
How Wikipedia's reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline - sehugg
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/
======
owenmarshall
Wikipedia has so many rules and restrictions around editing an article that
the only people who can invest enough time to learn them are people whose time
is otherwise worthless.

I once saw a great example when a notable athlete was traded from one team to
another... I think it was a famous basketball player, but can't remember
_who_. On a whim I checked the article history page and saw the same pattern:
a new user to Wikipedia would make the edit, and it was quickly reverted by
one established editor.

When I looked at the talk page, the WP editor made it clear that it was
Official Wikipedia Policy that even though both clubs had announced the trade,
and news was being carried on multiple outlets, the trade wasn't _official
enough_ until the NBA released a daily transfer list with his name on it. All
five new editors were threatened with WP:3RR and WP:yaddayadda instead of
encouraged. But hey, when the list was officially released twenty-five minutes
later the editor who got the page locked got to make the edit. Great job guys!
Way to add value to the project!

This _same behavior_ happens on every site where authority is meted out based
on activity, not ability. I once tried to correct an elisp entry on a Stack
Overflow answer: my edit was autorejected because it had less than five
characters difference. So I added a fairly pointless comment to get past the
automatic rejection, only to have someone reject it because the comment wasn't
sufficiently useful (go figure). I was finally able to get someone to make a
correction by going into the Stack Overflow chat and trying to explain
things... except the user, who freely admitted to never using emacs before,
messed up and made things worse. Whatever. My give-a-fucks were all out. It's
probably still wrong!

~~~
smackfu
The counter argument would be that 100 people are going to go to wikipedia and
try to update the team for a popular player. But who's going to do it for the
last man off the bench? A system that makes sure all updates are made
properly, if a little less timely (and we are probably talking one day later),
is not a bad thing.

~~~
1ris
I don't see how making sure are made properly should forbid that 100 people
are going to go to wikipedia and try to update the team for a popular player.

The Problem with Wikipedia is that Wikipedia does not want to reflect truth,
or reality or facts or objectivity however one might call it, but
verifiability.

That is why they revert to false statements, even if they know so.

~~~
Golf_Hotel_Mike
Is that such a bad thing really? Wikipedia already has a terrible reputation
in research and academics, most people simply refuse to accept any information
off it because "anyone can edit it."

Insisting on verifiability is a necessary evil if Wikipedia wants to have even
a modicum of credibility. Maybe the standards are far too stringent, but
verifiability is tangible, and the 'truth' isn't.

~~~
1ris
Wikipedia will never, ever be accepted by the academic community, no matter
what kind of rules are implemented, als long as it stays a wiki.

And once one accepts that one can drop this stupid principle. For me it seems
the only reason it exists is to pander the academic community. But it's a
hopeless and one sided love.

It does not improve quality, it does not improve credibility, the best thing
about it that is produces funny feedback loops.

~~~
Golf_Hotel_Mike
What other system would you propose that would ensure that articles are as
uniformly objective and factual as possible? It's all right to claim that
anyone should be allowed to edit an article, but the fact is that internet
communities have consistently shown that without extremely heavy-handed
moderation to uphold standards, they can quickly devolve into echo chambers
where only one opinion or one set of facts is heard.

Articles about NBA players are not a good example of this, but I can easily
think of plenty of other topics which would involve extremely loud and
opinionated fringe communities who are very motivated to broadcast their views
to the world. I can't think of any way to limit the influence of these
communities except by insisting that every article have impeccable sources.

The cost of this insistence on sources is that sometimes utterly obvious edits
may be reverted unless they can be properly sourced, but I think it is an
acceptable price for maintaining consistent standards of quality across the
wiki.

Also, I don't agree that the system only exists to pander to academia. Every
encyclopedia in the world has standards of quality to which their articles
must conform. The only difference between these other encyclopedias and
Wikipedia is the speed with which they are updated.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't go to Wikipedia to get the latest
news. I go there to learn stuff with the belief that this stuff will be
correct. I don't care if players' teams are updated hours instead of seconds
after a trade. I care much more about whether this information is correct.
Verifiability builds trust, and I don't see how Wikipedia could continue to
exist without it.

------
bane
Fixing WP is simple. Edits should go through a formal draft->pink->red review
cycle. Right now they go through a edit->immediate rejection cycle.

By policy anybody should be able to submit draft edits, and these edits should
hang around in a review queue for a large-ish group of reviewers to look them
over and thumb-up, thumb-down them in a "pink" review. Any acceptance or
rejection should require 3 or 4 thumbs up or down. If a thumbdown is given,
the reviewer _must_ state what's wrong with the edit (bad
spelling/grammar/poor citation, whatever).

If the edit is ultimately rejected, the person who submitted it now has 3 or 4
pieces of feedback, hopefully one of them useful. Now they can fix the edit,
resubmit and now it goes to the red review.

If the edit passes it goes to the red review.

Red review is the same, but if it passes it becomes "published" and the change
is made. Red reviewers should be the top editors of WP. Because the pink
review should filter out most of the crap, they'll hopefully be dealing with
higher level stuff and their rejection rates should be lower. Only in cases
where the edit somehow was _really_ bad, should they reject it.

Now here's the other thing. If a red review results in a rejection, the
submitter has to start over, but the editors that _passed_ it in the pink
review are penalized in some way. Perhaps a Karma system (e.g. to become a red
reviewer, you must have pink reviewed correctly 500 edits or something, to
become a pink reviewer you must have 200 edits succeed). Red reviewers with
too high of a rejection/pass ratio may lose their editing powers as well in
case some power-mad editor starts bulk deletionist policies.

This way people can both submit edits _and_ be engaged as editors (so they can
both see the crap that editors have to deal with and participate in improving
WP at the meta-level).

Problem editors can also be flagged by contributors, an editor with some
number of flags (say 10) by different submitters should be reviewed. After
each review, the number of flags that will cause the next review should
increase (maybe double or something). This will keep high quality editors in
place and not waste time reviewing editor's work.

