
Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is Losing Contributors - taylorbuley
http://siliconfilter.com/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-is-losing-contributors/
======
duopixel
Say you draw a venn diagram with three intersecting circles:

1\. People with technical web expertise

2\. People with deep domain knowledge

3\. People willing to deal with bureaucracy

You will get a very tiny population.

Wikipedia wasn't always like this, the problem is that well established
editors have built a fort to keep the noobs out—not because they are power
thirsty—but because they don't want to deal with noob mistakes.

As with anyone new to a job, your first week will likely be a net loss to the
company: they have to show you the ropes, set up your computer, take you out
for lunch, make you feel welcome, etc. The wikipedia editors don't want to
deal with this, so they just build technical and policy barriers to keep new
people out.

Around three years ago I decided on "donating" one day of my life to Wikipedia
in Spanish. I went around areas of intest, fixed some stuff, created two new
articles of well recognized designers. The next day both articles were
"nominated for deletion", one because it wasn't properly formatted or
referenced, and the other for copyright infringement. An overzealous editor
made a search on google and found a similar article in a blog, _my own blog!_
which I release under public domain and which shares my wikipedia handle.

I ended up collaborating one day and fighting bureaucracy three days. No
wonder they're having trouble finding new editors.

~~~
Steko
It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's eventually death/massive reorganization
will come about over four easily recognizable flaws:

(1) rejecting articles for notability.

(2) no advertising

(3) reliance on a tiny population of unpaid editors.

(4) allowing anonymous edits.

Google tried with Knol but they focused on (2), (3) and (4) when in actuality
the biggest weakness is (1) due to Kryder's Law.

What Google (or Microsoft or some startup) should do is create a third party
wikipedia extension, call it notapedia (or whatever) and have it spider
wikipedia and keep a fork of any page deleted for notability reasons.

Of course that's just the tip of the iceberg. People will be able to make
their own (notable or not notapedia) info pages. Notapedia will hit a critical
mass and the killing blow will come all at once as wikipedia is forked and
most of their editors enticed with revenue deals.

Having swallowed it's father (patriphagicide?) notapedia grows even faster.
Info pages are created for nearly every person on the planet, becoming the
anti-facebook that Zuckerburg envisioned but replacing the real facebook and
twitter and flickr and linked in and everything else as well. Businesses and
government agencies will check your id against the datestamped photos of you
on notapedia. An enormous network of private and government databases will be
setup to work as extensions of notapedia.

~~~
someperson
The final paragraph seems like a huge leap from your (very convincing) earlier
paragraphs.

Reducing/removing notability guidelines does not necessarily open the flood
gates to some kind of social network with a wiki page for every individual on
earth :P

That said, I really hope a wikipedia fork gains popularity and is merged back
later.

~~~
Steko
Was engaging in a bit of artistic license there but I think it's certainly
possible.

Once the notability threshold is gone and people realize they could make a
page for themselves, their family, friends, their dog, their band... Well some
people will do that. This can easily be turned into a crowd sourced version of
any social or blogging service. It grows faster because one user can make
pages for 100, 1000 people. It grows faster because the total lack of privacy
and editorial controls make it more interesting (right up Google's alley btw).
Lack of anonymous commenting means people are ultimately subject to libel
laws.

------
pornel
Contributing to Wikipedia is not fun.

If you create a new article, it's likely to get deleted for not meeting high
"notability" criteria.

Your first edits will likely end up being reverted for not having sources good
enough. For overzealous admins it's easier to bin them rather than find a
better source link or let someone else improve it.

~~~
yichi
As an administrator on Wikipedia, I thought the Wikipedia notability criteria
is quite leniant about articles which are not that notable, this is evident if
you ever look at what kind of articles gets kept on [[WP:AFD]]. The reason
notability criteria is there so not everyone can create an article about their
band which sold 3 copies of their CD (edit: Which typically have no realiable
sources indicating its existance). If the article you are creating was deleted
for not meeting the notability criteria, it means you probably did not source
it with a reliable source, and the administartor who deleted it could not find
a reliable source about the article you were writing.

