
Can Wikipedia Survive? - dctoedt
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html
======
Sir_Substance
I'm hypothesizing here, so I'm willing for someone with actual data to tell me
otherwise, but I don't believe that the traditional desktop users have gone
anywhere.

The massive increase in mobile traffic is coming from people who formerly
didn't use the internet except when they had to. Mothers, cricketers,
grandfathers, plumbers. All those people who you could never see hunched in
front of a keyboard are now discovering the internet via their fancy status-
symbol phones.

Which is cool and all, but importantly it means wikipedias editors, and
desktop users in general, aren't reducing. There's as many of them as there
ever were, and their growth rate probably hasn't slowed either. I imagine the
venn diagram of "people inclined to edit an online encyclopedia" and "people
who will find a mobile phone claustrophobic" is probably pretty much a perfect
circle.

~~~
adventured
One of the best, directly measured sources for this:

[https://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com](https://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com)

Says that desktop is mostly flat, more than it is evaporating.

Wikia has a vast amount of traffic, as one of the top ~20 sites in the US. If
you take their average monthly desktop numbers from August 1st 2013 to now,
there has been zero decline.

Would this premise hold true for sites like Twitter and Facebook? Probably
not. Social sites with photo sharing are likely far more prone to erosion on
the desktop.

~~~
DanBC
Wikia has a lot of content that is desktop gaming related. Does that skew
their figures?

------
contingencies
Personally, I just quit editing after 15 years (12 as an administrator) in
protest at the deletion of good encyclopedic content. Frankly, I can see
clearly why new editors don't want to become involved in Wikipedia - the
community these days is _positively toxic_. I think, subconsciously, I was
rather hoping someone would fix the problem and invite me back, but not only
has the problem not been fixed but nobody seem to give a damn. There was a
time when I even attended Wikimedia physical meetings with governments and
academics and so forth. Well... no more: so long, and thanks for all the free
edits.

My solution? Remove all the bullshit policies, reduce things back to a core of
spirit-of-the-word driven basics, and then have a random selection of a panel
of community judges (extra/uninvolved eyeballs) for anything at all that
people want to dispute. This would do far better than the mob rule of yore,
while lowering cognitive overhead and friction for new editors.

------
philipn
The press really loves to write pieces about how Wikipedia is in a constant
state of disrepair. If you were to go off what's written about Wikipedia in
the press, you'd think it was filled with child pornography and that the
project was a horrible, miserable failure. That said,

"One board member, María Sefidari, warned that 'some communities have become
so change-resistant and innovation-averse” that they risk staying “stuck in
2006 while the rest of the Internet is thinking about 2020 and the next three
billion users.'"

..is probably the best quote from this article. Wikipedia has a new set of
growing pains now that it's a fully-established project. It will never be
done, but a lack of increase of new contributors, month-on-month, isn't
necessarily the worst thing in the world for Wikipedia. A focus on long-term
maintenance (which includes not pissing off long-term editors, as the article
mentions) and mobile growth seems smart.

~~~
thanksgiving
The English Wikipedia has a lot of contributors but smaller siblings such as
new.wikipedia do not have this luxury. To be fair though, the problem isn't
unique to Wikipedia as few people read and write in the language.

[https://new.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%...](https://new.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%B6%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B7:RecentChanges&days=30&from=&limit=500)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=special:RecentCha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=special:RecentChanges&days=30&from=&limit=500)

~~~
prodigal_erik
Off topic, I get why ne.wikipedia.org is in Nepali, but why does
new.wikipedia.org have different content in the same language?

~~~
pooper
new is nepal bhasa or NEWari which is the language of the Nepal valley (also
commonly known as Kathmandu valley).