~~~
jpatokal
You've pretty much described "Flagged revisions" (1), which has been in
testing since 2008 or thereabouts and has been adopted by a bunch of non-
English Wikipedias, most notably German. Despite years of debate about the
pros and cons, it has not been adopted on the English WP, although a very
watered down version called "Pending changes" has been live since Dec 2012
(2).

(1)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions)

(2)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PC2012](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PC2012)

~~~
bane
So why isn't PC2012 the way of the world?

An important feature of my proposal is also to hold reviewers accountable...a
notable feature that's missing in the current WP world. (I'm sure there's some
purposefully byzantine process to do so today, but hell if a casual
contributor can figure it out).

------
tsuyoshi
Here is my anecdote:

I wanted to know more about my representative to the state legislature. First
I went to Wikipedia. It had a stub page, with only basic biographic
information. Checking elsewhere, I found that the FBI and IRS raided his
office, home, and business some time ago. His chief of staff, his business
partner, and and a former staffer that became a judge were all convicted of
fraud and/or tax evasion. Other than this, his political career was a whole
lot of nothing.

So, having done this research, I put it into the relevant Wikipedia article,
with appropriate references to news articles and legal documents, carefully
noting that he himself was never charged with anything. Reading between the
lines, I realize that the authorities tried to get his subordinates to roll
over on him, but failed - but that kind of subjectivity doesn't belong in an
encyclopedia article.

Anyway, less than a minute later, the change was reverted because of
"vandalism". Whoever reverted it had either not even glanced at the change, or
was a supporter of this politician, protecting his page from negative
information. Probably the former, but who knows?

This was the last, and worst, example of me wasting my time trying to
contribute to Wikipedia. I have had every single change I have ever made to
Wikipedia reverted (going back years). Sometimes I have done it anonymously,
sometimes I have logged in; it doesn't make any difference in my experience.
What seems to matter is if you're willing to put in the time to master
Wikipedia's bureaucratic procedure, which I am not. I just don't bother
anymore. So to me, this article makes perfect sense.

But I have to admit that I still read Wikipedia all the time. It is without
question, the most useful web site there is. It's not as comprehensive as I
would like, and for subjective information it's actually quite bad, but I
think that in general it seems to be getting better over time, on both counts.
So I don't know if you can say it's declining.

By the way, despite him either being a crook, or merely employing crooks on
his staff, I voted for him anyway, just last week. I really don't have a
vendetta against this guy.

~~~
jpatokal
Got link to article/your version? It's easy enough to restore your edit,
and/or raise it on the talk page. WP has lots of ways to deal with people
protecting pages from 'negative' info, although they do unfortunately require
a fair bit of bureaucracy and patience.

