible to live according to the saying,
"Become the change you wish to see in the world." A bunch of new contributors
focused on fixing things might help.

Although I do remember reading stories at one point about new contributors'
edits getting frequently rolled back by Wikipedians with more permissions.
That could be a barrier to entry, but it's unclear to me how much of a problem
this really is.

~~~
bradleyjg
The second you try and do anything non-trivial without first "paying your
dues" (and kissing the right asses) you find all your work trashed. If you
complain or try to keep it in place you'll see a dozen different bureaucratic
maneuvers involving obscure jargon and weird, diificult to use, administrative
pages and processes to thwart you.

It's amazing the wikipedia is as useful as it is given how utterly hostile it
is to new contributors. I hope it continues to be useful and thrives, but I'm
not so masochistic to actually fight to volunteer.

------
homosaur
The biggest problem I've seen over the years is that Wikipedia is not edited
by experts, and in general is edited by losers.

These are the sorts of losers that watch the RSS feeds of the little kingdom
of bullshit they've carved out in their own corner of Wikipedia and
relentlessly fight anyone trying to edit THEIR articles. Until Wikipedia gives
some sort of weight to experts (paid perhaps?) instead of unemployed shut ins,
the quality will continue to deteriorate.

~~~
imsofuture
Spot on. The power of crowds is immense, but it lacks the ability to focus for
for sustained periods of time. Hence, experts.

------
caseydurfee
Taxonomy is hard, especially if you don't want it to be a collection of
poorly-aging cultural biases. Even professional librarians have problems
creating and maintaining future-proof ones.

Why does the Dewey Decimal System still have 10x as much space for
Unitarianism as it does for all of Buddhism? [1] Well, think about what it
would take to fix Dewey's initial biases post-hoc... either you have to get it
exactly right the first time, or have a system that is designed to evolve.

It's unsurprising the wikipedia hive mind hasn't gotten it right. It's
orthogonal to everything Wikipedia has generally done well. Seems like the
best solution would be to have a separate taxonomy project that is overlaid on
top of core wikipedia data by a set of flexible rules and not hardcoded in
articles themselves.

[1] <http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-sep03-04.html#dewey>

------
belorn
So here we have a article complaining about an category problem that do no
longer exist, and a user that got banned because he failed to follow the rules
of the site.

Its a community site where decision is made through consensus, and consensus
was to fix the problems. So where is the emergency, and why is this article
trying to declare the site as doomed?

~~~
pyre
But it wasn't a unanimous decision to ban the malicious user! Someone had a
different opinion! The Horror!

------
mosqutip
The Wikipedia ideals of having open, unbiased, and free access to information
and being able to freely collaborate and edit articles directly conflict. If
editing is "free", so too is slander and misinformation.

Unfortunately, I have no good solution to this problem. But then again,
neither does Wikipedia.

~~~
guard-of-terra
They can start by actively discouraging lawyering and deletionism.

~~~
derleth
Deletionism is the only reason Wikipedia remains using. Without deletions, it
would have sunk into the world of spam-trap and personal blog platform long
ago.

~~~
ars
Delete the garbage, but leave the trivial. I hate deletionists.

~~~
derleth
> Delete the garbage

Which is still deletionism.

------
chris_mahan
I started in wikipedia in february of 2002. I was an admin, did over 3000
edits, most typos and grammar...

I gave up eventually. Last year they revoked my adminship for non-use, but I
don't care, because I don't use it.

I was active for quite a while, but gave up eventually, under the crushing
mind-numbness of endless layers of rules and procedures.

~~~
jacques_chester
The most important handbook for understanding Wikipedia's self-governing
mechanisms is _The Trial_ by Franz Kafka.

~~~
derleth
You're not even trying, are you?

------
sdoowpilihp
In regards to the Wikipedia list of American Novelists, could it not be that
sexism for the last many hundreds of years have rendered a collection of what
many consider to be the "most prominent authors" being primarily male. I am
not saying that it's right, but it would seem that given our propensity as a
culture through the years to over value the opinion of a man, a list of mainly
male authors is all but inevitable.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
I think the point was that all the women were being moved to the "American
Women Novelist" sub-list while all the men remained in the "American Novelist"
top list. If they had moved all the men into one just for men also and then
made the top level list just link to the two sub lists that would have made
more sense. This would also open up a format for additional sub lists linked
from the top list.

~~~
chris_mahan
What about transgendered authors? What about authors who write with a nom-de-
plume of a different gender?

~~~
jack-r-abbit
right... didn't I say that opens up a format for more sub lists?

------
aaron695
Lol, yes I did notice I've stopped using wikipedia.... no that was Myspace.

Very strange article.

------
CleanedStar
Wikipedia doesn't have an emergency. Jimbo Wales had large ideological axes
from the beginning, including topics such as who started Wikipedia. As Wales
once said that conservative "[Friedrich von] Hayek's work on price theory is
central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". Wales
went from running an Ayn Rand mailing list to running Wikipedia...but he's
totally neutral of course.

As an example of this bias, Wales appointed the rabid editor JayJG to the
highest authority, the ArbCom in mid-2005. He was voted out in early 2006 -
but Wales used his power to reappoint him any how. Most of Wales's political
position pushing has been behind the scenes, but here it was blatantly
obvious.

I got tired of this sort of thing and pulled back from Wikipedia around that
time. I'm very skeptical of the idea that everything has changed since Wales
has less power now though. It's kind of like when the military takes over in a
coup, kills off or exiles the opposition, and then holds an election. Once you
have sculpted the infrastructure enough to your advantage, you don't need to
be as heavy-handed any more. I guess I would be one of the exiles (and some
excellent editors threw in the towel over this sort of thing - very educated
people who could write well).

~~~
troym
Hayek was not a conservative.

[http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-
why-...](http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-
conservative.pdf)