If you think your article's deletion need to be reviewed, try contacting one
of the admins, if your article was deleted by me I would be more than happy to
tell you why I deleted it, and if I made a mistake I would not hestitate to
revert the deletion.

~~~
ramchip
> The reason notability criteria is there so not everyone can create an
> article about their band which sold 3 copies of their CD.

I could see this being a problem if the band's name is ambiguous with
existing, important articles. But if there's no conflict, how is that a bad
thing? Perhaps it would encourage people to contribute more if Wikipedia is a
little too lenient rather than a little too strict.

~~~
yichi
Bands which sold 3 copies of their CD tend to have no reliable sources
indicating its existance even, with no sources, how is anyone able to ensure
that it even exists? (Perhaps I should of reworded that). Notability criteria
in a nutshell, basically means, the subject of the article needs to be
mentioned by some reliable source. If we had no notability criteria, then we
simply have no ways to ensure that the subject of the article exists or even
real.

Note: I'm pretty much summarizing what's on
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:N> If you think I'm biased, please
read the policy directly on Wikipedia itself.

~~~
jellicle
The notability criteria are rather stricter than that. There are plenty of
individuals and nouns that assuredly exist but which are not "notable"
according to Wikipedia. The criteria wording is "significant coverage" in
outside sources, so not only does your band have to have one article written
about them, but many, in different outside sources, before Wikipedia won't
delete your entry.

~~~
_delirium
Iirc, the multiple-sources requirement came in because of some cases where
there was exactly one "reliable" article on a subject, but it was hilariously
bad, like an article on a fringe physics theory in some popular-press magazine
that made the mistake of taking it seriously, or an article on a person that
paints them in a very negative light. So the worry is that without more that
one source, Wikipedia just amplifies bias by parroting what one source says,
because the one source gets cited, but the rebuttals don't exist in a citeable
form. That can happen with more sources too, but at least there's more chance
of sources disagreeing when they're >1.

Despite it being phrased as "notability", to me it's the "verifiability"
requirement that's a better argument: there should only be Wikipedia articles
on things where there exist enough good sources to write a reasonably well
sourced article. That's more of a pragmatic than a philosophical decision; not
"this subject deserves/doesn't-deserve an article", but rather "we
have/don't-have enough sources to write a good article about this subject".

------
ColinWright
You can't engage gradually - if you don't get everything exactly right first
time you just get spat out with little or no feedback or encouragement.

Designers of user interfaces have learned over time that you need to engage
gradually and give positive feedback for the good bits, while gently removing
the bad bits. WikiPedia seems to do exactly the opposite.

User Hostile rather than User Friendly.

More, in the push to become a "proper" encyclopedia the markup has become
remarkably baroque, making it almost impossible to get to know what to do. The
macros and other procedures that work behind the scenes are nearly impossible
to grok given the lack of tools to help.

Overall, it's simply groaning under the mass of twiddles and has no elegance.

------
gnosis
I've freely given many, many hours of my life to improving Wikipedia, and
here's why I left:

Except for technical, completely uncontroversial articles, Wikipedia is
dominated by people with apparently unlimited time on their hands to devote to
pushing their point of view.

I got really tired of the endless arguments I needed to engage in to
contribute new information or improve the wording of existing articles.

Some person or group of people with apparently unlimited time on their hands
and who feel they "own" the article would inevitably come by and start
reverting and endlessly arguing every little change.

I just don't have the infinite time on my hands (or interest, frankly) that it
would require to out-argue these people. They can keep their articles. I've
got better things to do with my time than argue with no-life Wikilawyers all
day, every day.

------
bh42222
Wikipedia puzzles me.

Why so many deletions? The significance of a topic is very important for paper
encyclopedias because shelf space is finite. A regular encyclopedia collection
can have only so many books before no one can afford to buy one.

