
The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf] - mdlincoln
https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfaker13rise-preprint.pdf
======
mangeletti
Wikipedia has problems, but I think it's worth noting that Wikipedia has
enough content to fill 2,200x volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica[1], or, a
small library.

I don't think it's necessarily an existential problem that the public image of
Wikipedia's relevance is reaching a sort of "trough of disillusionment" due to
some of its governance issues. It has simply reached a scale where it faces a
new set or hurdles to overcome.

Personally, I've learned more from Wikipedia than I did in high school and
college combined, and considering that, despite all of Wikipedia's problems,
the content therein is more accurate and verifiable than the corrupted corpus
whence our primary and secondary educations are derived, I really appreciate
its existence.

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

~~~
placeybordeaux
How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public
perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number
of active editors.

~~~
mangeletti
I'm suggesting that there hasn't been as much of a decline in community as
there has been a decline in the available encyclopedia-relevant information
left in the world that isn't already published on Wikipedia.

Also, the public perception is related to the drop of users and vice versa.
There has been a lot of negative press lately, specifically related to
problems in the community.

~~~
placeybordeaux
The decline in number of editors seems to have started at 2007 given figure 1.
I wouldn't tie the amount of negative press to the decline in editors.

The point about there being less new stuff to write about seems apt, what do
you think about the counter points that the article had?

"First, as noted above, the vast majority of articles in Wikipedia are still
below community standards for “good” articles. Second, underrepresented groups
still find it challenging to join. For instance, one study found that only 9%
of edits are made by female editors, and that articles of particular interest
to women are shorter than articles of interest to men (Lam, 2011). Until
editors are representative of the population of potential contributors, it is
difficult to argue that the socialization practices are sufficiently
effective."

~~~
lawpoop
Not OP, but

1\. Isn't this a moving target? In the beginning, all you had to do was throw
up text; standards evolved (and probably continue to, I don't follow it), and
now you have to cite references, adhere to standards, etc. As more articles
are reviewed, more probably "become" substandard.

2\. Is this really a decline issue? I guess it is if you are considering
decline not as failure to maintain but failure to grow.

~~~
Retric
I contributed to several Wikipedia articles over the years (~50-100). It's
gotten to the point where it's pointless to improve even terrible articles
like stubs as basically everything is automatically reversed. At best a mod
may decide to add your content back, which means at this point it's basically
stopped being a public wiki.

Which is fine, IMO they should just change the name to Webpedia or something
if they don't want new edits.

PS: As to being 'full' they have 2.7 million stubs, that's a lot of missing
content.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics)

~~~
Spooky23
It's a shame, but any public forum seems to degenerate to this point. Stack
exchange is another great example... The bureaucracy that emerges distracts
from the original mission.

~~~
reitanqild
Interestingly lots of people seem to have a negative view of forums and fear
that stack-sites will go the way of the forums if they don't continue their
bureaucracy.

Yet I cannot remember one technical forum that was as unhelpful as stack-sites
sometimes turns into.

------
sandworm101
There is a finite pattern whenever one relies on volunteers. Most will come
and go, but a few hang around and rise to the top. Lacking renumeration, they
tend towards self-gratification. Some handle extra responsibility well, but
others start building their own little castles from which to berate all below.
This process is inevitable once you have multiple ranks of volunteers.

I've seen this with charities, open source projects, and it was a constant
problem when I worked in film/tv (interns). Things always go south when you
have volunteers bossing around other volunteers. Newcomers show up eager but
depart quickly, normally after some dressing down by a more senior volunteer.
Without pay in dispute, they rarely make complaint. They just stop showing up.
And who can blame them?

The answer is to keep all volunteers equal. That's probably impossible for a
project like wikipedia, but they could certainly do more to ensure new
volunteers are not so bullied by the old guard.

~~~
DanBC
That's different enough from VestedContributor that you should give it a name
and write it up.

