Halfaker, Geiger, Morgan, and Riedl have a new paper on the topic of open collaboration systems about how Wikipedia's reaction to its popularity is causing its decline (pdf).
Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia's primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community's formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:06PM
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 31 2015, @10:49PM
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrificus_Totalus [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Saturday January 02 2016, @07:52PM
I'm petrified.
Natalie Portman, Naked and Petrified, with hot grits
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:07PM
I always thought the decline in edits was because most of the information you want to be there already is.
Its pretty uncommon for me to not find what I'm looking for on Wikipedia if its something that belongs there.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:11PM
Indeed, the Wikipedia is the largest collection of information ever assembled, at this point there shouldn't be as much need for work as there was in the past. Mostly keeping current on evolving subjects and adding information on things that come into existence.
Some articles on dead people like Hitler probably don't need much attention and are probably best kept locked. However, things like politics need to be regularly updated as various political parties and politicians continue to evolved.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:21PM
And yet, those political articles are the most frequent targets of reversion wars. (And rightly so, I suppose).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:36PM
True, but by the same token, I'm not sure they can really be left out. Not without the Wikipedia adopting some sort of rule to limit current events from the site. I'm not sure that's really a good route to travel either.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Thursday December 31 2015, @11:20PM
Not really. Entries in Wikipedia are filled with factual errors bordering on the political bias and obfuscated details due to a lack in academic rigor, English-centric writing and editing and the obvious concerned-parenting and censorship. In some subjects, like the ancient world or 19/20th century history, whole entries are just factually wrong due to popular literature being extremely distant from any active academic work.
In the hard[er] sciences the problem is actually amusingly the opposite: Biology, Chemistry, Computing and Mathematics will have these extremely detailed entries that require years of specialized academic studies before making any sense. Personally, I've read a few entries on algorithms that required me to open up Knuth's Concrete Mathematics just to begin understanding what the they're talking about. And I'm not talking about implementation or comparative analysis to other algorithms... Just basic "what it does". Not necessarily even the "why"...
Sometimes, in the digital logic entries, you'll really start seeing some shenanigans going about. Whereby, mathematical notation will be mixed with formal logic, boolean expression (using 2-3 different notations, sometimes all at once), combinatorial mathematics, matrices (analysis) - sometimes going way and beyond multivariate into some crazy and unnecessarily modern stuff, statistical analysis and almost always completely unnecessary physics*, will be intervened into the most benign subjects for the most unnecessary reasons. People often will forget that the target audience of Wikipedia isn't peer-reviewed journal readers but ordinary people that just want to google Quicksort or AND gate to see what it is.
* In one(last) case, I've fought an editor on diode\transistor entries that was trimming down the simple approximation models and Ebers-Moll variations (that even went beyond what the factories and labs used) and instead quoted only the most obtuse formulas possible from some god-forsaken research paper \ patent claim that better approximated the performance of an uncontaminated germanium semiconductors 2% better under temperatures going above 200 degrees Celsius... I'm talking about the most fringe useless stuff you'd ever even heard of. Not even high power EE stuff... Just some obscure tenure submission paper... And for some reason the editor - obviously a math major - wanted that crazy ass formula in there. At the time, I thought he was a shill or something... But in retrospect, I suspect he was just so proud of understanding that horrible thing that he couldn't help but push it allover the place. That was around when I stopped contributing to Wikipedia.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 01 2016, @12:51AM
In other words, they need better leveling of the articles - instead of a single article on the subject, they need an outsider's introduction, a traditionalist's complete historical view, and a modern practicitioner's latest news and theories.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by melikamp on Friday January 01 2016, @03:14AM
Yes, many science articles are terrible. But have you tried writing an article? Holy shit, it's hard. It takes research. Here's an example of a tiny section I fixed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Computable_function&action=historysubmit&type=revision&diff=653691473&oldid=645717625 [wikipedia.org]
This is my area of expertise. The source is on my bookshelf. And it still took hours. I cannot even begin to imagine the work that must go into a good article about something more obscure or more technical. By the way, note the amount of mathematical gibberish I cut. No one complained. I know it is maddening when some idiot wrecks the article by going uber-technical and off-topic, and then sits on it like a hen on her eggs. But then all you need is patience. Patience and time. Start the discussion explaining why it has to be cut, watch people agree with you, and then cut it. I'd like to see the hen try to revert against an established informal consensus. You won't even have to do anything, because another so-called "owner" will probably take over the process you started. Because they are good people mostly, and they know the guidelines, but it takes time and patience to create anything good as a group. And it takes good will and cooperation.
