
The Decline of Wikipedia (2013) - Sideloader
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/
======
pierrec
Wikipedia's administration is far from perfect, but you have to give them one
thing: the amount of vandalism they've had to deal with is of historical
proportions.

It's not as impactful as physical mass vandalism, such as what occurred in the
world's great revolutions, but that makes the job of dealing with it all the
more unrewarding and annoying. I can imagine it would wear me down. It would
be interesting to attempt a formal quantification of vandalism received by
different projects susceptible to it. I'd be willing to bet that Wikipedia has
been more targeted than anything else out there, and by a wide margin.

It's good to point out the flaws in the WP's inner workings, but you have to
take a step back and realize the task of keeping the whole thing working is
quite difficult (I might even have said "impossible" but somehow they're doing
it.)

~~~
Animats
_" Wikipedia's administration is far from perfect, but you have to give them
one thing: the amount of vandalism they've had to deal with is of historical
proportions."_

Simple vandalism is more or less under control. Areas of high controversy
(abortion, Israel/Palestine issues) are a huge headache, and much of
Wikipedia's bureaucracy spends time dealing with those issues. In between
those extremes are attempts to use Wikipedia as a promotional medium.

Wikipedia doesn't allow advertising. A lot of people don't get that. I
sometimes take on tasks from the Wikipedia conflict of interest noticeboard.
This is usually someone trying to promote their band/DJ/company/product, or
themself. Most of those are routine, but sometimes it gets out of hand.

There are at least three wealthy convicted criminals who have PR people trying
to erase, or at least gloss over, their history on Wikipedia. There's a
company with a sketchy financial product that set up a massive effort to
delete their regulatory and legal problems from Wikipedia. There are several
companies which don't like prominent mentions of their product recalls. There
are many consumer product companies who try to push their marketing pitch onto
Wikipedia, and don't like that their pitch is turned into a cold discussion of
their history, mergers, finances, and problems.

Without the Wikipedia bureaucracy to push back against that tide of paid
promotion, Wikipedia would look like the happy news world of ads and PR
Newswire.

~~~
provost
Wow, that's troubling - I'd like to help out. Is there a requirement of
years/posts/edits to be made before you can help on the 'conflict of interest'
noticeboard?

------
DanBC
> The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective
> running the site today, [EDIT to prevent tedious distracting subthreads]
> operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that
> deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden
> its coverage.

> When asked to identify Wikipedia’s real problem, Moran cites the
> bureaucratic culture that has formed around the rules and guidelines on
> contributing, which have become labyrinthine over the years. The page
> explaining a policy called Neutral Point of View, one of “five pillars”
> fundamental to Wikipedia, is almost 5,000 words long. “That is the real
> barrier: policy creep,” he says.

I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-
dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&prefix=Wikipedia+talk%3AManual+of+Style%2F&fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search)

> Their version reads: “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the
> norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-
> automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her
> time and energy can edit.”

They should probably have "and has the stamina to out-last the people
incorrectly reverting good edits for spurious reasons" in there somewhere.

~~~
brador
> estimated to be 90 percent male

Why did you include this? It seems out of place, unless you're saying it's the
heavy skew of males that's causing the beurocracy?

~~~
DanBC
It's a quote from the article. Why are you fixated on that sentence fragment
from a much larger quote?

~~~
sametmax
If you had said "90 pourcent female", I think people would have felt
inconfortable. I don't see how the gender has anything about the bureaucracy.

~~~
DanBC
But I didn't say it, I just quoted from the article.

I edited the quote.

------
unavoidable
Wikipedia gets a worse rap than it really deserves.

If you ignore most of the pedantic self-important editors/trolls on WP, it's
actually a great experience to contribute. I write a lot of articles on
Canadian/British law and history, and the WPProjects are very supportive and
generally polite. Otherwise, I don't really need to interact with anybody. I
simply enjoy contributing to the organization of human knowledge. Nearly a
decade and thousands of edits (on various accounts for reasons of anonymity)
later, I have yet to have a real negative experience that has affected me in
one way or another.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Quite possibly because the topics you contribute to are very non
controversial.

~~~
unavoidable
But Wikipedia as an encyclopedic repository is never going to be a good venue
for controversial topics. That's not the purpose of an encyclopedia. It's a
terrible forum for a debate, and that's the way it will always be. This isn't
something wrong with Wikipedia in particular, other than the fact that it is
one of the largest and most visited sites on the Internet.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
An encyclopedia with any remote claim to being thorough will inevitably have
to cover _some_ controversial topics though.