~~~
prodigal_erik
Ah, different language, same script. TIL.

~~~
thanksgiving
There is Ranjana
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_alphabet)
and Devnagari
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari)

From what I understand, language and alphabets are related but not the same.
For example, you can write in Japanese with roman alphabets
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese)

Thus, it is possible to write in Newari (also known as Nepal Bhasa which
literally translates to Nepal Language) in devnagari as well as ranjana.

I cannot read or write in Ranjana. I can read or write Devnagari.

------
bane
So as an experiment, about a year ago, I helped created this page [1][2] (it
had been around for a while, but had been deleted a few times). Some editor
keeps deleting it or redirecting it to "cold chills" which it isn't. It's also
not ASMR.

I've never had any edit to WP last longer than 24 hours, so I was surprise
some version of what I helped resurrect still around. It's been worked on,
edited, and even had some warning flags placed on it. In general, it's an
improvement over what I originally provided.

Trouble is, I can't tell if this is because this is a weird and obscure topic
area, or because what I provided (with links to research papers) was good
enough for some bot not to automatically submit for deletion. Some of my
original phrases have even survived which is pretty amazing.

Contributing to WP is terrifying.

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson)

2 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8190451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8190451)

------
hartror
> In 2005, during Wikipedia’s peak years, there were months when more than 60
> editors were made administrator — a position with special privileges in
> editing the English-language edition. For the past year, it has sometimes
> struggled to promote even one per month.

Or has Wikipedia reached a point of maturity where the group of contributors
is largely stable and the core content written and refined?

~~~
pbreit
Yeah, normally once an encyclopedia has been produced there is only a fraction
of ongoing work.

------
robbrown451
I think the lack of participation now has more to do with Wikipedia becoming
mature, where it doesn't really need a lot more added, except actual new
information.

There was a long period where most anyone with the inclination could find
something to add. It's a lot harder now. Contributions are much more
scrutinized now, and there are much more stringent requirements for citations.
Which is good...that means that it is being refined, rather than just bulked
up. But that takes less people.

Even if the organization were to go away (which doesn't seem at all likely),
all the work that has gone into it is there for eternity. Others can build
upon it.

~~~
degenerate
Bingo. I'd edit wikipedia if it was needed, but it's just not needed. And you
would too, and you over there, and that guy too. We're all standing by, but
there's people doing it already. It has nothing to do with phones. There's a
term for what this article is doing, but I forget the expression... it's
trying to make a story out of nothing.

------
sehugg
I've found editing Wikipedia (as a casual user) to be more daunting than it
was five or so years ago, much in part due to figuring out the citation
system. Also, uploading images (even those you own) was a headache that took a
while to navigate.

I don't think though that people will all transition to mobile and forget how
to edit markup on keyboards, as the article suggests ... at least not anytime
soon.

~~~
Strilanc
I agree with both those criticisms. The citation templates are hard to find (I
had to google them), bury their example usages, and you can't even find out if
you did it wrong until the bot that rewrites the particular citation template
you used comes by and fails. When I was uploading images I think I managed to
get all the way to the last step of five before realizing I was supposed to be
using wikimedia instead.

The actual user experience for citing should be "just give me the link". Then
wikipedia should do the rest. Is it an arxiv link? That's a very common site;
scrap the data. Is it a docid link? Ditto. Is it some random pdf? Do your best
to parse out the title and authors.