[http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor](http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor)

VestedContributors think the rules can be bent for them because they've been
around so long and done so much good work.

~~~
sandworm101
Write up what? Sandworm's syndrome of the progressive dysfunction inherent to
hierarchical volunteer communities? Talk to anyone who has worked as a
volunteer coordinator. They see this all the time.

As for keeping volunteers equal to avoid the problem, that need not mean
keeping everyone identical. Leadership roles can rotate, with finite term
limits. That way every leader today knows they will be the underling tomorrow.
(This also keeps everyone interested and motivated as nobody is every stuck on
one task/job).

~~~
tamana
Hey, the founding mission of wikipedia is to publish stuff that every expert
knows, to inform novices.

------
rloc
I tried once or twice to edit articles but was quickly rejected by editors
that usually believe they sort of "own" the content. I've quickly become
demotivated as explained in the analysis and never contributed again. Another
problem is that when you think you've made an important and useful update
you're never sure when someone will roll it back.

Some are spending a very big chunk of their time to make sure articles stay as
they wish to. Being a former or an active editor on an article is not always
related to how much you know about the topic but Wikipedia favorites the
biggest editors. There is very little chance to convince if you're new unless
you commit to spend a lot of your valuable time contributing which is not
possible for everyone and not a good idea for most.

A very hard problem to solve.

Wikipedia is still great though with no real better alternative.

~~~
runn1ng
I have learned that in order to actually contribute to Wikipedia, you have to
treat it less like a collaboration and more like a battle.

You can't just contribute and consider it done. You have to be prepare to
fight your way through, engage in edit wars, learn about the battlefield (the
bureaucracy, the article sourcing) and in the end, if you fight long enough,
you usually win.

You have to repeatedly, over and over, show that the other person (who 'owns'
the article) is wrong, he will revert it, so you do a little dance of
reverting and back, then you have to try to dig up some rule from the ruleset,
and as I said, you will usually win because the other person gives up. Or he
doesn't, but then some higher editor stumps him.

~~~
ars
You are correct, and you know what happens? The people _LEAST_ qualified to
contribute contribute the most. Why? Because they have too much time on their
hands, and can battle endlessly.

People with real knowledge usually have better things to do.

~~~
Zitrax
It is indeed a problem to not have enough time. Just throwing in some facts in
an article is often not good enough, it must fit with the flow of the article
and not repeat things that has already been said and be in order, and with
references etc etc. Some people might not have the time for that additional
work to make the contribution "good enough".

I haven't followed Wikipedia for a while but I assume that some rejected
changes are due to that people throw in some changes that might be correct but
are not worked on enough to fit in with the rest of the article. And one can't
in general assume that someone else will do that work for you. Than the easy
way out is often a revert instead of leaving a more unfinished article live.

I did most of my contributions to Wikipedia when I had that extra time.

~~~
flomo
I see the exactly opposite. There's so many poorly written wikipedia entries
which read as "Fact. Other Disconnected Fact. Another Random Fact (except for
fact, fact and fact)." I've made attempts at smoothing out the language in
various articles, and it often gets reverted because someone's precious trivia
was removed. If anything, it seems that wikipedians are loath to have anything
"edited down".

------
smithkl42
I'll toss my own experience out there.

I've contributed edits to maybe a dozen or so different Wikipedia articles,
and would like to contribute more, but it's hard to get past a couple of
hurdles.

The main one is the byzantine and archaic editing tools. The markdown language
that Wikipedia uses is a PITA to learn, and following a discussion on the talk
page is almost impossible. Wikipedia presents a wonderful UX for browsing and
reading. It has perhaps the worst UX I've ever seen for a beginner who wants
to make a contribution.

Beyond that, I spent a significant amount of time editing some articles on a
fringe religious group that I had studied extensively. (Apart from the group's
own leaders, I arguably knew more about the group than anyone else in the
world.) But the group that was the focus of the article kept backing out my
edits and replacing them with propaganda. It was simply too much work to fight
them (especially with the horrible edit/discussion tools), they were a lot
more motivated than I was, and I eventually gave up.

~~~
quadrangle
Talk pages should not themselves be wiki pages. This is the result of all that
MVP stuff people go on about. Wikipedia had wikis, they didn't have discussion
boards. They needed discussion boards. MVP was to use another wiki page for
discussions, and that evolved into the stupidness we see today.

Talk and discussion are completely different process than collaborative
editing, and they demand different tools.

I also agree about the markup (it's markUP. "Markdown" is a specific type of
markup language which, despite its flaws, probably is the easiest and now most
common one)