But when most of the Wikipedia contents are text - why all the deletions?

~~~
ejames
Because there are storage costs other than the literal cost of maintaining
data on a server.

Is the data accurate and up-to-date? Are the links still viable? Do the
citations check out? etc.

It's just like having a project with a huge number of lines of code. It's an
important maintenance task to delete outdated or obsolete code - not because
you will run out of disk space to store your .c files, but because unused,
unmaintained code is very likely to be confusing or wrong.

Remember also the power rule for user contribution: 90% of all users do not
contribute anything ever. 9% of users contribute at least once. 1% of users
contribute everything else. If an article is not very notable, it's extremely
likely that the person who originally contributes it will be the only person
who ever contributes anything to the article, and contributing the original is
very likely to be the only contribution to the subject they make. This will
hold true even if there are some number of "long tail" readers interested in
the article, because readers are drastically more common than writers, and
infrequent writers drastically more common than writers who consistently
attempt to improve the articles they read.

So: Articles with low notability are probably poorly maintained, out of date,
and/or consisting entirely of the statements of a single person. Making them
better imposes a cost which relatively few people in Wikipedia's community
actually pay - the cost of taking time to edit something.

All of Wikipedia's pains and stretch marks will become much clearer if you
restate the purpose and function of the site. If you approach Wikipedia as a
server farm that takes in user contributions and produces a compilation of
same, then it's strange to have any limits on contributions, since the cost of
storing text data is extremely small. If you approach Wikipedia as a group of
people that takes in the members' time and energy and produces agreement
between the members, then you see where their problems come from.

Remember, a Wikipedia article gets to stay in a particular state only when
everyone who potentially could change it agrees that no changes are necessary.
Wikipedia produces consensus, not data. Its limiting factor is the time and
patience of the people who work on edits.

If you need consensus - the kind that will not be repeatedly challenged by
latecomers - and you are limited in the number of people who will voluntarily
"meet" in the editing area to discuss a particular subject, then low-
popularity articles are a cost with no benefit. The opinions of a single
person - possibly an oddball, since they're the only one who submitted the
article - will produce no agreement, and it will consume more time and energy
to find people who could hammer out a lasting consensus.

~~~
bh42222
_Wikipedia produces consensus, not data._

That's a great description of what Wikipedia is.

I keep thinking of it as an open source repository of human knowledge, like an
infinitely large encyclopedia. But in reality it is more like a forum where
useful information "gets voted to top", so to speak.

~~~
ejames
I think this is also the best way to understand the results of editing wars
and the like.

A requirement for consensus is incompatible with individual rights, since
people have the right to disagree. For low-interest topics, Wikipedia
eventually succeeds anyway because less-motivated contributors become bored or
exhausted and stop arguing. For high-interest topics, the search for consensus
becomes more and more explicitly political - political as in "determining the
governing rules of a body of disparate people", rather than political as in
"are Republicans better than Democrats", although the two kinds of 'political'
are both present in many edit wars.

Take the cool-off rules, for examples - locking an article for a period of
time, or forbidding certain people from editing it. This is central to
Wikipedia's functioning in highly controversial areas, but "nobody can edit
this article today" is a policy, not a datapoint. Politics produces policy - a
set of actions that can be acted upon by people who do NOT necessarily agree
about the underlying facts.

Nasty edit-wars borrow from the tools of dictatorship and oppression -
censorship, propaganda, exclusion from the body politic. It's not a
coincidence; as mentioned above, consensus is incompatible with individual
rights. You need to limit which individuals are allowed to participate, or
negotiate the ways that their participation will be accepted. In a
sufficiently small or like-minded group, consensus can work again.

A data server has a failure state where some of the data is lost. Wikipedia's
failure state, on the other hand, resembles the internal rupture of a
political party in a post-Soviet state. Like communist countries, Wikipedia
articles demand consensus from their citizens in order to operate.

Of course, unlike Eastern Bloc revolutions, Wikipedia contributors typically
do not get lined up against a wall and shot. =) That's also one of the reasons
we tend to put Wikipedia edit wars in either the "tech company struggles with
its architecture" bucket or the "people on the Internet are angry, news at 7"
bucket, rather than the "fractured political unit experiences internal strife
due to irreconcilable demands on limited resources" bucket where they actually
belong.

