
Why Wikipedia is Dying - andrewjho
https://medium.com/@andrewjho/why-wikipedia-is-dying-f2e5604df62f#.uwtahyxqf
======
jdietrich
1) Wikipedia is not dying. It is the sixth most popular website on the
internet. Traffic to Wikipedia continues to grow at above-average rates.

2) Wikipedia does not have a shortage of editors. It is in fact overwhelmed
with editors who have a net-negative impact on Wikipedia's stated mission. By
failing to read the rules and failing to accept the rules when informed of
them, you have made yourself a net-negative contributor. These rules are not
inscrutable, but are publicly available and explained in depth. The admin who
removed your content provided a link to the relevant rule.

3) Wikipedia's primary challenge today is quality, not quantity. The
overwhelming number of abusive users create an enormous burden of editing. The
pedants, petty tyrants and robots of Wikipedia may be a deterrent to new
contributors, but they also form the immune system that protects Wikipedia
against abuse.

4) In the space of 15 years, Wikipedia has become the largest and highest-
quality encyclopedia available. The community has developed a complex set of
processes to ensure continued quality. Those processes may be imperfect, but
they are demonstrably effective. Your criticism comes from a position of
complete ignorance as to the necessity and efficacy of those processes.

~~~
andrewjho
I'll charitably assume that you're arguing from a position of ignorance, not
malice. Read before writing:
[https://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism](https://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism)

(1) The metric that matters, active user growth, has been _declining_ since
2007.

(2) Right, the 1 MB of bandwidth I took up and 5 KB of storage space I
consumed with userspace pages outweighs the hundreds of minor corrections I've
submitted over the course of a decade. By the way, Wikipedia _does_ have a
shortage of editors relative to its popularity and potential.

(3) Deletionism destroys more information than it protects. This is easy to
establish. Educate yourself.

(4) You are circularly using the status quo to justify itself without having
explored alternatives and without having performed any research into the
historical evolution of Wikipedia and Wikipedian culture. Again, educate
yourself before posting.

~~~
flukus
> The metric that matters, active user growth, has been declining since 2007.

How do you expect it to continue growing? There aren't enough people to
continue active user growth. It's like your expecting it to be a pyramid
scheme that makes money as long as you sign up more people than exist on the
planet.

~~~
andrewjho
You're strawmanning my argument. I did _not_ say, as you imply, that active
user growth should continue indefinitely.

Take a look at this graph: [https://www.gwern.net/images/2012-henkvd-
activewikipedians.p...](https://www.gwern.net/images/2012-henkvd-
activewikipedians.png)

First, one would typically expect the number of active users to keep
increasing but for the _rate of increase_ to gradually decline, _not_ for the
number of active users to actually start _decreasing_ gradually after multiple
years of very rapid increase.

Second, if you don't see something wrong with that graph, get your eyes
checked out.

~~~
flukus
There comes a point where everything that should be in wikipedia is.

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intopieces
When you consider the scale of wikipedia, it's easy to see why governance does
not take the form of polite exchanges. There simply isn't time. You want a
conversation with an admin, but that admin isn't being paid to moderate, so
their time is already donated. The tedium involved with politely speaking with
every abuser (and OP is most certainly an abuser) would require a full time
staff. That doesn't even consider the different languages such users speak.

Wikipedia is no longer a scrappy little community of people who like writing
essays. It's a walled garden of information and the only way to moderate is
with an iron fist.

~~~
andrewjho
Your argument is completely logically incoherent. It amounts to saying that
the status quo is circularly self-justifying because... because... _just
because_.

Have you considered, for instance, the possibility that relaxing the
moderation (and -- yes -- allowing some real abusers to slip through the
cracks) but dealing humanely with those who the admins can interact with would
be better for Wikipedia on the whole? (Probably not.)

~~~
intopieces
I haven't considered it because you haven't made a convincing case for me to
do so.

That Wikipedia has fewer volunteer editors does not in itself indicate a
decline in quality. Maybe all the people that left were shitty editors.

That you disagree with the way they handle enforcement of the rules you broke
is not evidence of a deficient system, only that you don't like it.

I have my own misgivings about wikipedia, but the post linked here doesn't
mention any of them.

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marssaxman
What on earth would lead a person to believe that this might even possibly be
a reasonable use of Wikipedia?

~~~
andrewjho
Have you seen what the typical Wikipedia userpage looks like? E.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao).

People pretty much DO use them as personal websites -- the differential
enforcement seems to come mainly from how established a user is.

~~~
sushid
That's just a bio (albeit slightly strange) of the guy. I feel like that's
within reason as it's a user page (i.e. who the author is).

On the other hand, here, let me list a bunch of my recipes for safekeeping is
NOT a description of the user in any way or shape.

~~~
andrewjho
Sure. Arguing over what the True and Canonical Purpose of Wikipedia is will go
nowhere.

The only relevant fact is that it was consequentially better for the
administrator to behave otherwise. _Even if we assume that the user was 100%
in error and that the pages should be removed_ , the administrator's actions
_still_ served to objectively harm Wikipedia (in net).

~~~
x1798DE
How would it be better, in the long run? Almost no people will use their bio
page for storage of recipes or any kind of blog. There are explicit roles
against doing so, _and_ Wikipedia is constantly inundated with spam.

Off the small fraction of people who do try to do this, most will probably
think, "I guess I was out of line, since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not my
personal storage space." Anyone left over who is going to ragequit over
someone not being nice enough when they enforce the rules, frankly, probably
doesn't have the type of personality that can handle a lot of the often heated
discussions that go on on Wikipedia.

