
Wikipedia is an MMORPG - stennie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG
======
jl6
I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their
perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide
a link so we can judge for ourselves.

~~~
captainmuon
Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article
name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly
used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you
are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in
his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so
"Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turkeychicken" to the average German. I
have never heard this outside of Wikipedia. You might use it to contrast the
female from the male animal in a zoological setting, but the thing you eat or
the thing that makes "gobbeldigock" is called "Truthahn". So this was a win of
technically correct over useful.

I've also had many small edits on technical subjects (particle physics and
supersymmetry) reversed by people who were self-professedly not experts, with
comments like they could not find it in their beginners' textbook. So I just
gave up. (Edit: this was over ten years ago, and I can't find it anymore - not
even sure what my username was - but one dispute was about the naming
convention of some exotic particles. I was quoting from the famous "review of
particle physics" and respectable textbooks, but it kept being reverted to a
made-up notation...)

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
The non-expert with a beginners' textbook having strong opinions about the
subject is everything that's wrong with places like wikipedia and reddit. I
just hate it.

~~~
consumer451
> places like wikipedia and reddit. I just hate it.

All human products have issues, but are there any superior alternatives at
scale?

Wikipedia is one of our civilization’s greatest achievements, isn’t it? It
seems like the Library of Alexandria on steroids to me. Especially when
combined with an internet archive.

It’s funny to admit it, but Reddit is also quite an achievement due to the
scalable _human_ moderation model and very useful hive mind.

For research, name a better duo.

~~~
burntoutfire
> Are there any superior alternatives at scale?

Pay tens of thousands of experts to work on the encyclopedia instead. The
issue isn't scale, but the cost of the labor (which, in Wikipedia's case, is
free - but in many cases you get the quality you paid for).

~~~
hirako2000
This alternative has shown to produce inferior universal encyclopedia.

Encyclopedia Britanica was/is probably the most successful professional
collection of knowledge, it's been superseded by Wikipedia over a decade ago.

Free contributor is a low expense for sure but what you get isn't necessarily
lower value than paying contributors.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
The problem with wikipedia is that the existing editors tend to drive away
experts who are willing to edit things for free though. Like one comment here
about the random editor with a beginner's textbook reverting edits with
information that was not in their textbook( that were properly cited from
well-known books). That's just ridiculous and I'm blown away at the level of
hubris that makes you trust your own lack of knowledge more than proper
citations.

------
sergioro
Shameless plug: I recently wrote a Ruby gem to get/post Wikipedia articles
from the command line. Then I can use my text editor to edit the articles
which is faster than doing so in the browser. To install it: _gem install
wikian_. To see how it works visit
[https://rubygems.org/gems/wikian](https://rubygems.org/gems/wikian).

~~~
hk__2
That’s great! Which text editor do you use? How does wikian deal with edit
conflicts?

~~~
sergioro
I use Vim. Thanks for mentioning edit conflicts, I had overlooked that
important feature. Will add it to the next version of Wikian by comparing
timestamps of the local and most recent revisions.

------
haunter
Good comparison tbh. MMOs are one of the most toxic game genre (only topped by
MOBAs) and that perfectly fits to the holier than thou attitude of the
majority of editors

~~~
Mediterraneo10
And just as some people somehow manage to play MMOs every waking hour of the
day even as ordinary people would have e.g. a job and a family, so Wikipedia
has editors who somehow manage to edit all day every day. I have been active
in Wikipedia since shortly after its founding and I am quite familiar with all
processes and standards, but I have had edits reverted simply because my edit
history struck the obsessive editors as too casual; if I wasn’t editing
constantly around the clock like them, then I was seen as too low-quality an
editor for my edits to stand.

~~~
haunter
My main problem that a lot of times I want to do a raid and not the game but
the players won't let me do it. The game doesn't say you need this class or
this item level, actually anyone can and encouraged to do it. But then you are
there against the boss and another player turns up and kills it before you.
"Sorry you not meant to kill this boss, this _our_ boss, go farm something
else". Then you are locked out from the instance and scratch your head what to
do. That's especially frustrating when you know the other players use a very
wrong or inefficient strategy (my strat would work 10x faster!) and even
worse: you know those players don't even need the loot from the boss (they
can't even equip it or they already have it). So why don't they let others
join the fun?

~~~
Talanes
By definition, when you are in an instance, there shouldn't be another rando
there to take the boss. What games are you playing?

------
stennie
According to the page edit history, this humorous article was created in 2004
and has continued to evolve since then with 400+ edits (including updated
stats for 2020). I often describe my Wikipedia experience as the "largest
MMORPG I've played", and this article does an excellent job of fleshing out
the comparison.

~~~
libraryatnight
Hilarious stuff, great Saturday afternoon reading. thank you

------
qdiencdxqd
I think they should lean into this. Imagine how many contributors they could
end up with if their on-boarding experience was as smooth as World of
Warcraft.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
Or maybe not. It's not like they are lacking contributors and using addictive
systems to attract people isn't the most ethical thing, plus I seriously
question the quality of the contributors.

------
beagle3
I remember something more snarky along the same lines from encyclopedia
dramatica (or was it uncyclopedia?) from 2003 or so.

~~~
linkdd
[https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Main_Page](https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Main_Page)
:)

------
_fzslm
i love how Larry Sanger's name is cheekily crossed out :p

~~~
hombre_fatal
Just saw that lil devil post this today:
[https://twitter.com/lsanger/status/1304606908364578817](https://twitter.com/lsanger/status/1304606908364578817)

------
zitterbewegung
If you wanted to actually do this see
[https://parl.ai/projects/wizard_of_wikipedia/](https://parl.ai/projects/wizard_of_wikipedia/)

You would need a scoring system though.