~~~
jessriedel
MVP?

~~~
nolok
Minimum viable product.

In this case, "hey we need a way for people to talk to each other", "sure, we
should make a discussion tool, but to get it right now we could use a wiki
page that users edit one after another to add their answers".

The fact that it started as such is not an issue per se, but after so many
years wikipedia should have replaced it with something better and easier.

------
_pmf_
I think Wikipedia will become the best case study in how bureaucracy cripples
a working society. 80% of the effort of creating new content is following
byzantine processes and procedures.

While I admit that these processes work for consistency of content, I cannot
in the least observe any noticeable quality improvements, and the reason is
that valuable contributors with deep domain knowledge will not invest the time
to satisfy the OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.

~~~
digler999
> OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.

Is it really necessary to use mental illnesses in a pejorative way to make
your point ? How do you think it makes people feel who legitimately suffer
from those illnesses ?

~~~
mahouse
It should make them aware that they should refrain from holding any position
where they have to deal with people. I am sure you have never edited
Wikipedia; the amount of users and admins that more than obviously suffer from
autism spectrum disorders and OCDs is very, very high, and they are crippling
the bureaucratic processes of the wiki.

I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct" but I think just
looking the other way is not helping anybody.

~~~
Retra
Maybe you should refrain from trying to diagnose mental disorders by
pretending to analyze Wikipedia editor culture.

That's not even a disorder, it's just plain stupid.

~~~
Marcomasino
Aw, come on, lighten up, it's just an online forum. Maybe people develop
Asperger traits from working in this field. Like one time I asked a college
did he know what the time was, he replied YES and walked off :)

------
LoSboccacc
Eh, it went from a interesting novelty, to a incredible community, to a petty
bureaucracy.

My personal experience is that under the crowdsourcing model the well meaning
non experts outnumber the real experts and it's hard to police them while
treating all as equals. In short, democracy brought content toward mediocrity.

Now it's dangerous to use it but for a cursory introduction to any in depth
content, while non factual content is polarised toward whatever the
bureaucrats decide it's a neutral tone, which may or may not work.

~~~
TheGrassyKnoll
> interesting novelty, to a incredible community, to a petty > bureaucracy.

One line summary of the history of the United States ?

~~~
LoSboccacc
It may be a property of democracies scaling, the pattern is indeed common.

------
shmerl
Wikipedia is a hit and miss. After contributing, some things stick, but others
can be removed without good reason, and wasting one's time on bureaucratic
fights to restore that content is simply very tiring and after some point it
becomes annoying enough, so I stopped trying to restore such things most of
the time.

------
CM30
An odd thought, but perhaps the decline in editor numbers also has something
to do with an increase in the number of wikis in general, mostly aimed at
specific audiences and about specific subjects. Back in the early/mid 00s,
Wikipedia was the site you'd contribute to if you wanted to write general
encyclopedia entries about something that's now seen as fairly niche (like
say, a certain TV show, film series, game franchise, etc), and from there you
might become interested in editing other pages on less specialised subjects.

But now, thousands of wikis exist, about every subject under the sun. Many of
those are very popular, have more welcoming communities, etc. So people don't
join the general site any more. If they care for say, Star Wars, they join
Wookiepedia. If they care for Pokemon, it'd be Bulbapedia. Or one of the many
others listed here:

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWikiRule](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWikiRule)

~~~
Animats
That's helped take some of the load off Wikipedia, and may be responsible for
some of the decline in number of editors. Wikipedia used to have a big problem
with fancruft - vast amounts of detail about some popular culture icon.
There's an article for every Pokemon. There have been attempts to create
articles for every episode of popular shows, and every minor One Piece
character. There's pushback on that, and general agreement now on how much is
too much.

The fanatical fans now go to to Wikia or TVTropes, where they can write
endlessly on their pet subjects without having to cite reliable third party
sources. That's a good thing. You don't need the heavy scrutiny of Wikipedia
on those subject.