~~~
TeMPOraL
A normal encyclopedia is curated by a relatively small amount of people who
are able to reach a consensus on a controversial topic, as opposed to random
strangers on the Internet with an opinion being able to edit things.

------
mlinksva
Elections for the Wikimedia Foundation community board seats begins tomorrow;
candidate statements and Q&A make good next level/updated reading.

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Board_elections/2015/Candidates)
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/Board_elections/2015/Questions)

Voting requires 300 edits on a Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project ever and
20 in last six months.

------
bra-ket
I found that the best way to contribute to wikipedia is from multiple IPs
without logging in. Otherwise some troll could delete the entire history of
your edits with some wacky explanation.

------
aerodog
So where are we today?

~~~
bane
WP and the Wikimedia foundation continue to ignore their internal problems and
instead focus on gathering data that shows what everybody already knows, then
trying to "solve" it with irrelevant projects that don't even begin to nip at
the edges of the issue.

We're years in on the issue and WP keeps asking like they don't have any idea
what's wrong, even though likely millions of words have been bled on the
topic. The only people who don't seem to understand it is WP themselves and
the only conclusion one can reach is that they're doing it on purpose.

~~~
shalmanese
The Wikimedia foundation is well aware of the problem and considers it their
top priority. However, it's not clear exactly what a solution would be. The
"irrelevant projects" are their best attempt at fixing the issues.

Complicating the fact is that the relationship between the Wikimedia
foundation and Wikipedia is not like that of a conventional private company to
a product they've built. The WMF intentionally delegates large parts of the
governance of Wikipedia to the community and cannot autocratically come in and
force change without community buy in.

This is a philosophical position that was established a long time ago and one
which the WMF supports, even if it makes the process of change harder.

~~~
bane
> However, it's not clear exactly what a solution would be.

The issue or course is that they don't publicly acknowledge the issue. They'll
produce hundreds of pages of reports on the issue and end it with a "what
could the problem be?" with shoulders shrugged.

Acknowledging the problem is the first step towards finding the solution.

Here's me almost 1500 days ago (4 YEARS!)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598491)

Here's the recent thing that was going on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168)

Here's an article on it
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272466)

And another
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638)

This discussion goes back to 2011 at least, and WP just _can 't_ seem to admit
that there's a problem.

~~~
shalmanese
All I can say is that I offered to do some informal product consulting with
the WMF a few years ago and I walked into the building thinking I knew what
the issues were and what obvious steps were required to fix them and I walked
out being as equally confused and frustrated as the people there.

------
spdegabrielle
Gamergate.

It's absolutely the right place to look if you want to know how to 'jump the
shark'.

~~~
hkon
Please elaborate a bit. I am unfamiliar with both terms

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Gamergate in a nutshell:

A: "Games journalism is being corrupted by woman-centered bias. Here's the
damning proof: This guy says his ex-girlfriend repeatedly traded sex for
positive reviews of her game."

B: "That is provably untrue."

A: "Yes, okay, that was a lie. Why are you so hung up on that when the real
issue is that women are ruining games journalism?"

~~~
k__
I had the impression that game journalism is corrupted in general and the
story (true or not) just brought this to medial attention.

Which I found sexist, because those people got pampered by the game publishers
all the time and no one cared...

~~~
scrollaway
As I said below, I work in the industry. And yes, it's extremely incestuous
(not just games journalism... the entire non-mobile games industry).
Corruption is rampant and until gamergate surfaced, nobody cared because
"whatever, it's just games".

> Which I found sexist

Huh?

~~~
k__
Well, because they harassed that girl and were all about "look how those girls
can sleep them to the top" blabla

~~~
scrollaway
"They" is a big net to cast. I know a lot of people who were involved and
don't even have twitter accounts - would you cast it over those too?

I don't think I saw a focus on how "those girls were sleeping to the top" over
the more general issue of "look at how those guys would trade sex for
undisclosed favours".

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _I don 't think I saw a focus on how "those girls were sleeping to the top"
> over the more general issue of "look at how those guys would trade sex for
> undisclosed favours"._

I want to be perfectly clear, though, that neither of those things ever
happened. The story that various writers accepted sex from Zoe Quinn in
exchange for good reviews was the founding event of the Gamergate movement,
and it is 100% false.

~~~
scrollaway
Not that you have any sources for that, but either way, does it matter? I
don't know about you, but I don't really care about Quinn (her sex life even
less so), and IMO everyone involved (on both sides) should stop caring about
her - she, and some other nameless people, have been using the controversy as
their personal publicity ring.