------
LostTrackHowM
I am shocked this first version of an online encyclopedia has lasted so long.

Typically first versions of software reproduce real world limitations, which
don't apply to the software. Second and third iterations tend to drop them.

Wikipedia has lots of those real world limitations. Notoriety and style of
writing were determined by the limitations of shelf space and paper.

The selected editor team is something wikipedia specifically wanted to get rid
of but has bumbled back into over time.

I keep expecting someone else to crate wikipedia 2.0, but so far nothing.
Here's my suggestion for a better virtual encyclopedia.

\- Articles are cryptographically signed by authors.

\- Articles are not editable after publication. Edits result in new articles.

\- Articles have a unique and unchanging url.

\- Registered users can vote on articles.

\- Registered users can create collections of existing articles. And those
collections can be tread as an article.

\- Articles can be filtered on popularity, and on popularity among select
groups of authors, and on popularity among select groups of up-voters.

I think based on the above you end up with human repository of knowledge.
Where articles and links to articles are reliably unchanged, and you never
have to worry about them changing "under your feet" so to speak.

The same group of people running wikipedia now, can reproduce their own view
of the world in the above setup, and their fans can use it.

Any other group can also create their view of things. There is going to be one
most popular view of things. But there could also be a one armed economists'
view of modern dance filter of the knowledge pool.

How to deal with spammer or trolls? In addition to voting and filtering, top
notch text compression and time based moving of the least often visited
articles to slower and cheaper storage.

The slowest and cheapest storage we have, combined with how well we can
compress text, in my opinion, results in almost unlimited capacity to store
text. And thus notoriety should not be a concern. Leave that to paper
encyclopedias.

~~~
Sebb767
I don't think that would necessarily result in a better wiki.

> Articles are cryptographically signed by authors.

This would significantly up the hurdle for doing edits and, given the meager
popularity of PGP, not really pin down a person. But fair, I'd like to see
that as a feature.

> Articles are not editable after publication. Edits result in new articles.

I don't see how this is different to a version history. For the most part,
people just want the newest information; if a specific revision is needed, you
can already direct-link to that.

> Articles have a unique and unchanging url.

Again doable via direct links. I see why you'd want to use that, but if I link
(for example) my town, I want people to get the best info about my town and
not that version I saw at that moment, unless I'm talking about edits
specifically - in which case I'll link a revision. Of course, this requirement
satisfies the crypto nerd in us, but it's really going against the usability
here for hardly any gain whatsoever.

> Registered users can vote on articles.

Because that works so well for Reddit and all the other vote platforms. Or in
science - see the replication crisis.

In all honesty, I think adding a popularity score into this is going to make
things far worse. It'll just lead to repeating whatever happens to get votes,
with everything else ignored. Why bother with the article of your town? No one
cares about that, those two upvotes ... Let's go start an edit war over the
birthday of a person!

> Registered users can create collections of existing articles. And those
> collections can be tread as an article.

Fair, but that's nothing that wouldn't be doable as of now.

> Articles can be filtered on popularity, and on popularity among select
> groups of authors, and on popularity among select groups of up-voters.

That'd be actually interesting, but I don't think it be worth the drawback of
votes. Also, people which were set to that group or people which self-identify
as that group?

~~~
LostTrackHowM
_Also, people which were set to that group or people which self-identify as
that group?_

Why not both. Self-identified groups and groups curated by someone else.

And on popularity, I just think of votes as one filter. For example, who and
how decides what is the best info of your town? Latest? A filter. Most
popular? Another filter. The exact link you sent. Also a filter. Liked by a
selected group of people. Yet another filter.

------
fnord77
> Genre(s): Fantasy

------
SMAAART
Same for Reddit!

------
fardeem
The things I find on this orange website haha

~~~
surround
Hacker News is an FPS

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Okay, you’re going to have to expand on that one. Even if we’re going for the
very loosest of metaphors, I don’t see it.

~~~
surround
It was the only other game type I could think of ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
lemondemon
Deleted. Sorry, my anxiety is playing up.

~~~
Permit
It's hard to know what to make of your comment. Consider the perspective of
others reading it:

You allude to a government conspiracy but don't elaborate. You say you
investigated this story, but don't describe your investigation (ie. Did you
interview victims or did you read blogs online?). You mention this all
happened on Wikipedia so presumably there exists some kind of paper trail, but
you don't provide any supporting evidence. You describe "random objects" in
your mail but don't describe them.

From the reader's perspective this story could be:

1\. An unbiased account of a (unnamed) government unfairly wielding their
influence over Wikipedia

2\. The result of someone upset that their Pizzagate exposé wasn't being taken
seriously on Wikipedia

3\. An exercise in creative writing

Some kind of supporting evidence would greatly improve your comment.

~~~
lemondemon
I investigated the story by reading newspaper articles and government
documents. I'd like to forget this ever happened, but also would like to serve
as a (anonymous internet) warning. Heed it or not, up to you. I don't want to
link to the paper trail and wake up any dormant monsters. The "random objects"
I also don't describe, in case the objects ring a bell to someone. But you can
imagine a door handle or a travel bottle of shampoo.

If you want specifics, I suppose I could mail you those. I fully agree that
the account sounds fantastical and psychotic, but it is what I was comfortable
sharing. I also think it is a smart tactic if you wanted to discredit someone.
I never told anyone close to me either and completely submitted after the
article was deleted.

~~~
klenwell
Can you provide a link to one of those newspaper articles or government
documents? That would go a long way toward establishing your credibility.

~~~
lemondemon
Sure, but not publicly. Provide contact.

~~~
GauntletWizard
I'm going to bite, as well. My pubkey is in keybase from my profile, and my
e-mail is on github (or you can just use keybase chat)