Honestly, I imagine the extreme edge cases represented by the productive
editors likely to be seriously dissuaded by this are not a real contributing
factor in any perceived death or decline of Wikipedia (one of the most
successful and widely used products on the internet).

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spamlord
LOL, so wikipedia is dying because this one person thought it would be a great
idea to store personal recipe archive on it and admins deleted it. That's not
really compelling evidence.

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winteriscoming
The user's pages on Wikipedia were deleted by an admin because it was used
more like a personal blog, which Wikipedia was never meant to be. Of course,
perhaps the admin could have given thr user a chance to copy over the content
before deletion but then again I don't blame the admin for considering it
similar to regular spam and deleting it. Maybe they still have a copy and
perhaps the user can request for it.

I still find Wikipedia to be a good source of information and don't consider
it dying. Even if it is dying, I don't believe this to be the reason.

~~~
andrewjho
You're justifying the administrator's actions based on _a priori_ notions of
what Wikipedia is or was "meant" to be.

This allows you to ignore the _actual consequences of actions_.

What's the point of a rule if it doesn't lead to positive consequences?

~~~
jnicholasp
Mate, this isn't about abstract philosophical disagreements over what
Wikipedia is. Wikipedia is a private platform entitled to make and enforce its
own rules about what it is and how it should be used, that you've been using
for years and have no excuse for not knowing the obvious basic rules of, one
of which is "don't abuse wikipedia by treating it as an all-purpose host for
your personal data". You have zero grounds to be pissed, and zero entitlement
to the time and effort of a volunteer moderator who saw someone blatantly
abusing the site's hosting generosity. Not letting you use Wikipedia's servers
as your personal cloud service has absolutely nothing to do with a perceived
decline in the character or culture of the site.

Make a Google doc next time.

~~~
andrewjho
You seem to have completely missed the argument of the linked article. (Also,
saying that something "isn't about X" doesn't magically make it not about X.)

You also seem to be mixing up what "is" with what "ought to be". Feel free to
read more about this common fallacy here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem)

~~~
jnicholasp
It's pretty clear that you are confused about what Wikipedia is (not your
personal cloud server) vs what you think it ought to be (your personal cloud
server). Getting angry about your clearly-against-the-rules behavior being
stopped and using that as a reason to go on a rant about Wikipedia dying of
incivility is ridiculous.

Wikipedia may or may not have a problematic culture. You were still obviously
in the wrong and no one owes you their time to go into a gentle negotiation
about it.

~~~
andrewjho
I'll break this down into easy-to-understand parts for you.

> It's pretty clear that you are confused about what Wikipedia is (not your
> personal cloud server) vs what you think it ought to be (your personal cloud
> server).

Nice "clever response," but you would realize -- if you had read and
comprehended my article & comments -- that I have no such confusion.

> Getting angry about your clearly-against-the-rules behavior being stopped
> and using that as a reason to go on a rant about Wikipedia dying of
> incivility is ridiculous.

"Ridiculous" is not a counterargument.

> Wikipedia may or may not have a problematic culture.

Meaningless statement. Waste of space.

> You were still obviously in the wrong

A factual restatement of what the rules are does not even come close to
constituting a reply to the linked post, let alone a counterargument.

> and no one owes you their time to go into a gentle negotiation about it.

Normative statement. It's also incoherent. My position is that it is
_consequentially better_ for administrators to act otherwise. If you can't
reply on consequential grounds and without making appeals to what people
"should" or "shouldn't" do, then just don't reply, please.

~~~
jnicholasp
I read your article and all of your comments, and my consequentialist argument
is this: you will be a lot happier, and other people will like you more, if
you learn to use rationalist thinking modes and lists of fallacies less as
weapons to wield against others, and more as tools for self-examination and
ways to question not only what you're thinking but why - sometimes you'll
realize that you're over-reacting to a perceived insult, and justifying your
angry response with a weakly related argument about why the entity that
insulted you is terrible. And maybe you'll stop yourself before you do that
publicly where people can see your tantrum.

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SnailWizard
If this isn't a joke, you're extremely self-entitled and you need to chill out
if you get offended this easily.

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tim333
Wikipedia does often seem a bit lacking in basic politeness. Something like
Hacker News's 'be civil' type guidelines might help.

------
FiatLuxDave
andrewjho, I can see you are very passionate about this. But you seem to be
arguing with everyone in this thread. So, first, let me tell you that I
largely agree with you about inclusionism. What you want... yeah, I want that
too. However, Wikipedia is a collection of information, as well as an
encyclopedia, a process, and a community. You find yourself in the position of
disagreeing with the community. This can suck, because it is obvious that you
wouldn't feel so passionate if you didn't love Wikipedia.

I recommend that you direct your passion towards expanding the Wikipedia
community into a new direction commensurate with your goals. Sometimes
communities need to separate in order to make everyone happy. A good city
needs both the quiet streets with toddlers on bikes and the hot nightspots
with pounding music. Do you have a right to play your music? Damn straight, I
say, and play it loud and proud. But your neighbors may be perfectly justified
in saying "not here, we believe this is supposed to be a quiet street". That
seems to be the nature of your disagreement with the community.

I'm not aware of Wikipedia having any policy against deep linking. There have
also been a number of success stories of special interest Wikipedias (e.g.
wookiepedia, Conservapedia) which have been successful. In theory, you could
start an "everythingopedia" which includes Wikipedia as a subset through deep
linking (therefore making it very useful) in addition to your other items
which would be deleted in the normal Wikipedia. I don't know if someone has
already tried this, but it seems to me that you will find more success making
a place for your own type of community than trying to change the minds of a
community which does not agree with you.

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justintocci
Finest Astroturf platform of all time!

------
kevinwang
Lol