Fact is, I can tell you first hand that the industry I'm in is massively
corrupt. I'm glad some people are casting a light on it. Devs, journalists,
indies, companies, it's rotten all over. Full of people abused for working
their "dream job", full of undisclosed deals to promote such and such game
(makes sense when your livelyhood literally depends on it)... and full of
seriously low quality wannabe-journalism to top it all.

I love what I do, but god damn do I hate the environment I do it in.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Not that you have any sources for that_

As a matter of fact!

Eron Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with 5 guys, whom he named.
([http://gamergate.wikia.com/wiki/5_guys](http://gamergate.wikia.com/wiki/5_guys))
Four of these guys were game designers, not journalists. Nathan Grayson was
the only journalist among them, and he mentioned Quinn and her game exactly
twice, in passing in larger articles--one for Rock Paper Shotgun in January,
one for Kotaku in March.
([http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-
quest-v...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-valve-
greenlights-50-more-games/), [http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-
several-time...](http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-
times-about-a-pos-1624707346)) Gjoni himself says that Grayson and Quinn
didn't sleep together until April at least. ([http://geekparty.com/eron-gjoni-
clarifies-the-zoe-quinn-nath...](http://geekparty.com/eron-gjoni-clarifies-
the-zoe-quinn-nathan-grayson-timeline/))

So, yes, the idea that Quinn traded sex for reviews is provably, definitively
a lie, and all of this information has been publicly available for around nine
months.

> _but either way, does it matter?_

Yes, the truth matters, especially when lies are being used to harass someone.

This is _exactly_ what I was talking about in my original snarkpost. You're
absolutely right that the gaming press is full of corruption, and has been for
as long as there's been a gaming press, but gamers in general have never given
two shits. Remember when Jeff Gerstmann got fired from GameSpot for giving
Kane & Lynch a 6/10, and the bloggers tutted over it for a week, and then
everybody forgot? It wasn't half as controversial as, say, that time the
CODBLOPS tutorial level was too hand-holdy. Who cared if some guy lost his
job? The games kept coming, and that was all that mattered.

But when a woman is accused (falsely) of using sex to boost sales of her
(free) indie game, oh ho ho, now it's time for a fucking _movement._ THIS
INJUSTICE SHALL NOT STAND.

And when you show these guys incontrovertible evidence that the accusation
against Quinn was a lie, then they immediately backpedal and say it was never
_really_ about Quinn, and go right back to raging about Anita Sarkeesian and
Brianna Wu and ignoring guys like Gerstmann.

There are people who've aligned themselves with Gamergate who actually care
about ethics in game journalism, and it's a damn shame, because Gamergate is
rooted in lies. If you really want to do something about corruption, don't do
it while riding the coattails of a "movement" that was only ever a wildly-
successful troll.

~~~
scrollaway
Thanks for the sources.

> There are people who've aligned themselves with Gamergate who actually care
> about ethics in game journalism, and it's a damn shame, because Gamergate is
> rooted in lies. If you really want to do something about corruption, don't
> do it while riding the coattails of a "movement" that was only ever a
> wildly-successful troll.

If you look in my post history, you'll find that I said exactly this a few
months back. I'm convinced that Gamergate's #1 problem is how the name is
reused for everything and based on a hashtag (which makes it easy to abuse as
a "dialing my personal army" kind of thing). Twitter doesn't allow for
intelligent discourse anyway, and encourages this kind of "us vs. them"
mentality. (Maybe you're familiar with CGPGrey's video on it, if not, I very
highly recommend it: [http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-
angry](http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry))

The tipping point that boosted GG's popularity wasn't specifically the Quinn
scandal but the onslaught of "gamers are dead" article, which was followed by
more and more revelations (and I'm sure a fair share of them were false). The
Quinn scandal was one starting point, but it could have been anything else.

But does it matter what started a movement, really? Because _right now_ , the
controversy's is fueled by the people who stand to gain the most from the
attention. Quinn is the least guilty of it, but if you look close enough,
you'll find that the harrassment claims are really just claims. Just the other
day, one of those recurring names was claiming she had to "flee to Europe
because of the threats", and then when few-months older tweets surfaced about
a "planned vacation to Europe" surfaced, the narrative changed. (Again, I
apologise for no sources but I dislike giving those people attention - my
email is accessible from my profile if you want to continue in private).

I'm sure they get their fair share of death threats but... don't be on twitter
then? It's not just a horrible medium for discussion, it really encourages
this behaviour. Anyone mildly popular and controversial gets death threats.
Just like anyone mildly rich will find people asking for money.

I try to remain neutral, as I said. But it's hard to feel sympathy for those
people. The only thing that can be done about corruption is that people find
out and talk about it, and that won't happen without momentum. GG just happens
to have the momentum.