The real reason Wikipedia seems to have an editor shortage is that it matured. What do you even do with an article that kind of sucks, yet better than nothing? Rewrite from scratch? Try to fix incrementally? Any Joe Schmoe can write the first draft, and so they did already. There is huge room for improvement, but we cannot advance there without editors who are PhDs, professionals, or similarly equipped. And moreover, most fun articles do have people who invested themselves personally into improving them. It's not enough to be brilliant and/or correct; we also have to work with these people as a group, and it's overhead for sure, but there is no other way. Slow incremental improvements will continue to make this project better, even when we go two steps forward and one step back.
I hope you and everyone else who burned out on contributing to Wikipedia will take a deep breath and reconsider. Giving cash is an easy AND cheap way to help, unless your time is worth nothing. But fix a typo if you see it, no one reverts them unless by mistake! Leave a helpful comment in discussion. Cut a commercial ad when you see one. The new live editing tools are pretty darn sweet for these kinds of simple tasks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @11:22PM
Is the article incomplete? Is it easy to understand? Does it contain typos and grammatical errors? A shitton of articles means that it takes a shitton of editors to find and fix these issues. Fewer people contributing is very bad for wikipedia.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday January 01 2016, @05:29PM
I always figured it was wikipedia not doing shit about deletionists and guys camping on articles. It doesn't take long to find story after story where those that have a stake in an article spin the fuck out of it and ban anybody that dares try to correct, the most famous of which was the Scientologist camping on anything to do with Xenu or Scientology but it happens on a smaller scale all the time and it doesn't take more than one run in with a camper or deletionist to say "fuck this shit" and move on.
I know that is why I no longer bother to fix even obvious errors, I ran into a camper admin who keeps erasing facts about a show he likes that doesn't fit his worldview (really wouldn't be surprised if he writes fanfic) despite the fact that the actor, the writer, and the director have all said in interviews "that wasn't supposed to be the story arc for that character, the suits cut the shit out of his scenes" and the writer has even gone so far as to put out a graphic novel just to try to fix what the suits gutted. But that is not allowed, even as an addendum at the end of the article, because that would mean the character was supposed to be bi in the vein of Jack Harkness, not a macho man which I'm sure just fucks up his self insert fanfics. BTW I'm not saying that to be snarky, I actually talked to this assclown on chat and....damn. The way he said shit like even the writer "Just didn't understand him" and continued talking like it was a real person? Was kinda scary.
So now I just avoid Wikipedia if at all possible, as I've seen first hand the information is only as good as the bias in the one camping the articles.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:07PM
several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage.
Pretty sure that was the original intent of those changes.
The frequent and raging reversion wars on any topic having even a hint of controversy made it pretty much necessary to impose some controls. And chasing away defacers and trolls was always part of the design. That every Tom, Dick, and Harry with an ax to grind was going to be shut down was clearly always the intent.
I think if there is a decline, it is a self correcting decline. As people burn out, others join, but perhaps not in the numbers found before for the simple fact that all the heavy lifting has been done, and the vast majority of articles in Wiki are in maintenance mode.
Yet even recent events end up having a page introduced and cross links built, usually the same day the event happened, says that the contributor base is probably about the right size.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:19PM
Holy cow. We came up with the same subject line at the same time!
Quick! What am I thinking right now????
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bornagainpenguin on Friday January 01 2016, @12:31AM
Really? Because as far as I can tell the trolls won by being the last person to post. The only people allowed to contribute are the people playing Wikipedia: The RPG Game. Everyone else gets their edits automatically reverted.
The average person, the crowd in crowdsourcing got tired of the games and the politics and fucked off to something else to do. There is still some use to the site for trivia but these days that's all the site can be trusted for.
That's sad. Quite a bit and away from the promise and the dream.
But head, don't take my word for it, find out yourself!
Steps to prove that Wikipedia is useless:
1) pick ten articles about a subject (one you know about).
2) check the talk pages and edit histories.
3) realize it is intentionally kept inaccurate due to bias and stupidity.