~~~
gojomo
Do you have any ideas for other rules that can increase the useful-output-to-
political-conflict ratio?

(Welcome either in this thread or in direct communication; I am trying to
devise better computer-mediated systems for this. While conflict and politics
are intrinsic to human affairs I think proper system design can reduce the
number of zero- or negative-sum interactions.)

------
kevinpet
My beef with Wikipedia is the squeaky wheel gets the grease problem: a vocal
minority easily drowns out the more rational but less rabid. For example: why
does the article on pregnancy need a naked woman on it? The talk page
dismisses all arguments of "why is this necessary, what's wrong with this
other photo of a clothed pregnant woman" with "we don't censor".

The article for video games is a good example of this. There's clearly someone
on wikipedia who has made it his life's work to ensure that there cannot exist
an article which doesn't explicitly state that "video game" can only refer to
something that has a raster display.

~~~
scythe
>My beef with Wikipedia is the squeaky wheel gets the grease problem: a vocal
minority easily drowns out the more rational but less rabid. For example: why
does the article on pregnancy need a naked woman on it? The talk page
dismisses all arguments of "why is this necessary, what's wrong with this
other photo of a clothed pregnant woman" with "we don't censor".

The irony is palpable. Upon reading this, I went to the Wikipedia article on
Pregnancy and looked at the talk page. I found a lot of surprisingly decent
and rational discussion about the choice of the image, including some gems:

 _"There is no profanity in any of the later 3 images. These images depict the
natural condition of pregnancy (external manifestation, physical changes,
etc), to which image 1 alone would not be able to do justice."_

 _"Someone recently used the phrase "adolescent glee" to describe the
attitudes of some editors who argue for the most prominent possible placement
of nudity, and that resonates with me. Just because we can (and IMO should)
include this image somewhere in the article does not mean that we should make
it be the first and largest image—or that we should have zero images of
pregnant women who aren't in a state of undress. If you want to present
pregnancy as a part of normal life, then showing exclusively images of women
who are undressed isn't the way to go about it."_

Regardless of whom you agree with, both sides are putting forth legitimate
arguments. Your intentional misrepresentation of the discussion raises
questions about your motives.

~~~
alttag
I've had similar concerns with many articles as the GP (as clarified in the
sibling comment): namely that so much of it is a clash of ideologies, and it's
inconstant with my own. I don't have the time or inclination to deal with
ideologues—I had enough of that as an elected public education official.

As a specific example, consider the pregnancy article already under question.
In my mind, a reasonable compromise would be to move to image (not _re_ move
it) and put it behind a link labeled "image of nude pregnant woman" or a mask
(like the spoiler codes in game forms) or some other easily identifiable
method. I won't argue whether images like that has value or not [1], but the
clash between opposing moral standards (if you'll pardon the potentially
charged term) is pervasive in the talk pages.

There are some images that I don't feel the need to look at, and more
particularly, don't wish _my_ young children to look at. I understand that not
everyone feels that way (I'm not telling anyone how to raise their kids), but
by placing such images front-and-center, I feel blindsided or robbed of the
choice to seek out such things. Yet on Wikipedia, this sort of perspective is
consistently rejected ("No censorship!"). I see it as the amoral being
preferred to the moral, and I'm uncomfortable supporting an organization that
consistently acts in such a way. In recognition of opposing views I'm not
suggesting that images like this be removed--just labeled or easily masked so
that I can choose to see it if I want, and similarly choose _not_ to.

I'm not trying to push my view on others, but Wikipedia (as embodied by its
editors) pushes its view on me.

1: It seemed to me from the talk page that some of those in favor of keeping
the nude pictures had emotional attachments to the image rather than objective
reasoning.

