Wikipedia Approaches Its Limits 564
Reservoir Hill writes "The Guardian reports that a study by Ed H Chi demonstrates that the character of Wikipedia has changed significantly since Wikipedia's first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007. While the encyclopedia is still growing overall, the number of articles being added has reduced from an average of 2,200 a day in July 2007 to around 1,300 today while at the same time, the base of highly active editors has remained more or less static. Chi's team discovered that the way the site operates had changed significantly from the early days, when it ran an open-door policy that allowed in anyone with the time and energy to dedicate to the project. Today, they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away. 'We found that if you were an elite editor, the chance of your edit being reverted was something in the order of 1% — and that's been very consistent over time from around 2003 or 2004,' says Chi. 'For editors that make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 all the way up to about 15% by October 2008. And the 'onesies' — people who only make one edit a month — their edits are now being reverted at a 25% rate.' While Chi points out that this does not necessarily imply causation, he suggests it is concrete evidence to back up what many people have been saying: that it is increasingly difficult to enjoy contributing to Wikipedia unless you are part of the site's inner core of editors. Wikipedia's growth pattern suggests that it is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out. 'As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power.'"
How many editors are retirees? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's their own fault (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have a 25 percent probability that your edit will be reverted, why bother? Coupled with abuse of the "notability" concept for new articles, Wikipedia has gone from "the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit" to the "encyclopedia of things we like and some people may edit."
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BMO
Surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
The rate at which new articles has decreased; I would hardly call this surprising. The coverage of Wikipedia is so great that the only place for new articles are more obscure concepts and greater specialization of existing ones.
Quality standards (Score:5, Insightful)
.
Then add the pile of people doing snow jobs, Steven Colbert stunts, reversion wars, etc, and I don't think its surprising at all.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:4, Insightful)
It's worse (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not just numbers of articles. Articles are shrinking. Trivia sections get eliminated if not integrated in the rest of the article in order to conform with "style" (no matter how interesting/surprising the trivia bits are), images that aren't strictly conforming to copyright get purged (even if they probably qualify for fair use -- but someone hasn't made the argument, and bots eventually get the images out), anything controversial gets mired in edit wars or simply deleted, and so on. Some great articles that I've gone back to over time are little more than stubs now. At least the earlier versions are preserved in the edit history.
Success and the desire to make it a more polished product is slowly whittling Wikipedia away and discouraging casual (but knowledgeable) contributors. It's becoming a pain to contribute and more boring to read.
It's more and more like a "real encyclopedia" every day.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Insightful)
Even non-core contributors have a 75% chance of getting their changes accepted - and my guess is that the probability is even higher if the changes make sense...
And rather than being a story about 'scarcity of resources', isn't it more one of Wikipedia approaching perfection?
Re:Amen to that (Score:5, Insightful)
The "muppet" was right to do so. Information that is not independently verifiable does not belong in an encyclopedia.
Publish the information somewhere else as an authority on the subject, then make the edit and add a citation.
Fuck Wikipedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped contributing to Wikipedia years ago. If you write an article, no matter how well-written, there's a good chance over 9,000 deletionists will pop up and go "HURR HURR NOT NOTABLE" and either speedy delete, prod, AfD, or some combination of the above. Those who cannot create instead focus on destroying.
Re:Amen to that (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the intended outcome, though. Wikipedia used to be just a collection of information put together by random people, but the goal is increasingly to build a well referenced collection of information put together by random people. If you can't cite any at least halfway-decent source for an addition, it doesn't belong in a Wikipedia article, because there would be no way for a reader to verify for themselves that the information wasn't just made up.
The fact that Wikipedia didn't do this often enough, and was to a large extent a collection of unreliable information put together by people with no credentials, with no way to verify any of it was accurate, was one of the most frequent and strongest criticisms in the early years (and still persists to some extent). So I'd say it's a definite shift in the right direction to require sources more stringently.
It's all about compromise. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should i have to go wandering round multiple sites of unknown reliability when wikipedia could at least serve up the basics!
It wouldn't piss my off so much if wikipedia had always aimed to be an "encyclopedia of things we like and some people may edit.", but it didn't it was meant to be "the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit", and it pretty much was until a ruling clique formed!
Power corrupts (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually what it really means is that a few editors have amassed all the power (much like a few people amass all the power in the government). This problem has been around for a while. I personally stopped contributing after they kept deleting the the article on the stolen sidekick [evanwashere.com]. Its been reduced down to just a few lines [wikipedia.org] in some other article.