4) fuck off to better sources of information
It can better if the topic is somehow controversial, but it doesn't matter, by at least ten articles errors can be found that are being kept in place by people playing Wikipedia: The RPG Game, and who don't care about accurate information or building a working encyclopedia just their e-peen.
WARNING: Once you see this with your own eyes, you simply cannot treat the site with the respect you may have once felt towards it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @02:37AM
I agree with much of what you say, yet I don't find Wikipedia useless. If one just wants to get a quick introduction to a subject, it's adequate more often than not.
Every fact on Wikipedia (except arithmetic) is supposed to be supported by a citation to another source.* First looking at a Wikipedia article, then reading from the sources it uses, is typically a viable way to become acquainted with an unfamiliar topic. That's all it's supposed to be (except that it's also supposed to serve as an atlas).
* so says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday January 01 2016, @04:22AM
I agree with much of what you say, yet I don't find Wikipedia useless. If one just wants to get a quick introduction to a subject, it's adequate more often than not.
This is worth repeating, because it's probably the most important thing to remember about wikipedia: it's a great starting point for a topic, but it should never be treated as the final authority on any topic. Read the article, follow the footnotes, and then use what you learned to make better, more informed searches for more information on the topic. Unless you just need a really general idea of something, at least. Then you can usually just skin the article and follow a couple citations. Either way, check those footnotes, they're often more useful than the Wikipedia page itself.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:08PM
I've been bitching about that for years.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bziman on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:10PM
I wanted to help out, but every change I've ever contributed has been rolled back. And they were all obvious typos or formatting problems. I don't like playing that game. So I use wikipedia, but I never donate money, and I no longer offer contributions.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:19PM
That is often true.
I long ago (about 10 years) had log in at Wiki, and corrected a paragraph with lots of typos, misspellings and improper capitalization of proper names. The changes lasted for two days, and were then reverted. It wasn't even a controversial article, or one that I had any personal involvement in, and I didn't change either the gist or the slant of the paragraph.
It was the last time I even considered making an editorial contribution.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:29PM
I put so many hours in at that place only to find it was like writing in sand. Many of those hours were spent just dealing with troublemakers who were hard to get rid of. I practically became a lawyer in Wikipedia administrative procedures. So many things were just discouraging, so now I only contribute a few times a year. Even this year I tried to get rid of a photo that was uploaded to mock a celebrity and I was told I'd submitted that request to the wrong place and to go resubmit it somewhere else. I told them it wasn't worth my trouble.
Also I will never forget the guy who camped out on the yogurt article fighting anyone who tried to change the spelling from "yoghurt." There was just too much of that sort of thing.
That said, learning how to write in an NPOV style was one of the most important exercises of my life, and I'll be including it in my children's education. It's a shame more people at Wikipedia can't actually do it.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @06:07AM
That said, learning how to write in an NPOV style
What? That is in direct opposition to curriculum! [youtube.com] Are you some kind of anti-Common Core conspiracy theorist? [youtube.com]
Don't you think college kids should earn credits by injecting ideological bias into Wikipedia? [campusreform.org]
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Friday January 01 2016, @06:31AM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:31PM
I hear so much about this but I've never personally experienced it. I guess it is because I mostly contribute to small articles on scientific topics.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Friday January 01 2016, @12:41AM
I long ago (about 10 years) had log in at Wiki,
Shit I feel old.
The changes lasted for two days, and were then reverted.
People keep saying this, could somebody point to an example? It hasn't happened to me, at least that I've noticed - I edit anonymously. I did create an article back in 2003 on a Greek island, and I see some of the text is still in there despite the article being 8 times longer now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Friday January 01 2016, @01:29AM
Here's a random example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sega_Genesis&action=history [wikipedia.org]
Look at the large numbers in red parenthesis and the often larger numbers in Green Parens.
Red = removals
Green = additions
You will see a smattering of little changes, both adds and deletes.
Then you will see dueling changes of large blocks of text. Bigger numbers.
Around about 28 November 2015 you see dueling revisions. This is a product that has been on the street since 1988 for pete sake, and they are
still going at each other tooth and nail. You can hit the "prev" link to see the actual revision they are bickering about.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Friday January 01 2016, @02:18AM
Amazing. As I understand it both contributors should have been kicked off months ago. It's pathetic!