------
nanoscopic
I used to contribute to wikipedia. I stopped after a number of articles I
created were deleted by "notability nazis". There is a strong favoritism of
what people think is notable over what actually is. The rules are not followed
and many things that should be removed aren't while things that should stay
are removed.

I am not interested in participating in a system where my hard work is
discarded regardless of excuses.

~~~
ghaff
Even if I understand why the rule/criterion exists, notability is a
particularly problematic Wikipedia rule. Just about everything is notable if
you get local enough (whether in terms of location, field, community, etc.)
And the proofs of notability, such as they are, end up being (ironically)
rather rooted in things like publication in dead tree periodicals or books
even if that makes actual verification difficult.

So you end up with notability being rather arbitrarily decided by admins who
see nothing wrong with long articles on obscure pieces of geek fandom while
being unconvinced about the notability of people like influential executives
at major companies, journalists, and the like.

~~~
sparkzilla
Arbitrary decisions are a huge problem in Wikipedia. We get round this problem
at Newslines by replacing notability with newsworthiness. If someone has news
written about them then it is suitable for inclusion.

~~~
presumeaway
That's far too easy to game, though, and even works on Wikipedia. Just the
other day, I searched for a particular boutique marketing firm, and found they
had a Wikipedia entry, complete with 20-30 references.

All of which were basically from the same small, inexpensive PR campaign.

Wikipedia runs a serious risk of becoming a commercial echo chamber (if it
hasn't already).

What're you guys doing at Newslines to prevent it from turning into a vehicle
for self-promotion?

~~~
sparkzilla
It's only a problem on an encyclopedia because it's not relevant to its
mission. As primarily a news archive we don't care as much about PR (Almost
all company news is PR anyway), and if it became a problem we would flag it so
it could be seen by those who are interested in it (There's value in having a
PR archive too), and hidden by those who don't want to see it. The user should
be in control. One man's PR is another man's news.

------
tokenadult
I've seen a lot of complaints about Wikipedia here on Hacker News over the
years. Yet I also see a lot of comments and even submissions of new stories
that come straight from Wikipedia. This love-hate relationship suggests that
Wikipedia has plenty of strengths along with its weaknesses. May I ask a
question of everyone here? Suppose an Elon Musk or another philanthropist
established an Online Encyclopedia X Prize, setting up a financial incentive
to try to build something better than Wikipedia. If there were a prize for a
new-and-improved free, online encyclopedia, what criteria should be used for
awarding the prize? What could a new project do to show it is building a good
encyclopedia, and that it deserves a cash prize to keep its growth going as it
wins user acceptance? What specific goals would show that the project passed a
reasonable "finish line" in a race to build a viable competitor to Wikipedia?

I am a Wikipedian. My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia's
administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the
possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias)
will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia
policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins
guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much
wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away
the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the
article topics. A new effort to build a free, online encyclopedia with lots of
user input (which I would enthusiastically support) would have to figure out
how to deal with this problem.

In respectful disagreement with some comments posted earlier in this thread, I
think that most Wikipedia articles on many subjects are _terrible,_ actively
misleading and very poorly sourced. I am trying my best to fix articles on the
topics for which I have the most reliable sources. (I have an office full of
reference books for writing projects I do for my paid work.) It has been a
long, slow slog since 2010 for me to improve the sourcing and make more
neutral in point of view some of the most-read articles about the psychology
of human intelligence, for example. Many Wikipedians don't read books, but
only look up information on Google University, and think that anything that
isn't found in an online source is not a verifiable fact. That makes the
editing process very slow.

~~~
jbob2000
It should not involve humans in its aggregation and moderation. Needs to be
intelligent enough to gather information and categorize it without the biases
of a human being.

~~~
meepmorp
This would presumably use automatic systems developed by humans, who'd also
judge the ability of the systems to gather and organize accurate and relevant
information according to human standards. Doesn't that just push the biases
into a less obvious domain?