There is of course Deletionpedia [dbatley.com], but it looks like their bots aren't always on top of the situation. Several of the articles I've tried to find there weren't saved in time.
It's a shame, since Wikipedia could be so much more that the narrow vision of the deletionists.
Re:The Incestuous Cesspool (Score:1, Insightful)
Can you cite your sources?
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amen to that (Score:2, Insightful)
"The "muppet" was right to do so. Information that is not independently verifiable does not belong in an encyclopedia."
There are two types of "independent verification":
1) citing a different, published source for the information
2) doing it oneself -- as in a scientific experiment that will independently test a claim
It's fine and dandy to cite another published source for information, but we all know that people can and do slap up a web page making whatever wacky claims they want, and then cite that page in Wikipedia as if it is useful. In the scientific realm, citation of other publications only goes so far: those publications could still be wrong. The ultimate independent verification is to do the experiment yourself.
If I make the claim that water is extraordinarily toxic and hazardous to people's health and cite the DHMO website [dhmo.org] as my source, does that make my claim automatically "independently verified"? Can I go ahead and change the Wikipedia entry on water? Or are people more likely to accept their own personal experience and their ability to test the claims directly?
You and Wikipedia are right to expect a strong level of independent *documentation* for a claim, but there is more than one way to independently verify something, and sometimes personal experience or experimentation should be accepted as a valid approach. Anyone can independently verify that water boils at 100 degrees C at STP. Do I really have to cite a written source in order to say that in Wikipedia? If you have been there or done something that qualifies as first-hand knowledge of the issue, or anyone could verify the claim for themselves (e.g., do X yourself and you will see result Y), why shouldn't you correct an obvious mistake? Slavishly expecting a citation is silly in some circumstances.
Why I edited (Score:5, Insightful)
I edited Wikipedia because I found significant errors and omissions in areas I was familiar with. The articles are accurate enough now. And, yes, I had an edit reverted. After we discussed it on the talk page, I redid the edit, and it was much better the second time.
So, I'd like to propose a completely innocuous explanation for the figures given: the number of casual contributors has gone down because there's a lot less room to go into an article and be an expert. Also, casual contributors very often haven't learned how to make a good Wikipedia edit, and having it reverted is ultimately a good thing. Moreover, with the lesser need for the casual contributor, the proportion of crackpots and vandals has doubtless increased. This could well account for the large number of reverts.
While Wikipedia has definitely changed, it doesn't look to me like it has changed for the worse.
Re:Amen to that (Score:4, Insightful)
"Information that is not independently verifiable does not belong in an encyclopedia"
Well he could always have downloaded the software, compiled it up and run it but I guess he couldn't be bothered.
No (Score:3, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with the "inner core" and everything do with morons who watch their favored pages and revert anything and everything that undoes the axe they ground in it. Most people's time is more valuable than that of the cultists, conspiracy theorists, fanboys, and ideologues who make up the bulk of the editors.
The inner circle's flaw is that they don't enforce standards of credibility, not just of the editors, but of the sources used to cite information into the encyclopedia.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't buy the premise of TFS at all. First, afaict it's always been hard to not have an edit reverted. After I had an accommodating IOL inserted in my left eye, I edited the Cataract Surgery article [wikipedia.org] to add the accomodating lens with the monofocal and multfocal lenses, and it was reverted almost immedately. I tried again several times to update it (my surgery was in 2006, the CrystaLens was three years old at the time), and all efforts were unsuccessful.
It took a mention of these efforts to edit the wiki here at slashdot to get wikipedia updated; it now mentions the accomodating lens. Its descriptions of the monofocal lens (you still need reading glasses and often bifocals) and multifocal lens (which works somewhat like bifocal or trifocal eyeglasses) are somewhat vague, but having the experience of not being able to sucessfully edit it I'm not even going to try.
As to the drop in new articles, that's entirely understandable. In wikipedia's early days there was a lot less information in it, and a lot more possible articles to write.
Uncyclopedia, otoh, is too easy to edit. Its article on crack cocaine used to be hilarious, now it's just stupid.
Re:Amen to that (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes on a whim, I'll just add some info or make a correction. But I rarely bother to see if it stays. If people revert it, it's their or Wikipedia's problem, not mine.