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sega_Genesis&diff=692778524&oldid=692778405 [wikipedia.org]
There have been over 35.25 million Genesis units sold worldwide. Including several million licensed third-party variants of the system that were sold in various regions, with the bulk of those being sold in Brazil
Changes to
Sega sold 30.75 million Genesis units worldwide. In addition, several million licensed third-party variants of the system were sold in various regions, with the bulk of those being sold in Brazil.
So that's 35 million including "several million" third-party variants, or 31 million plus "several million" third-party variants.
THERE'S NO FUCKING DIFFERENCE
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Friday January 01 2016, @02:55AM
There is a difference, and it's subtle. For one thing, the latter version doesn't include an actual number to those third-party variants, so it's less accurate. There's also a psychological trick there, because it's subtly implying those variants don't count, and a casual reader might not even notice the distinction and just see it as "30 million Genesis units sold". On the other side, the first one gives a more accurate total but doesn't make any distinction in variants vs. original units.
It looks like the first version's editor was trying to inflate the number to boost its relevance while the second was attempting to obfuscate some of the sales to make it seem like it sold less. If I had to guess, I'd say they're both old enough to have owned the console as children, one had a Genesis, the other had an SNES, and they're both still clinging to this petty shit despite being old enough that they should know better.
For what it's worth, the Wikipedia page's current version is closer to what I would do, citing the sales of different companies separately, though I would have started it with the total 35.25million number and then supplied a breakdown of units (30.75million Sega ones, X million by Y company, etc.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Friday January 01 2016, @04:41AM
It is subtle, and of course it's pointless. However it tells a great meta-story about things that actually matter, and how easy they are manipulated by professional spin doctors in the media rather than bored 30-something hasbeens.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday January 01 2016, @07:31AM
Yep. Like the saying goes, "lies, damned lies, and statistics." There's no better way to lie than to manipulate real data, and people do it even with the dumbest of things like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @03:01AM
The "dueling revisions" is termed edit warring [wikipedia.org] and is against the rules. Those contributors could have gotten a smack-down for doing it.
They disagreed over whether the article should mention Sega Genesis outselling the SNES; there are more important subjects to argue over, but if the Wikipedia bureaucrats tried to dictate—more than they already do—what subjects people may edit, surely the project would decline rapidly. I'm not convinced it's in decline, but I haven't been following it closely for awhile.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday January 01 2016, @06:43AM
By contrast, my experience is that occasionally I've dropped in a sentence or two of information that I considered relevant, and when I've checked back years later that information was still there, albeit modified.
What seems to make the difference:
1. The topic is not politically controversial.
2. The topic is not hotly debated among professionals in the field.
3. The topic is not about pop culture.
4. There is enough interest in the topic that the deletionists don't get their claws into it.
So I'd be very surprised to see any changes to the following last more than 5 minutes: "Donald Trump", "Definition of a Planet", "Family Guy", "Aeolian and Adhesion Morphodynamics and Phytoecology in Recent Coastal and Inland Sand and Snow Flats and Dunes from mainly North Sea and Baltic Sea to Mars and Venus" (that's a real book title that's apparently a fairly standard text in geology, but doesn't seem to merit a Wikipedia entry).
By contrast, changes to these stand up fairly well: "Commemorations of Casimir Pulaski", "Karl Mack von Leiberich", "Ecotopia".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 01 2016, @12:33AM
Ditto here. I think everyone here knows my writing and typing, and even my spelling, looks careless a lot of the time. (That's because it is careless!) Years back, I cared enough to try to repair typos and poor grammar on pages that I cared about. In almost all cases, some self-appointed care taker rolled back my edits. I got tired of that pretty quickly, so the only contributions I've made since, is to "join the discussion", leave a remark, and then just leave. No more editing for me.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday January 01 2016, @01:49AM
I wanted to help out, but every change I've ever contributed has been rolled back. And they were all obvious typos or formatting problems. I don't like playing that game. So I use wikipedia, but I never donate money, and I no longer offer contributions.
Yep, same here; it seems like that's the most-cited reason for people saying "screw it" and not bothering.
I think the problem is that established users "adopt" articles they invested time into and then get territorial about them. If you try to change one of these adopted pages, it's likely to be reverted because all "outsider" edits (e.g. not theirs) are viewed with suspicion or contempt. You can't even clean up phrasing or grammar, because it's an implicit insult of the writing skills of the page's self-appointed "owner", so it's going to be reverted because obviously their writing was fine and how dare someone try to change it.