------
thieving_magpie
Honestly they could never add another page or edit and I'd still be going
there for the next decade.

------
Animats
So the peak was in 2007. I think I know why.

In 2006-2007, there was an organized push on Wikipedia by pro-Israel editors
to make Israel-related articles favorable to Israel. This provoked some major
controversies, especially because at least one of the pro-Israel editors was a
Wikipedia admin and abused their authority. (Eventually, they were
"desysopped" for that, but it took years.) For a sense of this, see [1],
including all the archived talk pages.

Wikipedia dealt with the problem by strictly applying the "reliable sources"
rule. It became the practice that every single fact in Israel-related articles
must be cited to a reliable source and properly footnoted. Anything that
wasn't was deleted as "uncited" or "synthesis" by one side or the other. Until
that time, articles often had text which wasn't cited to a specific source.
The tough citation requirements anchored the dispute to factual information,
and, though the process was painful, worked. The controversies settled down
and the edit warring slowed to a crawl.

Those strict standards gradually spread to the rest of Wikipedia. Now,
everything had to be footnoted like a doctoral thesis. Few people outside of
academia write that way. This results in a big hammer coming down on someone
new wanting to write an article about their new favorite DJ. Does he have
mainstream press coverage that isn't from a press release, and did you cite
it? If not, he's out of here.

Until you learn to write in that strict style, you can't contribute much to
Wikipedia. For people used to blithering on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, this
is hard. That's what's discouraging new editors.

Writing for Wikipedia is now like contributing to a major open source project
like the Linux kernel. There's a big body of code, and your changes have to
fit in well and be justified. That's necessary. Wikipedia faces a constant
incoming stream of PR, vandalism, and general crap. (Check out the ever-
changing list of recent changes.[2]) The petty vandalism is mostly reverted by
AIs now; ClueBot, driven by an ANN and trained on known vandalism, is quite
good. The other problems take human attention, by volunteers tired of seeing
similar annoyances over and over.

For the other extreme, of writing about anything with no quality control, see
4chan.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israeli_West_Bank_barrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israeli_West_Bank_barrier)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges)

~~~
bhouston
More details on that Israel controversy here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-
interest_editing_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-
interest_editing_on_Wikipedia#Israel)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Midd...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Middle_East_Reporting_in_America#CAMERA_campaign_in_Wikipedia)

------
IvyMike
The article raises an important point that I haven't seen addressed elsewhere
in the comments: revert bots can be terrible.

For example, I was once reading about a song, and at the bottom there was a
link to a youtube video. The link was broken, so I replaced it with a working
youtube link.

The edit was immediately reverted by a bot that was anti-all-links-to-youtube.
Fine, maybe that is a problem. But it's also a problem that the anti-youtube
bot replaced my youtube link with a youtube link.

When I went to the bot's page, it was filled with comments from dozens of
others who had made similar edits that were blindly reverted. The bot author,
who took a "it's me against the world" stance, proclaiming that his bot was
doing the only sensible thing, and that he was "sick of arguing". As the paper
proclaims, this immediate negative reinforcement had long term consequences of
turning away many good faith editors.

------
ignostic
Wikipedia feels like a piece of software that's experienced massive scope
creep. It's huge. People have pet pieces they're emotionally attached to. It's
so massive and trying to do so much that it's hard to even tell how best to
improve it or where to start. For every "bug" (bad piece of info) that's
fixed, we push 50 new bugs (and tons of new and correct info, of course).

I've stopped editing because it just feels like a drop in the pond every time
I do. When I fix obvious bias it just reappears by the editors with ulterior
motives. And I just don't have the energy to fight them on it. I've stopped
reading as much because I've learned that for any topic there are much better
and more thorough sources. Economics and medicine in particular have very
little... quality control on Wikipedia.

With that said it's still a fantastic source for an overview of a topic that I
know nothing about, especially for non-controversial topics.

Wikipedia will live on as a good starting place for deep research and a quick
explanation for quick questions. There just aren't enough editors to make it
into the "sum of human knowledge" some people want it to be.

------
elbigbad
Abstract

Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer
contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a
tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However,
recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia
has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in
the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show
that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and
consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically
crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the
restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and
the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key
causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal
mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes –
especially changes proposed by newer editors.

------
js8
I think the reason for decline (and bureaucracy) is actually a lack of
democracy. For example, there is no way to recall administrators. Also,
opinion of majority is sometimes dismissed as not being good consensus, which
only helps people in established cliques. Democracy is a rule that ensures
fairness, but senior administrators do not always want it.

Secondary problem is IMHO the caste nature of administrator privileges. I
think if the privileges were more separated and it would be possible to recall
them, this would reduce the ossification of the hierarchy.

I also think Wikipedia could benefit from having a stable branch into which
the changes from unstable branch could be regularly reviewed for addition. It
would be nice if unstable branch could return to the idea that someone can add
things even if they are not perfect or immediately sourced; IMHO experts can
always add sources later for content that is already present, and it would
give them some incentive to contribute.

That being said, Wikipedia is amazing! I would really like to thank to people
who put some work into it.

