
The Great Failure of Wikipedia (2004) - hnmcs
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808
======
secstate
Except for the fact that more than a decade later this great failure has not
managed to make Wikipedia any less useful the vast majority of the world's
population.

The fact of the matter is that regardless of the OP's whinging, a new model
for encyclopedic knowledge was desperately needed for the late 20th century.
Britannica and World Book were hopelessly embarrassing themselves with out of
date content, and their vision for an online model of the products looked
remarkably similar to their dead-tree models, including huge lead times to get
changes made to specific entries.

Wikipedia, for all it's tribal bullshit, remains the gold standard of
knowledge retention. And if it turns of people like the OP from contributing,
that stinks. But it's better than the handful of editors EB or WB had.

------
Tomte
"This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It’s that there’s a small
set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a
heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and
procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have
to become content defenders."

This. Best description of Wikipedia I've read so far.

~~~
xlm1717
Also this:

"A very large amount of maintainers leads to infighting, procedural
foolishness, and ultimately a very slow advancement schedule."

Sounds like the no-confidence vote that many wikipedia editors signed last
week.

~~~
secstate
I think that had to do with a board appointment with serious lapses in moral
judgement when he worked at Google. That, as best I can tell, has little to do
with the no-confidence in how editing is handled.