Basically, Wikipedia editing is like dogs pissing on the same tree: if you make a change, someone else has to come by and piss all over their territory again because you got your stink on their page.
Another thing that can be discouraging to potential contributors is the aftermath of the Wikipedia civil war between the Deletionists and the Inclusionists. Inclusionists wanted to record everything while the Deletionists were convinced that Wikipedia would only be respectable if it deleted anything deemed unimportant. The Deletionists eventually won and left behind a wasteland of deleted articles, usually citing "notability" as the reason for the carnage. In their crusade to make Wikipedia "respectable" like a "real encyclopedia", the hardcore Deletionists purged many previously-useful pages, and with every page that gets removed, more contributors get disgruntled and stop bothering. People that actively contributed get discouraged because they put time and effort into trying to expand Wikipedia's coverage and then get told "that isn't important, go away".
Luckily for us all, though, monsters from the Pokémon games were exempted from the Delitionist agenda because Pokémon is popular, so you can still find individual [wikipedia.org] pages [wikipedia.org] for [wikipedia.org] many [wikipedia.org] of [wikipedia.org] them [wikipedia.org] on [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. To be fair, they've actually consolidated many of these; there used to be an individual page for every pokémon until someone merged them into lists of ~50 per page. The point, though, is that creatures from a video game -- the sort of info that usually goes on a site like gamefaqs or a wiki dedicated to the game -- were considered notable enough to be listed in full by the same people that were going around deleting pages about websites, webcomics, etc. for being "non-notable". Entries about content creators, smaller films, etc. -- real people and things -- get deleted for not being notable, but minutiae about pokémon, James Bond's enemies [wikipedia.org], and other trivia is important enough to not just get listed, but get individual pages in many cases.
Note that I'm not saying these pages should have been deleted, too. Just that, if trivial shit like that can get individual pages, it's a bit hypocritical to go around deleting webpages about actual people and things as non-notable. It either needs to be a repository of everything or the trivia crap should all go, instead of making exceptions for certain trivia because some editor with pull happens to be a fan.
It's far too late for it now, but sometimes I think that Wikipedia would have worked better as a central hub that combed through many smaller, topic-oriented wikis with a "record everything" mentality.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday January 01 2016, @02:40AM
The grand-parent is just a troll. He says he had typo fixes reverted, as usual no links provided to prove it's not bullshit. Every time people complain they got legitimate useful edits reverted I ask them to link, and no one ever does. Not once. I edit very very rarely these days, and I never was heavy on it, but I NEVER had an edit reversed without me eventually agreeing it was OK, and that only happened a few times.
I do not buy the bullshit that it's hard or not possible to improve an article because of some squatter. Show me. Let it be an actual improvement, in line with Wikimedia/Wikipedia guidelines, of the type that 9 people out of 10 will agree it's an improvement, and I will log on from TOR and bulldoze that squatter as an AC. I refuse to buy the bullshit about "page owners" because I edited dozens of big pages, and I never had a problem, and if I had, I'd fix it in minutes by simply talking to that person. The problem is not "page owners" but GP's (and your) refusal to collaborate. It's a group project! You gotta work with these people. Yeah, some people on your team are not as bright as you are, but their intentions are mostly good, and you can always reason with them. And if they get uppity and stuck, you can always fill out a few forms and dislodge them by appealing to facts. If you keep fixing the typo and they keep reverting you while ignoring your messages, you can have them banned, for chrissake.
Not everyone can enjoy writing an article as a part of a committee, but that's the only way now, since the project is mature. This is a good thing, it cannot be fixed, and it doesn't have to be fixed.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday January 01 2016, @04:14AM
The grand-parent is just a troll. He says he had typo fixes reverted, as usual no links provided to prove it's not bullshit. Every time people complain they got legitimate useful edits reverted I ask them to link, and no one ever does. Not once. I edit very very rarely these days, and I never was heavy on it, but I NEVER had an edit reversed without me eventually agreeing it was OK, and that only happened a few times.
It's not necessarily a troll, even without supplied links. For example, I had it happen a few times on similar types of minor edits (as I implied with the "same here"), but I can't point you to anything specific because this is stuff that happened probably ten years ago, give or take. I have a good memory, but I'm not so bitter and petty that I memorise every slight in detail, nor do I keep a list for reference just in case someone online questions me about the validity of my assertions. It's not trolling, I just can't give you better detail because it wasn't that big a deal to me. I tweaked a few things trying to help, they kept getting undone, and I just went "eh, screw it, better things to do with my time then" and left it alone.