~~~
rspeer
I'm not so concerned about recalling administrators. Administrators who do
blatantly bad things sometimes end up losing their position, and sometimes
just end up with enough people angry at them that they leave.

What I'm concerned about is that there's no way to get _new_ administrators,
which is what it would take to bring in new ideas that break up the
unnecessary bureaucracy.

The process that used to create them got entirely paralyzed, both by
ridiculous inflation of metrics (I saw the edit count requirements -- they
call them suggestions but they're requirements -- increase by a factor of 20
while I participated), and by the requirement to convince a supermajority of
long-standing editors to vote for you.

I became an administrator in '06, and by '08 I would never have been
considered. Basically, you have to edit every part of the encyclopedia while
upsetting nobody, then inflate your already prolific accomplishments to get
your foot in the door, without looking like a liar. This is impossible.

Old administrators (like me) lose interest. New ones don't take their place.
The work is being increasingly done by the most obsessive people, and by
faceless bots.

------
tedks
I find it hard to believe that Wikipedia is "in decline" when the article I
wrote about the niche area of CS I worked in during undergrad has a life of
its own now. People continue to add to it and now it has a fair deal of
content and information that I was unaware of. If that's what decline looks
like, I'm fine with it.

------
viggity
should be titled "The rise and decline in Wikipedia editor counts".

Wikipedia may have its political issues, but to say it is "in decline" seems
off. There is only so much that can be written and only so many new things can
happen to document. Obviously no hard limit exists, but still.

If it was to be in general decline as the title conotates, I'd expect to see
overall traffic lower over time and while I searched in earnest for 10
minutes, I couldn't find that data (alexa is pay service now, wtf?). But have
a hard time seeing actual traffic declining.

------
zkhalique
Isn't this more describing a typical s-curve with regard to the information
being mostly filled out? Wikipedia isn't a news site.

~~~
sparkzilla
Actually most of the popular articles for readers and editors are news-based.
However, the site, while barely adequate as an encyclopedia, is terrible for
news presentation.

------
sparkzilla
An interesting paper that basically says that the number of editors is
declining due to the difficulty in keeping and retaining new users. Any person
who has tried to edit Wikipedia will know that aggressive rule-wielding
wikifanatics immediately try to kill newcomer edits using whatever tools they
have to hand. But it's important to realize that Wikipedia's ambiguous rules
and arbitrary decisions are not a bug, but a feature, giving power to
incumbent editors. While most new editors just give up, the ones who do stay
on and fight become the same kind of fanatics.

Many people say that the toxic community is the problem, but the community
issues IMHO are actually a _symptom_ of poor software design. The wiki's open
structure and article-based format, which allows the most powerful groups of
editors to "own" pages, gives power to people who are interested in keeping
and retaining control, rather than those who are interested in sharing
knowledge. The power is centralized in these gatekeepers, leading to all the
problems we see on the site.[1] This is also the reason the Gender Gap
exists.[2]

The solution is to redesign the software to devolve power from entrenched
groups, but this will never happen because there is no leadership, and the
people who have the power are the survivors/fanatics that actually like the
current system. Because they write the rules they will not give their power up
easily.

As for the quality arguments below: without new users and continuous evolution
in software development, content presentation, and editorial review processes,
the site cannot maintain quality. I believe that it is impossible for any wiki
system to maintain a high quality anyway: the amount of time to improve
articles to high quality is exponential, while the number of editors and work
available is linear. Even in the best circumstances, something has to give. If
the number of editors is actually declining then quality problems may also
increase exponentially.

[1][http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-
sins/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/)

[2][http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-
wikipedi...](http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedia/)

~~~
phicoh
Comparing wikipedia to openstreetmap, it seems to be a community problem, not
a software problem.