Actually, even the URL might be overkill. A random bag of words about the
paper (its title, or author and year, or just half-remembered fragments) could
be more than enough. A naive search of google scholar with that bag of words,
augmented with context from the surrounding article, could potentially have an
excellent hit rate.

~~~
lwf
> The actual user experience for citing should be "just give me the link".
> Then wikipedia should do the rest.

You're absolutely right. And Wikipedia's Visual Editor[1] does just that:
[http://i.imgur.com/0yM2koH.png](http://i.imgur.com/0yM2koH.png)
[http://i.imgur.com/opVTplc.png](http://i.imgur.com/opVTplc.png)

It isn't perfect, but it's constantly being improved. It was at one point
rolled out as the default editing experience on the English Wikipedia[2], but
was made opt-in after feedback from the community[3].

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor)
[2]:
[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor#History](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor#History)
[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC)

------
hlfcoding
Their iOS app[1] looks promising, but the reviews seem to indicate it's still
not there yet. Back in 2004, I had friends who grew addicted to casual
browsing of Wikipedia in the browser. I'm not sure if that activity translates
well to mobile browsers, but that it's probably a variety of factors: lack of
integration with the device OS, longer average latency, more user actions to
navigate content (accordion interface). As far as editing, not having input
accessories for the markup syntax makes editing on mobile painful. Luckily,
these problems all seem surmountable.

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-
mobile/id324715238...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-
mobile/id324715238?mt=8)

------
Fannon
I also don't think that the problem is the rise of mobile devices here.

My perception is that Wikipedia has developed a culture that where new people
are really discouraged from starting and contributing. The problem is both
social and technological.

And while the MediaWiki software is open source, it forms a rather closed /
restricted sub-area of open source software. They reinvent alot within their
community. I'd be very happy if they did some steps like Drupal 8, integrating
part of the Symfony 2 Framework.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia / MediaWiki are still very powerful and I don't see
any viable alternative to them as of now. It was / is a highly successful
project. Not many software projects grow so old and are still relevant.

------
Animats
We keep hearing this argument, usually from print authors who are struggling
to remain relevant. Really, Wikipedia is in good shape, having reached the
point where there are articles on most things of significance.

Let's take a look at the last 10 new articles on Wikipedia right now:

    
    
        EDULITE Institute 
        Air Reserve Component 
        New York Declaration on Forests 
        Daniel lopez lauber 
        Northeastern Conference (Wisconsin) 
        Embassy of the United States, Mexico City 
        RU.TV 
        Castle of Evil 
        Diagnosis of multiple sclerosis 
        Arlington Beardtime 
    

Some of those subject might be worth an article, but it's not like Wikipedia
really needs an article on any of those subjects. Most of the important stuff
was covered in the first 500K articles.

Of course Wikipedia is hard to edit from a phone. Small screen devices are for
mostly-output applications. Writing anything longer than a text message is
hard on a phone. Editing documents is hard on a phone. Writing a footnoted
paper on a phone or tablet is painful, even though you can now run Microsoft
Word on Android devices. Does anyone on HN program from a phone except in dire
emergencies? Writers use keyboards. Readers use tablets and phones.

Wikipedia's bureaucracy is somewhat complex, but it beats having some group of
"moderators" with unquestionable authority. Editing Wikipedia has become
daunting mostly because it's now expected that almost everything be cited.
That's a good thing, because it prevents blog-type blithering. But many people
aren't used to that, especially if they never went to a reasonably tough high
school or college.

------
fauigerzigerk
Is it really such a bad sign if the number of editors goes down after most
content that many people know about has already been written and refined for a
number of years?

I would be very surprised if the difficulty of writing wikipedia articles on
6" screens has anything to do with it.

~~~
DanBC
But the quality of that refined content is not very good. There's still huge
amounts of work that need to be done. But trying to do that is sometimes like
walking through molasses.

So yes, it does matter.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
The problem is that the quality is better than most people's expertise on the
subject. Back when there were no articles on some subjects, many could make a
contribution because many knew more than nothing about the subject.

In any event, I don't see how that relates to editing on a 6" screen.

~~~
DanBC
Wikipedia needs people to check citations and provide citations.

That's really freaking hard on a mobile phone.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
That's a good point.

------
tokenadult
As a note at the end of the article points out, Andrew Lih, the author of the
article kindly submitted here, is someone who literally wrote the book about
Wikipedia, namely the book _The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies
Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia._ [1] His book is one of the books I
read as I transitioned from being a reader of Wikipedia to being an editor of
Wikipedia in 2010.

I think the best point he made in the current article needs more emphasis in
the article, and more discussion here on Hacker News. "The real challenges for
Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes — the tensions among
foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives,
and new volunteers trying to break in." Big time. The governance on Wikipedia
is basically a mobocracy, and it is not producing good improvements to
articles.

Contrary to what several comments posted earlier in this thread (while I was
examining my Wikipedia watchlist) say, I don't think much of Wikipedia is very
good at all yet. There was the famous study that suggested that Wikipedia was
no worse (based on a sampling of articles in the study) than the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_ at that time, and plainly a typical Wikipedia article is better
than a typical single-author website on the same topic somewhere on the
Internet, but Wikipedia is actually a LOT worse than the content of other
reference books college-educated people can find by consulting an academic
library. Wikipedia currently wins reader attention because of the extreme
convenience of doing ill-formed Google searches on the Internet as a whole and
then examining whatever Wikipedia articles show up highest in the search
results. Yes, that is a contribution to the quality of freely available online
information. But remarkably few of the 5,000 most viewed articles on Wikipedia
each week[2] are even up to "B class" on Wikipedia's very generous quality
rating scale, and "good article" or "featured article" quality articles on
highly viewed topics are even rarer.

I work at improving some of the high-page-view articles. Two of the 5,000
articles on the weekly top 5,000 list (they are there every week without fail)
that are at "good article" quality level are articles that I helped improve.
But the petty edit warring and endless wikilawyering about silly issues, often
solely in the interest of pushing fringe points of view, has ruined a lot of
Wikipedia's articles and has driven away many productive editors who are
disgusted by all that interpersonal drama with unaccountable strangers.

What I would like to see tried is a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize, with
careful work done on prize criteria and funding for a substantial prize by a
philanthropist, to see if there is a better way to organize a crowd-sourced
project to build a free, online encyclopedia, both as to software base and as
to organizational structure. I suspect that there are two or three models of a
new encyclopedia that could force Wikipedia to change or be left in the dust.
Elon Musk could really make himself famous by trying to fund a prize like
this, but he is by far not the only Silicon Valley entrepreneur who could
afford to fund a meaningful prize in this space.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Wikipedia-Revolution-Nobodies-
Ency...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Wikipedia-Revolution-Nobodies-
Encyclopedia/dp/B002KAOS60)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages)