------
WalterBright
One possible solution is for Wikipedia to have two versions - one with a very
conservative editorial policy, and a second with a very loose, liberal one.
Occasionally material that has proven it's worth in the second gets merged
into the first.

~~~
didibus
That's actually a good idea.

------
NickKitchen
The need is too great to have the service that wikipedia provides, if people
are becoming less willing to keep it accurate then that is interesting. If
people are consistently finding inaccurate or uninformative articles then they
will search for their information somewhere else

I found this page where you can listen to the 'sound of wikipedia', basically
a different guitar string is plucked at a different pitch when certain changes
are made to wikipedia articles. It is pretty cool in the sense that it shows a
lot of changes are being made, however you are able to see and hear the amount
of changes made by bots, which is surprisingly few

[http://listen.hatnote.com/#fr,en](http://listen.hatnote.com/#fr,en)

~~~
avivo
That link is great! Watching the page gives you a much more visceral sense of
how wikipedia actually works, and ~all the things in the world that people
might care about. Click "about" to read the key. (e.g. purple blobs are bots)

It is also especially fascinating to watch during a time with realtime news
you care about. I've seen edits to Rosetta and Philae while just watching
briefly!

------
sparkzilla
As someone building a direct competitor to Wikipedia for crowdsourced
biographies and news-based pages [1], I have come to the conclusion that the
wiki software while responsible for the site's success, is also the cause of
its inevitable decline.

The software causes almost every problem that people complain about, mainly
because it lets real or imagined experts have too much power over the page.
It's simply easier for an editor to reject new information, than to go through
the pain of adding it. In one case, I struggled for weeks to try to get a
simple sentence into the site, only to be harassed by the site's
administrators, when I challenged a particularly ambiguous rule. Entrenched
editors such as William Connolley [2] on Global Warming, act as guardians for
whole sections of the site, and do not allow any dissenting opinion, censoring
and minimizing views that do not suit their agenda. So much of this is simply
unnecessary in a better designed system.

As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an
increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information,
which makes it increasingly difficult to add new information. Many of those
rules, such as those for notability, conflict of interest, and reliable
sources are ambiguous and arbitrarily applied, giving even more power to
editors and admins, instead of content creators. This means that the site has
become rigid and nobody wants to maintain it. The quality of pages is
declining rapidly. It is also very easy to harass other people on the system,
so much so that women and minorities are virtually excluded.

We have taken a different approach with great results. By avoiding the page-
based metaphor and giving better tools to our editors have created a system
that makes it easy to add information without being harassed. We also pay our
writers and editors, and are implementing a revenue share system so they can
actually get some benefit from their work. So far our writers have added
25,000 posts without a single edit war, and zero harassment. 80% of them are
women.

[1] [http://newslines.org](http://newslines.org) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Connolley)

~~~
grecy
I run a mediawiki based information site, and I disagree the following
statement:

> _The software causes almost every problem that people complain about_

The real problem is:

> _As a result of the open nature of wiki editing, Wikipedia has built up an
> increasingly restrictive, massive, rule set of how to reject information_

Wikipedia is not longer a place setup so people contribute information, it's a
place set up to reject the addition of information (as you point out).

It's been a goal of my wiki to be the precise opposite, and it's been very
interesting to see people go from "I hate wikis b/c of Wikipedia's stupid
rules" to "huh, my edit was accepted" to "wow, this is extremely useful and
collaborative".

I believe a wiki is not inherently bad, it's all the rejection rules they've
built on top that are the problem.

~~~
sparkzilla
Hi, I checked your site out. It's a useful resource. However, it appears you
are making it by yourself mainly. When you get a lot of users on your wiki you
will have to make a lot of rules, or ban a lot of users. I used to run my site
on MediaWiki too and moved to WordPress. I don't know if that would work for
your content though.

~~~
grecy
> _When you get a lot of users on your wiki you will have to make a lot of
> rules, or ban a lot of users_

I'd like to hear your reasons why you think this will be needed?

As long as the edit is something useful to traveling overland, it's allowed.
That's the only rule, and I think it's the only rule that will ever be needed.

~~~
sparkzilla
The objective of any crowdsourcing system is to find people who know more
about the topic than you. However, oftentimes those people are dicks. You need
rules that will allow you to get their content without them causing you (or
them) a lot of grief.

------
ggchappell
This page just cries out for a date. When was it written? I can't tell. The
latest reference is 2012, but that leaves a 2-year period. I tried the PDF. No
date there, either. Try the citations. Finally: 2013. But that's 'way too much
work to answer an obvious question.

So, everyone -- including Mr. Halftaker -- when you publish _anything_ , put a
date on it!

------
JasonFruit
I've contributed a bit to Wikipedia, including a couple recent new articles,
and I have never experienced this. Maybe I'm so extraordinarily skilled that
nobody would inflict ham-handed moderation on me, but I don't think that's the
case. Probably it's just that I'm not so glaringly awful that I should be
discouraged from contributing again.