------
shinratdr
Hardly surprising. The last 50 edits to a Wiki I've made were to private
Wikias. Why? Because I actually contributed something, and the paragraph I
wrote about bugs in a Fallout: New Vegas location is still there in it's
entirety, but with additions and conformations from users of other platforms.

That's how Wikipedia was supposed to work. Now every time I try to do
something, I know it will be deleted over non-notability. It's not even a
question anymore, it's just a matter of time.

Since we can break up articles into sub-topics very easily, there is
absolutely no reason for this behaviour other than a love of power-tripping
and some vague Wikipeida guidelines to fall back on. The editors are already
in this thread, defending themselves. Nothing new, just the same "We don't
want pages about your unknown indie band". Talk about baby & the bathwater.

------
bugsbunnyak
I think MediaWiki is showing its age. Some improvements could include: \-
reputation system and better meta-edit controls a la StackOverflow. This could
help remove some of the politics associated with Administrative rights in the
current system. \- edit thresholds that increase with size/age of articles, to
avoid stupid troll-based edit wars. To still allow quick reaction to news
events, have a vote-based modification system to allow upvotes to overcome the
threshold. \- A robust table editor to replace the monstrosity of MW tables
would go a long way to improve readability. \- ... and in general, less arcane
markup.

~~~
starwed
MW tables aren't really a monstrosity -- I doubt a better text editable table
format that maintained the flexibility could be produced.

But yeah, there are some problematic holes in MW, especially when you consider
how wikipedia is used today.

Example: How many times have you clicked on a link, to be redirected to a page
that seems to have no relevance? After a few seconds, you realise it was
supposed to redirect to a specific subsection, but that subsection has been
removed or renamed. That is a problem that could be solved with better
technology.

------
InclinedPlane
Not surprising in the least. We already know that the people who add content
to wikipedia are not the same as the people in power. But worse than that
there's a pervasive failure to understand that within the wikipedia moderator
and management community.

The mods and admins have put a lot of their effort into pissing off the
greater community with edit wars and rampant deletionism. It shouldn't come as
a surprise that this would eventually take its toll on discouraging
commenters.

------
Hyena
Presumably a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the English-speaking world has
been picked. So Wikipedia really needs to draw contributors from outside
Anglosphere to flesh out history and culture articles.

~~~
hugh3
More importantly, it needs to draw contributors from outside the Anglosphere
to work on languages other than English.

English wikipedia has 3.7 million articles. Spanish has only 810,000, Chinese
just 300,000-ish, and Hindi less than one hundred thousand. That's the top
four most spoken languages in the world right there.

~~~
_delirium
For Hindi in particular, there's a big competition-with-English issue. There
was a study at some point that Wikimedia commissioned that found that most
educated Hindi-speakers preferred to read and contribute to the English
Wikipedia. IIRC, one of the reasons was that they felt it promoted Indian
culture to a more international audience if they wrote an article about an
Indian location, or novel, or historical figure, in English. Another reason is
that a lot of higher education in India is in English already.

(Also, anecdotally, the South Indians I know would rather use English than
Hindi; their own native-language Wikipedias, like Kannada, are too small for
them to consider them viable, and they see English as more "neutral" than
Hindi in domestic political terms.)

------
TorKlingberg
The problem with Wikipedia is the reaction to people trying to add crap that
doesn't belong. It has been to put up barriers to adding content, making
anyone who starts a new article go though more and more bureaucracy, paperwork
and proving your innocence. It is the same with uploading pictures or just
adding text to an article. This has led to much fewer people joining the
community, and without enough editors to look after the articles, the
arguments to lock down and protect only becomes stronger.

Basically Wikipedia has suffered the same fate as many mature online
communities. In the beginning everyone is helping each other out and you are
creating something great together. After a few years the older members of the
community start getting really tired of the clueless newcomers and start
complaining and setting up rules. New users no longer feel welcome and never
stay long. Soon 90% are experienced members, and the newcomer perspective is
lost completely. It is often not intentional, making it easier for moderators
is just higher priority than letting more people participate.

I wonder if Stack Overflow will survive growing up.