~~~
ikeboy
I don't think your X Prize idea is good. The last thing we want is the people
who are willing to donate time to editing to split between many competing
sites. 10 wikipedias each a fifth the size would not be an improvement.

------
wavefunction
Wikipedia should integrate NLP querying so you can ask it questions and it can
attempt/succeed at presenting relevant and useful information from its graph.

 _edit voice search for mobile as well_

------
foopants
Good riddance. It is a hateful, bullying, propaganda pile.

~~~
sova
Not all of it. Just the contentious stuff. If you want to learn about
chlorophyll, for example, it's a great resource. The periodic table on Wiki is
also really great. The rest that could be classified as editorials is somewhat
troubling, though. That said, it is a product that has not had a rethink of
its internals or structure in ~20 years? So it had a great run. Either become
the next World Book or the first social encyclopedia, but trying to balance
both has been a journey indeed.

------
sparkzilla
It's not the keyboards that are the problem. Wikipedia will not survive
because the site has a huge amount of software issues, the most notable being
the wiki-software itself, which is almost 15 years old and simply not suited
to the demands of the modern web. The software is the cause of almost every
problem the site has (including bias, harassment, censorship, Gender Gap, lack
of media support, hideous textbook like formatting and more) but the cult-like
status attached to it ensures it cannot be meaningfully updated. Decline is
inevitable. For more on these issues see this blog post [1]

Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. While it was dealing with
"encyclopedic" topics it was fine, but now that the encyclopedia part is
pretty much done, editors are building up pages that are actually news
archives, a task the wiki software does not handle well.

As for the author's claims that that Wikipedia has no substantial competition
-- it's coming. My site, Newslines, aims to take away all Wikipedia's news and
biography pages, replacing Wikipedia's article-based writing system with a
news event-driven approach that results in far less bias, and pages that
readers can sort and filter. We even have video! You can see a couple of pages
we are working on here [2][3]. So far our writers, who receive revenue share
for their efforts, have added over 30,000 posts on 8000 different topics.

[1] [http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-
sins/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/) [2]
[http://newslines.org/dylann-roof/?order=ASC](http://newslines.org/dylann-
roof/?order=ASC) [3] [http://newslines.org/emma-
sulkowicz/?order=ASC](http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC)

~~~
zachrose
... which is almost 15 years old and simply not suited to the demands of the
modern web.

What are the demands of the modern web?

~~~
cdcarter
I'm particularly interested in how the MediaWiki software is the cause of
harassment and gender inequity. I think there may be a good argument for it,
but I'd love to hear what GP thinks.

~~~
sparkzilla
I wrote a blog post on how Wikipedia's software choices cause the Gender Gap
[1]. In short, the MediaWiki software gave power to the initial users of the
software, who were mainly men. As the site grew, the software was not updated
to devolve power to other groups, such as women and minorities, in part
because the dominant group thought they were/are doing good work. In Wikipedia
might is right and the end justifies the means. It's not just women, men find
themselves routinely harassed on Wikipedia, and that's IMHO a fault of
software, that doesn't have enough checks and balances on its various power
structures. I came to realize this empirically because my site, which also
crowdsources news and biographies, has up to 80% female participation. [1]
[http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-
wikipedi...](http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedia/)