An open structure means that you have to watch what others are doing
constantly. But that doesn't explain the huge number of stories where
reasonable edits are reverted. That can only happen because the wikipedia
(editor) community is ok with that.

My conclusion is that wikipedia forgot to redefine itself. Originally,
wikipedia was a summary based on existing literature. But pretty soon users
took wikipedia way beyond that. Using it to document stuff, instead of
summarising stuff documented else where.

Most wikis are a tool to collectively create documentation. And somehow
wikipedia is stuck in older world, and not what most wikipedia users expect it
to be.

My conclusion, until the project reforms and allows original content, I won't
contribute.

------
Paul_S
I used to contribute a lot when I was younger and had more free time but I
might have kept that up if not for the change that happened in the late 00s
when the higher ups decided that wikipedia has too much content and started
streamlining by simply deleting whole sections. I am not talking about when
citations became a stricter requirement and the quality in general became more
of a focus - that came later. I think it's more sane nowadays but I'm too
disillusioned now. I hate its approach of "if it's not intelligible to or of
interest to a layman then it needs to be streamlined".

~~~
contingencies
Exact same experience here, though I'm still an admin and contribute here and
there, the politicking has deeply sapped my enthusiasm.

------
bachmeier
It's easy to dismiss this as "oh well, it's not perfect". The problem arises
when you see something that is factually incorrect but cannot change it, and
you know others rely on it. I've noticed a number of wrong, or just not
precisely correct, things on Wikipedia, so I seldom click on those links when
they appear in a search result.

I've never used it all that much, to be honest, but the information hiding
aspect is what makes it so dangerous. Allow incorrect information to appear on
the site _and then explain why it 's incorrect_. Allow information on the site
that might be incorrect, so that others can investigate further. But
presenting the material as if it is correct, because there is a quality
control mechanism in place, is simply dishonest.

If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, it would not bother me at all. No
information would be lost. It would reappear elsewhere on the internet.

------
lovelearning
Somehow OpenStreetMaps has managed to remain democratic, welcoming to
newcomers and yet remarkably accurate without much (any?) moderation, despite
being almost as old as Wikipedia. I've always wondered how it manages that.

~~~
spb
OpenStreetMaps' content is virtually 100% objective (with only political
borders and names being potentially contentious).

~~~
frenchy
It's not 100% objective, but for simple things, it mostly is. If you hop on
the mailing lists you will find all sorts of people bickering about whether it
should be `shop=ice_cream` or `amenity=ice_cream` or `restauraunt=ice_cream`
as they fight over their self-made taxonomies.

At some point, I think, things will inevitably change. But for the moment,
there's so many obvious things to work on that the confusing/subjective things
don't really pop up too much.

~~~
DanBC
Do you have links? I'm interested in meta stuff.

Discussions about shop= vs amenity= are sometimes frustrating, but I bet they
don't come anywhere near the discussions over using –,—, or - in page titles.

Here's 15,000 words. At the end of that? No consensus.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(policy\)/Archive_101#Hyphens_and_endashs)

The type of dash to use in "Mexican-American War" got over 20,000 words.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_War/Archive_3)

Dash wars even got to Arbcom:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case&oldid=429209333#Hyphens_and_dashes)

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tokenadult
As mentioned in the other recent thread about Wikikpedia, I am a Wikipedian. I
joined active editing in 2010, that is after the heyday of welcoming new
editors, but long before most articles on important topics were anywhere near
to being well sourced. I have tried to clean up the mess on some articles, and
am a winner or co-winner of two Million Awards[1] for fixing up high-page-view
articles.