I think the drop in new-contributor retention is an intended effect, an
example of the system succeeding.

------
Animats
This claim keeps coming up. Reality is that Wikipedia is mostly done. All the
important article were done years ago. Now it's just maintenance. Look at
incoming new articles - spam, minor politicians and sports figures, etc.

Paper encyclopedias followed the same pattern. Creating Encyclopedia
Britannica was a huge job. Annual maintenance was done by a small staff.

~~~
TillE
Not even close. If you're interested in a particular area of history and
you've read a few books on the subject, you'll know that Wikipedia is missing
reams of useful information.

Maybe Wikipedia is ok for current stuff and the 20th century, but it barely
scratches the surface for most of medieval Europe, for example. There's
absolutely no need to be constrained to the terse articles and limited scope
of a traditional encyclopedia in this respect. In fact, Britannica has
substantially _more_ information on certain topics.

~~~
ghaff
Agreed. Most obvious modern stuff, especially things that are well-known in
popular or tech/geek culture. But I'm constantly surprised how many topics,
including technical ones, are little more than stubs or are actively bad. Mind
you, there's a lot of material that doesn't follow these generalizations but
it's very inconsistent.

~~~
vacri
By its very nature, the "popular stuff" is the stuff that more people are
interested in. If the "popular stuff" is done, then there's going to naturally
be fewer people interested in fleshing out the "unpopular" stuff.

~~~
cwyers
That seems to assume things not in evidence -- maybe the other entries would
be more popular if they were referenced more, and they'd be referenced more if
they were more fleshed out.

~~~
vacri
You could reference "Vacri's cheese preferences" on every page on the web, and
it still wouldn't be as well fleshed out as the topic of WWII on Wikipedia,
particularly if vacri and his close associates weren't particularly interested
in providing the info. Frequency of reference follows popularity more than
popularity follows frequency of reference.

Or perhaps another example: most politicians have some sort of twitter or
facebook account listed on their promotional material. It doesn't make those
twitter accounts particularly popular, despite being frequently referenced.

------
CurtMonash
After my experience in DMOZ, I have carefully NOT joined Wikipedia as an
editor. However, I make minor spelling, grammatical and/or stylistic changes
when I notice the need. I also correct obvious factual errors. I usually don't
introduced NEW facts, but I delete false existing ones if I notice them.

And hey -- if I'm not perfect by the standards of "No Original Research" or
even "Neutral Point of View", I don't have a role that allows me to be
punished. I just move things in the right direction (by Wikipedia's standards
as I understand them) as far as I can be bothered to, then go on with my life.

~~~
jholman
If you are making changes when you notice the need (and thank you for that
work!), then you ARE an editor of Wikipedia. That's what that word means.

~~~
CurtMonash
True enough. But I'm not a member of the organization. :)

------
polemic
Well here's another useful correlation: the first iphone launched mid 2007,
the peak of the active editors graph. Perhaps the rise of mobile is the true
cause here.

~~~
Torgo
Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and smartphones are all in full effect by that
point. 2007 has got to be Eternal September for the Web.

------
TheCoreh
I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet. There's no restriction to doing
so, is there? To avoid having super high server costs, it could even be a
"soft-fork", where only the pages which are edited are stored locally, all
other content is fetched from the original.

If these restrictions are really affecting the quality of the articles in
Wikipedia, we'll see the quality of the articles on the fork grow, at which
point they can be merged back by Wikipedia.

~~~
muuh-gnu
> I wonder why nobody has forked Wikipedia yet.

Wikipedia _was_ forked, several times. The reason you dont seem to know about
them are:

1\. The added utility was not sufficient to make an impact strong enough to
pull people away from wikipedia.

2\. The added no utility to the fork at all or made things bad at Wikipedia
even worse.

Wikipedia is like democracy, it is the worst free encyclopedia we have, except
all the others.

