
Wikipedia Will Fail in Four Years (2006) - tokenadult
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm
======
tptacek
It's useful to read this to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem WP
faced even in 2006, when it already had huge traction. Wikipedia is an amazing
achievement, maybe even up there in the leaderboard of western civilization,
and the fact that they managed to do it despite an active decentralized
motivated adversary (the forces of vanispamcruftisement) is just one aspect of
that.

~~~
diminish
on WP, some whole articles are carefully crafted artworks of spam, where
vanispamcruftisement movement learned the encylopedia language and you never
notice. One day someone will write _" vanispamcruftisement manifesto"_, why
spam is a positive moment of western civilization. Spam techniques of once
become mainstream ad types with non-relevance diminished and design improved
and cost increased. Many social media are flood of spammy posts about 'self'..

~~~
rosser
Examples?

~~~
rwmj
Took me 1 minute to find:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_sweeper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_sweeper)

Essentially, pick a topic which isn't totally mainstream (and hence getting
lots of editor attention), but covers something that people buy for themselves
/ their house and where they might visit "review" sites to help them purchase
the item.

~~~
Kiro
What's spammy about it?

~~~
rwmj
Check out the links in the References and (the second link) in the External
Links section. Do those really add to the article or are they content-free
"comparison" sites? The fact that you don't think the page looks spammy shows
how subtle this game has got.

Edit: stable link to the page I was discussing since hopefully someone will
remove the spam links soon:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lawn_sweeper&oldi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lawn_sweeper&oldid=558830887)

Edit#2: Since I used to work in "whitehat SEO" (thankfully no more) let me
explain what's going on here:

A long-lasting link from a Wikipedia page is like gold to search engines. It's
far more valuable than if you linkspam a comment on someone's blog. It
indicates that this page is very relevant to the topic. So when people search
for "lawn sweepers", those links appear nearer to the top. The spammers
monetize this by filling these essentially content-free pages with affiliate
links to Amazon and other sellers.

There's no motive here apart from money. This doesn't make Wikipedia, Google,
the web or even lawn sweeper sellers any better. It just benefits the
spammers.

~~~
mjn
This is particularly prevalent in geographical articles. I recently spent a
few hours clearing spammy links out of articles on Greek islands (and towns,
and beaches, ...).

One strategy spammers are using to try to make their links in Wikipedia
"stickier" is to insert them as citations instead External Links. Wikipedians
will (rightly) think more carefully before removing references than external
links, since refs are supposed to be providing justification for part of the
article, not just a nice-to-have extra. But in most cases they are not really
legitimate citations, in the sense of any kind of reliable source for
information (either the information isn't even there, or it's copied from a
better source like an official website, in which case the original source
should be cited instead).

------
Steko
_My 2005 Prediction of Wikipedia 's Failure By 2010 Was Wrong_

[http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict...](http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict.htm)

~~~
tptacek
This analysis is off in a couple ways.

First: the incentives to spam Wikipedia remain _enormous_ ; Wikipedia has
incredible search mojo. The kind of spam he's talking about is of a kind with
Wordpress comment spam, but the kind of spam Wikipedia deals with in reality
is more sophisticated, and involves entire bogus articles.

Second, flagged revisions are a tool that suppresses edit wars, and are used
on (last I checked) a tiny subset of all the pages on WP. That "most important
technical change" restricting "anyone from editing" WP hasn't been and never
will be deployed sitewide.

~~~
Steko
Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness.

FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of
notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would
require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I
mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.

~~~
tptacek
Good luck, but I don't think you'll be successful with that, because I think
notability is an extremely important part of the glue that holds the Wikipedia
project together. Without it you not only get a torrent of pointless, trivial
content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff, but you also
lose _the_ critical factor that makes the editorial challenge of Wikipedia
tractable; without notability, you simply have too many potential articles to
fact-check, and no way to fact-check them.

About 15 years ago some friends and I started a company whose technical
premise boiled down to taking IRC and replacing the static tree-based
"routing" system it has with a real dynamic routing protocol. No more
netsplits! Arbitrary topologies! It was so simple! Why would anyone want
anything other than a biconnected IRC? It turns out that the moment you lose
the static tree property, the whole system goes to hell. All the sudden,
messages aren't (and can't be) reliable, because the network can change out
from under them while they're being forwarded. So you figure you'll just build
a simple reliability scheme for messages to ride on. Oh, wait: IRC is a group
messaging system, and not only is the distributed systems GMS problem not
particularly easy to build in a "realistic" network, but providing reliability
on it is essentially the multicast reliability problem, which is itself so
annoying that it's part of why IP multicast failed.

My long-winded point is, sometimes something that seems like an obvious
weakness of an existing system is actually fundamental to that system's
viability.