I refuse to buy the bullshit about "page owners" because I edited dozens of big pages, and I never had a problem, and if I had, I'd fix it in minutes by simply talking to that person. The problem is not "page owners" but GP's (and your) refusal to collaborate.
Your argument is basically "it didn't happen to me, so it never happened to anybody" here. You're also shifting the blame onto other people just because they claimed to have a different experience than you did. Hell, I wasn't even saying the bad parts are the norm, just that they happen and they can discourage people from contributing further. It's a discussion about a decline in Wikipedia participation, so some of us are sharing anecdotes about things that discourage participation.
That's why I mentioned the Inclusionist/Deletionist conflict, too; it didn't happen to me, but I remembered it because some people I knew years ago were gungho about Wikipedia editing but ended up bitter because pages they made or contributed to were getting deleted because someone with a bug up his ass about webcomics not being notable, ever, went around deleting any page about webcomics, no matter how large or popular they were. I believe it eventually got sorted out, and it's easy to say "that's not what usually happens", but none of that will make a disillusioned contributor feel better.
This stuff happens. People will turn even the simplest things into drama, tribalism, and political intrigue; it seems to be human nature. But not everybody wants to deal with it.
It's a group project! You gotta work with these people. Yeah, some people on your team are not as bright as you are, but their intentions are mostly good, and you can always reason with them. And if they get uppity and stuck, you can always fill out a few forms and dislodge them by appealing to facts. If you keep fixing the typo and they keep reverting you while ignoring your messages, you can have them banned, for chrissake.
Yeah, that's great, but not everyone wants to deal with bureaucracy and red-tape just to fix some grammar errors. I made a couple tweaks with edit comments explaining why I made the change, they got reverted without a note, and I tried agian. After that I just moved on. Sure, I could have fought it like you said, but I didn't give enough of a fuck to bother over something so minor. I made an adjustment trying to help out and it wasn't wanted, so I left it alone. I wasn't interested in drama and edit wars over something so trivial.
And before you start demanding links and citations, note above where I said this was way back and I don't keep a list of petty grievances, so I can't really be more specific. I don't even remember what general topic it was about, because I used to hit random articles and read anything interesting, so it could have been anything.
I suppose if it had made me angry I would remember more, but it didn't. I just shrugged it off and decided I'd keep my relationship with Wikipedia read-only and let other people deal with the politics and drama. The only reason I mentioned it today is I saw other people mentioning similar experiences so I chimed in.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday January 01 2016, @07:30PM
(Score: 2) by bziman on Friday January 01 2016, @09:22PM
Speaking of trolls... I never had a log in - just anonymous edits. Years ago. Do you remember what your dynamic IP address was two houses ago? Of course not. I'd go find them if I could... it was only a handful of times. What happened to you that you just assume someone is lying? I relate my own experiences, thank you for pissing all over me - you're probably the one who reverted my changes.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday January 01 2016, @02:17AM
I call bullshit. Please link the edit with an "obvious typo" you fixed which then got reverted.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mrcoolbp on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:10PM
Wikipedia is literally the largest experiment in the wiki framework. I think a lot of us thought it surprising that wiki would actually work on a global scale - that it wouldn't just become a cesspool like everywhere else on the internet. For many years I thought it did very well, I even started an article that was later fleshed out to many times its original size.
It's sad that we started seeing all the articles recently (past few years) about how the Super-Editors (or whatever they are called) immediately revert everything and that it's near impossible to be a casual contributor. I still hope that this experiment can somehow succeed (not die) as I believe wikipedia (despite it's flaws) does a great service to mankind.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:13PM
The Wikipedia system's collective hostility towards newbies is well documented, and that will undermine its credibility in the long term. A few gatekeepers control access to their Wikipedia "turf", and e-drama is rampant.
As it blows past 5 million English articles, I think that preventing stagnation could become more important than generating new content. The pace of new article creation will slow... unless people insist on making a page for every episode of their favorite TV series. Now the focus needs to be on making sure that article info isn't 5+ years old or riddled with inaccuracies.