~~~
bane
_After a few years the older members of the community start getting really
tired of the clueless newcomers and start complaining and setting up rules._

Maybe a "forced retirement" rule should go in effect for long time editors?

------
doctoboggan
It has always been my opinion that the high barrier to editing has prevented
vandalism. It seems we are now getting to the point that it is preventing
legitimate commits as well.

~~~
int3rnaut
I've been on both sides of the spectrum of this--I've "vandalized" (I was
young, it wasn't malicious but I can see now it was disruptive--and for those
wondering...it had to do with wild cats slowly taking over my city... haha)
and I've legitimately tried to post useful and factual information and I will
say this, the thing I universally found to be my biggest obstacle was this
elitist structure of the "higher ups"--the big editors held way to much power
(I can't speak to the present as I no longer even try) but I can't tell you
how frustrating it was to try and be helpful and good, and then being told I
am an idiot/noob and to cease from attempting to write wiki articles. It
always seemed like some of them were just on power trips, and didn't care for
your "help".

------
DannoHung
Maybe wikipedia should start to move to a git-style of collaboration?
Anonymous or semi-committed members can make or arrange small contributions
that may or may not fit all the requirements. More senior members collate and
merge contributions together. There would be multiple branches of a page to
support re-organizations or new page sections....

I dunno, just a thought.

~~~
bane
Or perhaps support different "levels" of "encyclopedianess"? At the top are
only articles that are of encyclopedia level contribution, then as you go down
the rules slacken up a bit. All new contributions start at the bottom,
say...level 5, and have to be accepted by editors at each higher level.

That way if a reader doesn't care for the hyper-strict top level, they can
view more inclusive information down the lower levels.

If the site grows too big/strict and more levels are needed, it should be
relatively trivial to add another level down.

------
gojomo
My current project aims to address many of these concerns with a new kind of
reference website. The goal is to be complementary in license to Wikipedia,
but with a different organizational model that is better able to accept any
topic and casual contributors. (That is, it's definitely _not_ Just-Another-
MediaWiki-Install or content fork.)

I'm still pre-launch but I discuss the themes and motivations in a blog at:

<http://infinithree.org>

~~~
carussell
I remember this being brought up before, and I remember some sound advice to
change the name. It appears that advice was not heeded.

~~~
gojomo
I cannot find any criticism of the name here via HNSearch, nor in the previous
submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597881>

So it appears that advice was not, in fact, given.

If anyone had delivered that advice, I would have pointed out: 'Infinithree'
is just a pre-launch code name.

Any other feedback?

------
a3_nm
I find it quite worrying that people will rely on Wikipedia but stop editing
it because it's hard and because not everyone is friendly there. Yes, part of
the time that you spend editing Wikipedia is lost because you have to look up
obscure conventions and templates and policies, and argue with people every
now and then, including some rare cases where it's hard to assume good faith.
You should be fair though -- Wikipedia is a huge endeavor, and administrative
friction is unavoidable to some extent.

If people stop contributing, though, the bureaucrats will take over, and we
cannot afford to let Wikipedia stagnate and die in this way. It's tempting to
leave the administrative burden to someone else, but it will get heavier and
heavier for those who stay.

------
raldi
"It's the deletionists, stupid."

------
bane
No really? Wikipedia has fostered a culture where the only remaining people
who participate think it's perfectly reasonable to destroy knowledge because
it hasn't achieved a level of fame such that everybody already knows it.

------
sambeau
I too have found editing wikipedia painful.

On one memorable occasion my historically accurate change to a page was
reverted by the 'page owner' on the grounds that "ask any man in the street
and he will tell you different".

------
gerds
Because Wikipedia peaked in 2005.

------
VioletEvil
Tweaking articles is the very best way to get involved with editing Wikipedia.
There are lots of minor typos and grammar mistakes in Wikipedia, and fixing
every little bit refines an article.