~~~
Steko
"torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to
find the real stuff"

I don't think people page through online encyclopedias that way. I'm not
notable, if I had a wikipedia page I don't think it would link from any page
that actually exists today. How could that ever bother you? I don't think
you'd come across it unless you googled my name and it took you to my
wikipedia page in which case it would seem to be doing good.

~~~
DanBC
I used to hit the [random] link and know I'd get something interesting.

Now, not so much. I'll get a tiny stub of something programmaticly dragged in
from some huge database - a town name with maybe some population figure and
location; an obscure politician with party affiliation and birthdate.

For people who enjoy gnoming these kind of articles are tedious - what's the
point of correcting a comma if no-one is likely to see it?

~~~
saraid216
Supporting the random button isn't what I'd call anywhere near the top 10 most
important functions an encyclopedia of any kind ought to provide. Serendipity
is useful in a library or a bookstore, but when you open a book, the
bibliomancy becomes avant garde art at best.

------
trysomething
_Separately, Jimmy Wales reportedly said that 0.7% of Wikipedia 's users have
made 50% of all Wikipedia edits and 1.8% of users have written more than 72%
of all articles, and he was quoted in the New York Times in June as saying “A
lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one
sentence...But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core
community” of about 1,000 Wikipedians._

I believe Aaron Swartz did some statistical analysis on this and found it not
to be true .. a small number of editors make the most # of edits, but the
_content_ is written by a very large number of editors.

[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia)

~~~
deskglass
His analysis was better than mine in that he weighed content by persistence.
Still, for what it's worth, I found that when edits were weighed by length,
the 1000 most frequent editors dominated.

~~~
cayblood
Depends on how well you calculate length. Miniscule edits can produce enormous
diffs.

~~~
deskglass
That's true. I forgot to mention that I capped the lengths of negative edits
to 10.

------
tedsanders
I know a guy who's a "Wikipedia consultant." He's a longtime editor who now
sells his services to companies and people looking to polish their image. I'm
glad the practice hasn't spread.

~~~
etherealG
why not report him to the wider wiki community. it seems prudent to crack down
on this kind of behaviour for all our benefit.

~~~
tedsanders
Like ZeroGravitas says, Wikipedia isn't zero sum. He frames the issue as being
paid to make Wikipedia better. It's not clear that what he's doing is wrong,
though it does leave a funny taste in my mouth. I suppose it really depends on
how much the money biases him.

------
Ologn
Wikipedia's open nature helps it. Several years ago I did a "wiki patrol" for
new edits. There is an IRC channel and programs and facilities for this. Most
of the cleanup I did was of well-meaning people who did not understand
Wikipedia's markup format and the like. Some was vandalism. Lots of people do
these "patrols". I would not underestimate Wikipedia's ability to deal with
spammers. The open nature of it all helps it.

------
erict19
Not only wrong, but Wikipedia usage is thriving in emerging markets - thanks
to Wikipedia Zero (modeled off of Facebook Zero which despite data consumption
cost mobile user $0). Fascinating I say...

------
greglindahl
Goldman's use of ODP as an example is really funny; all the ODP employees left
for other projects within Netscape & AOL soon after ODP was acquired. And
that's why it went downhill.

------
psbp
I'm so glad this hasn't happened...yet.

------
phdtree
Anonymous editing is a real problem for Wikipedia. There are already numerous
"edit wars" by anonymous editors - mostly on ideological/political issues, but
also celebrity people changing articles about them to remove criticism, for
example. These abuses/debates will likely continue to get worse. That's why we
at phdtree wiki project ([http://phdtree.org/](http://phdtree.org/)) don't
allow anonymous editing.

What Wikipedia needs is a good karma system, like the one used by HN.

~~~
erkose
Blah! Shameless plug. PR firms employ real people to edit web content to
reflect clients favorably.

~~~
jamesmcbennett
They do, but no surprise that they do.

Had a really interesting conversation the other night about sites that offer
consumers an honest ranking of things such as a place to eat. When they
monetise through businesses that care little for the honest rankings and only
desire strength for their own personal ranking, there is a conflict of
interest. When power is placed completely in hands of consumer, power corrupts
them too as they demand a free meal otherwise leaving a bad comment despite
recieving good service. I have talked to hotel managers who have been
threatened with bad comments despite no problem in service and had no choice
but to not charge for the room due to the dishonesty.

The big question here is how do sites generate a site that is honest providing
a good service that can be monetised successfully and cannot be gamed by
either business or consumer. Any good examples?