For all of the shit we toss at Wikipedia these days, I am interested in one thing Wikimedia is doing: Wikidata. It could be a powerful resource for Web applications if the data are accurate and comprehensive. I think I can use it to make a poor man's AI for analyzing news headlines/articles and displaying extra information, like the informative sidebars Google and others add to certain searches.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:32PM
In the past, I found it easier to get corrections into a wiki article by emailing one of the authors/revisers of that article. Put it in yourself, it gets reverted.
However, since they've made it almost impossible to get ahold of the authors or the revisers, other than via logging in and using their silly talk feature even this avenue is closed.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:15PM
Wikipedia is an incredibly valuable collection of knowledge, beyond anything imaginable a couple decades ago. And amazingly free of ads and other crap. Some days I think Wikipedia is the only web site that should exist.
Well not quite, but almost.
If you look at the early work of TBL when he invented the web he was thinking of knowledge pages that anyone could update. (Like so many early networkers, he assumed only his science peers would use it and they would all be reputable people with good intent.)
Wikipedia had the audacity to offer up pages that anyone could vandalize, trusting that the next person would fix it. And, incredibly, it worked!
But now it is being taken over by the "deletionists". Most anything you do is more likely than not going to be deleted. Appropriately categorize an article: Deleted. Add some useful and true knowledge: Deleted. Create a new article with valid content: Deleted.
So I can see why most people wouldn't bother contributing any more. I hope Wikipedia can find the right balance between keeping out vandals but allowing good faith additions.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday January 01 2016, @12:33AM
But now it is being taken over by the "deletionists"
It's the Millenian SJW Socialist SystemD Misogynist users!
(Score: 2) by number6 on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:24PM
Suffice to say, I only tend to fix text and I only edit trivial subjects or something related to my neck of the woods.
Many times I am improving the text of the items in the 'External Links' or 'Notable Residents' sections for the purpose of making the page more informative and search engine friendly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:25PM
The nextgen encyclopedia will be AI generated. I bet Google, or ex-Googlers at a startup are working on it now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @09:57PM
Wikipedia has a bad structure that is inherent to its code (although this could be remedied).
Right now you have One Canonical Page per topic. At best, you have a tail of edits that brought you to your current status, and a talk page that is normally useless, full of flames or obscure wikilawyering.
This is the wrong way to tackle any information where you have multiple possible viewpoints, analyses and sources of information.
At a bare minimum, wikipedia should support labeled branching, and a vdiff feature between different branched versions, so that you can't get one silverback drowning out the rest of the herd.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jmorris on Thursday December 31 2015, @11:30PM
The code faithfully implemented the vision. The vision was one Truth, The Party's Truth. There being no obstacle to SJW entryism it was clearly designed to be run by them. NPOV is nothing less than The Party's Truth being so self evidently correct that it isn't even a POV. It isn't remarkable they turned into what they are, it was right there in the initial announcement. Everybody could edit but some editors were more equal than other editors from day one and it was clear who the more equal ones were intended to be.
For example, look up "Cultural Marxism" and it isn't described in the terms of the people who actually proposed and implemented it, that it is the dominant set of thoughts driving most of the political left today, no it is just a right wing 'conspiracy theory' and that is their NPOV final word on the subject. Lookup "Critical theory" and you get an unreadable word salad intended to convey zero information as to what it really is since of course it is unspeakable outside of initiated Party insiders. (In a nutshell, the name says it all. You criticize. Everything, relentless and unending criticism, and it is a violation of the rules of critical theory to propose or even entertain any solution to the criticism as that is simply a distraction from the True Solution to the problems, Revolution and a Socialist People's Republic of course.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @10:08AM
There are no "different viewpoints" to objective reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2016, @01:49AM
Is that so, Einstein?
Here, let me help: two people are asked about waves. One is a marine architect, one is a musical composer. If you don't see how their very approach to the topic of the concept of "wave" is fundamentally different, along with the implications of same, the problem is with you.
Let me help again: Two physicists are asked about their explanations for gravity. One starts mumbling something about gravitational waves and lensing, maybe. The other starts filling a blackboard with equations and discussing strings. Can you maybe see how there could be room for more than one article, with different approaches to the same topic?
Oh, wait, let's talk about another objective reality: what really happened with Nipplegate, and what was actually on that nipple and why it was there? Maybe we could afford different takes on it?
What happened to JFK was a piece of objective reality. What we know about it is a hell of a lot murkier - maybe we could have a few different article versions on that?