But how I got the awards basically illustrates the problem. One article I
fixed I wrote entirely off-line in a text editor file, while commenting on the
talk page of the previous lousy version of the article, and then I dropped in
the new article text all at once. Every previous time when I tried piecemeal
editing of that article, my best edits would be reverted, while other stuff
that was entirely made up and without reliable sources would be inserted into
the article. The second article I worked on fixing up was a collaborative
effort. Again, I started with discussion on the article talk page. My first
few edits were reverted, contrary to reliable sources, by editors who exerted
"ownership" on the article but who refused to look up sources. Later I was
joined by two other editors, and one of the other two made it his project to
rewrite the article from top to bottom for one of the Wikipedia editing
contests. He liberally threw out old unsourced crap and then layered in new,
well sourced text. I mentioned on the article talk page I'd like to fix a few
sections of the article, and proofread all of it, and after he deleted the old
crap, I put in new good content in the sections I worked on and checked all of
his references throughout the article. The former editors who let the article
be bad for years slithered away. It's a slog and a struggle like this every
time someone tries to improve Wikipedia--the established editing culture
includes snap judgments without looking up reliable sources.

AFTER EDIT: I also mentioned in the previous thread about Wikipedia that I
hope sometime soon a philanthropist funds a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize
to put to the test what could be possible in building an accurate, well edited
free, online encyclopedia if some new projects began and tried out some new
models of project management and perhaps some new software. (I personally
don't have any trouble dealing with Wikipedia's software, but I have been
using various kinds of markup languages since the 1980s in earlier editing
work.) The only way to know what's possible is to try to challenge the
incumbent project with some competition, I think. Even if Wikipedia then just
ended up winning a prize with reasonable criteria, it would still become
better, and we would all have a better idea about what works and what doesn't.

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

~~~
Paperweight
I think the next generation of online encyclopedia will let a writer "own" a
complete version of the article, and the readership/editors will vote on the
best written article.

Kind of like Urban Dictionary, except serious.

~~~
Animats
That's Citizendium.[1] 16K articles total, 1219 "developed" articles, 160
"expert approved, citable articles". It has about 10 active contributors,
after 8 years of operation.

[1] [http://en.citizendium.org/](http://en.citizendium.org/)

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kevindeasis
It would be cool to have a Wikipedia spinoff but articles have to be explained
like I'm five. You might get a lot of contributors from that. It's important
because some articles have a lot of jargon and feels like it was written by a
bureaucrat. SOME people are only willing to invest a few minutes of their
time.

~~~
Animats
That's the Simple English Wikipedia.[1]

[1] [https://simple.wikipedia.org](https://simple.wikipedia.org)

~~~
kevindeasis
Good to know, that is pretty cool. I wish they had more stuff.

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mark_l_watson
Wikipedia used to be a large part of my web experience. Now I might end up on
Wikipedia 2 or 3 times a week. That said, DBPedia (RDF data derived from
Wikipedia) is useful and I rely on it.

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return0
I think that's the best you can do with crowdsourcing. To go beyond you would
need a structured community. My bet is, however, on an AI that will build the
articles automatically.

~~~
sparkzilla
You can do a lot more with crowdsourced models. Crowdsourcing content != wiki.
My site (see bio) is a more structured way to build news and biography content
that IMHO gives better presentation and less editor stress than the equivalent
Wikipedia pages.

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Kinnard
As an early wikipedian who doesn't edit much anymore I can corroborate some of
the assertions in this paper.

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mtw
I rely on wikipedia like everyone on hacker news but I can't help thinking
that changing their status to benefit corporation like Kickstarter would
improve the structure and also their finances. Non-profit closes a lot of
doors, especially growth opportunities. A renewed status could bring new
mobile apps, tie-ins with media companies, perhaps an open API available to
third-party developers etc.

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quanticle
For the record, this paper was published in 2013, in case anyone's looking at
it and wondering why its conclusions seem awfully _obvious_ today.

[http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664](http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664)

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reagle
Note that this is from 2013.

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tonocm
Can someone give them a standard LaTeX template please