~~~
mxfh
Forking is not enough, the whole thing has to get out of it's wiki format and
be transitioned into some kind of purpose built system, the wiki approach was
great for growing fast but is hell to maintain or understand when used for
content and administration in parallel. The best thing I could think of would
be a streamlined kind of git with repositories for every article and an easy
to understand ticketing system and maybe the possibility to have concurrent
versions of articles one branch for the deletionist and notability enforcing
kind and another inclusive one.

~~~
sparkzilla
See my comment above. We have solved most of the problems for crowdsourced
news-based pages and biographies at Newslines. We cut out almost all
Wikipedia's problems by focusing on newsworthiness as the standard of
inclusion; letting users create posts based on news events, not long-form
articles; and using a standard post approval process.

------
kmfrk
Hell is other Wikipedia editors. Truly.

------
a3_nm
I agree with the submission: I think there is potentially a problem of test
edits, or unsourced edits, being reverted automatically or in an unpleasant
manner, and that newcomers can easily be discouraged from contributing. I
think part of it is a problem with the culture, and part of it is a necessary
evil: when articles achieve higher quality overall, there is bound to be less
adding and more discussing about what to add, so more changes will not make
their way to the article. (This is the case for any document, you start with a
lot of writing and then there is a lot of painful editing, I don't see why it
would be different here.) Also, the more you try to structure and source the
articles, and the harder the syntax is going to be, compared to the time where
you could just write anything and add it to the article.

Yet, for all of this, I have never been able to understand why, whenever a
discussion about Wikipedia comes up on HN, so many people complain about
getting all their changes reverted. I have edited Wikipedia for years and I
think at most 3 cases did I see something reverted for no good reason. Maybe
this is because I edit in less controversial areas (computer science), or
because most of my edits are just typographic fixes, or because I also edit on
different Wikipedias (especially the French one), or because I'm vaguely
familiar with some of the customs or policies?

It would be really nice if people complaining about bad reverts could provide
links to the diff of their edits, the reverts, and the subsequent discussion
if any. One nice thing about Wikipedia is that the history is always public,
so if something valuable has been reverted for bad reasons, it can be seen,
and added back; if someone seems to be discouraging new users from
contributing, anyone can see it and let them know; and if there was a
misunderstanding, maybe we can see that the two sides were of good faith.

It's a bit frustrating to see everyone complain but never have links to
objective facts where you can see what went wrong and try to understand why.

------
lnanek2
> algorithmic tools used to reject contributions

Kind of reminds me of Twitter banning all my games that let users tweet scores
using their APIs as being too much like a full Twitter client. It's pretty
obvious Twitter just aimed a bot at everyone and didn't actually look at who
they were banning.

------
vacri
The title of the article is based on the faulty premise that fewer editors
means a decline.

Edit: the first sentence of the abstract indicates that they don't mean a
_literal_ decline in pure numbers :)

------
reitanqild
And, sooner or later someone might get access to stackexchange logs (they
aren't open, are they?) and say the same.

~~~
bunderbunder
[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)

------
pm24601
My brief story to add to the general theme is:

* I knew personally that a regionally important corporate lobbying group was funding a ballot measure. (For the moment assume I am correct: this was not a 'secret': everyone in local politics knew this. It just wasn't 'official')

* I edited the organizations wikipedia page to state that the group was promoting the ballot measure.

The edit was reverted.

Was I going to spend time trying to track down obscure articles on local
newspaper websites to prove this to wikipedia? No.

It just wasn't worth it.

I have come to the conclusion that the really interesting information is still
in peoples heads.

I rarely find wikipedia turning up in my searches any more - in particular
anything "controversial" or anything where there is moneyed interests involved
who are interested in suppressing the other side.

I actually don't see a solution for Wikipedia. It is trying for some sort of
'objective' encyclopedia. This is well and good for questions like what is an
atom in the 21st century. However, lets pretend that it is a 1901. "What is an
atom?" was controversial and the back and forth that would have been
interesting to know as a 1901 reader would be edited out of the 1901 version
of Wikipedia.

Quite simply for me:

* something is interesting if it is "controversial" (global warming, health care, etc.)

* I am not interested in an "objective" sanitized view. I have a bias and I am not interested in hearing about the "controversy about global warming". Therefore I am biased toward sites predisposed to my perspective.

* Others have different preferred bias.

* Trying to come to a group decision where both sides are convinced that their side is correct is impossible ( in particular if one side is paid to not change their mind )

* If something is really important (i.e. job critical) I want to go to a source expert that I trust irregardless of what the 'crowd' thinks. I know what the standards I am applying to determine who I regard as the expert.

* rarely search for important things and find the wikipedia article interesting

Therefore:

* Wikipedia as a common community encyclopedia only works for the uninteresting 'factoids' that are not important

* I filter out wikipedia when looking at the google results when I am looking for something I really care about getting correct.