If you think you know all the answers to the everything, you're a normal fifteen year-old, or an idiot. Possibly both. Human knowledge, however, doesn't deal in certainties, and anything which purports to collect that knowledge is either prepared to deal with controversies, or is ill-equipped.
Wikipedia, as currently constituted, is very ill-equipped.
(Score: 1) by an Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31 2015, @11:09PM
Lets not forget the rampant e-Drama that erupts whenever something rubs a member of one of the higher ranking cliques the wrong way. Even when you can get most of the shit-slingers out of the article after that, the ones that remain frequently turn the article into something that would make political blogs blush with envy.
And, god help any 3rd parties that even so much as try to correct spelling and punctuation after that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tizan on Thursday December 31 2015, @11:20PM
Surely to be replaced by coservapedia http://www.conservapedia.com/ [conservapedia.com]
or
uncyclopedia http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/ [wikia.com]
That is where "truth" is .....
(Score: 2) by unzombied on Thursday December 31 2015, @11:54PM
If there's a peak Wikipedia date/version, it could be frozen with XOWA [github.com]. Would have to download the preferred Wikimedia dump [wikimedia.org], but as a bonus you could have any of the Wiki* projects on your machine.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Friday January 01 2016, @12:31AM
Official response: Don't be silly, this is all covered under WP:TWAT, and despite ignoring WP: AGF you're a total n00b because your're a WP:NEOAF
And of course that leads to: Ciao
(Score: 2) by NoMaster on Friday January 01 2016, @04:42AM
If only there was a "Funny and Insightful" mod...
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @08:39AM
Wikipedia has a clique of superusers who are allowed to flagrantly break the neutrality and civility policies, and the admins will ban you for reporting them. When multiple editors report abuse by a superuser, the admins will ban the entire slate as "sockpuppets" based on the "tendentious behavior" of disagreeing with the superuser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Zeke1999/Archive [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive178#WeijiBaikeBianji [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive889#New_user_Kaffeburk_using_a_talk_page_as_a_political_Forum_.28rather_than_an_editorial_discussion_space.29. [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive887#Strong-arm_tactics_by_Jytdog [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive186#Nocturnalnow [wikipedia.org]
Then they'll hire consultants to try to find out why their editor retention numbers are down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @10:12AM
Link 1 has been thouroughly investigated and checkuser analysis showed that there were confirmed suckpuppets...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 2016, @05:28PM
The checkuser said there was an extremely tenuous (emphasis theirs) similarity based only on geolocation and with no other technical evidence. All that proves is that two users came from the same metropolitan area, such as both might be from London or greater New York or the Alexandria/DC area, and they refused to run CU against the third user. This is far from confirmation that they are the same person, especially when all three write differently. Read more carefully and don't be so quick to believe the declarations of the admins that "they are guilty because I said so".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 01 2016, @02:59PM
Generally MBAs don't understand volunteers or even the concept of volunteering.
Don't matter if its boy scouts, or charity orgs, FOSS software development in the 90s, they just don't get it.
Its often pretty funny "I don't understand, there's 500K FOSS software devs and we want bugs fixed in our boring as heck vertical application, instead they write 501K mp3 players and emacs extensions. How can we force volunteers to do what we want?"
That leads to hilarious quotes from the article like
Evidence suggests it is difficult for newcomers to find work to do
Oh they have a bucket list of things they want to work on, and are forbidden to work on. So they leave. F wikipedia, they suck. Eventually thru attrition the well runs dry and the project dies and that'll be a good day. Their content is freely licensed, so it might actually be worth something without its toxic community.
Imagine if a coalition of control freaks and SJWs had to individually approve every github repo and every git push and any individual on the planet can anonymously stand in your way (essentially trolling, in a civilized and abstract manner)
If you want a "real" encyclopedia it would have articles as git repos complete with forks and branches and the secret sauce would be some kind of voting system. Probably automated A/B testing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2016, @01:56AM
Amen, brother! ... or sister, I wouldn't want to presume.
Honestly, this would be a productive soylent project. A group of people who get together, sick of the status quo and the way that it gets railroaded by people with a counterproductive agenda.
Maybe this is what we should plan - an alternative, branchable wiki?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 02 2016, @02:59AM
Git isn't the best solution for a wiki. You probably want something diff based, rather than file version based. This is actually one area where, even if your text is markup or XML or whatever, there's a useful aspect to meaningfully differentiating changes in the text.