It's not like I'm an avid supporter of wikipedia (esp given the sort of things they and their admins do). So I don't see the point of putting in extra effort for them (unless someone paid me enough
I've seen pages with pretty obvious stuff that's full of "citation needed" tags. I doubt that sort of thing is due to people trying to establish the truth, these sort of occurrences are more due to egos or politics or some astroturfing. Just a google search will provide tons of citations, so why clutter the wikipage with a citation for every other statement?
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anatomy not be child-friendly?
Since about half of the people on this planet have the organ depicted in that article, why should it not be relevant to people with that organ?
Re:A halfway decent source? How? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway , all the guy had to do was download the software and run it to check the veracity of my claims
Which makes your contribution "original research" that should not be in Wikipedia at all.
Look, Wikipedia is, first and foremost, an encyclopedia. It's supposed to be a collection of information from other reliable sources. If you can't provide a reliable source for the material, then it doesn't go in. Period.
Saying "run the software yourself" is not a source. Wikipedia doesn't publish "things that are true", it publishes "things that can be verified by asking other reliable sources".
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
> So why not have a mechanism for moving articles to the relevant specialised wiki and adding a stub page in Wikipedia (or a redirect to an index page) with a link to that specialised wiki, rather than just delete someone else's work?
Because deleting someone's article is about power - it's about showing them that you have it and they don't. All the rhetoric about notability and "reaching a consensus" is just a cover for demonstrating that you can shaft them. Moving the article to a specialised Wiki wouldn't achieve this.
In fact articles about specialised Wikis keep getting deleted as "non notable", because the people that run Wiki don't have any power of them.
Everyone likes to think that we're an evolved species interested in knowledge but actually everything is about hierarchies, chimp style. Actually if wikipedia stopped being about consensus and switched to voting a lot of these problems would disappear.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
"the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit", and it pretty much was until a ruling clique formed!
I think they are trying to keep it from degenerating into a blog, or a chat space, or an encyclopedia of trivial things like the Star Wars universe. Some wikis, like Wookiepedia, started out because Wikipedia kept kicking out certain stuff, like exhaustive detail of the Star Wars universe.
This article makes the change in Wikipedia sound nefarious, like there is some elitist cabal that wants to accrue power. Sure that is true in part. But as the site has grown it is more important to keep things out than it is to add things. The alternative is that every article about a politician will include nasty, defamatory, and useless content and that vociferous fans of various fantasy genres and celebrities will take over all coverage of things related to their realms.
Wikipedia needs people who say "no", and if those people are a bunch of elitist editors, then fine.
Re:Fuck Wikipedia. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most importantly: You can't write about anything that the deletionist crowd doesn't know about. They're like republicans: "Please, oh mighty god, let there not be a world outside my windows".
I've had quite a few articles deleted on subjects that are considerably more notable - but less geeky or important to the in-crowd - than lots of the articles that remain.
I've taken to sarcasm since. Every minor porn starlet has her own wikipedia page, but lots of non-porn movies, games, books that were seen by a lot more people don't. What does that tell you about wikipedia and the people that run it? :-)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I'd like Wikipedia to have even more articles, the notability guidelines are honestly quite pointless and lead to many -great- articles being deleted. It doesn't benefit the community if you delete them, sure, Wikipedia might not be the place but this isn't a paper encyclopedia, space is for all practical purposes infinite for text.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amen to that (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Modifying good info (Score:2, Insightful)
Colleges don't disallow Wikipedia because of it's nature, they disallow Wikipedia because it's an encyclopedia -- you can't legitimately source Britannica or any othher encyclopedia in any academic paper, so why should you be allowed to cite Wikipedia?
Re:A halfway decent source? How? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Saying "run the software yourself" is not a source"
No , its a lot better than a source - its seeing it for yourself.
"Wikipedia doesn't publish "things that are true", it publishes "things that can be verified by asking other reliable sources"."
What a load of BS.
Re:Amen to that (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's one of the insane concepts that many experts hate about Wikipedia.
They say that democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's a simplified metaphor to point out a crucial flaw of majority voting.
In the same way, one could say that Wikipedia is where an anonymous blog posting (which can be linked to) is the more trustworthy authority on spacetime than a direct edit by Stephen Hawking himself.
Protest all you want, reason all you want, the simple truth is that that's how it is.
The Left and censorship (Score:1, Insightful)
First you champion free speech when you are in the minority.
Then when you are in the majority you clamp down hard on any dissent.
You justify it by saying you are "in the right" and that contrary "misinformation" will just "confuse" the people.
Just look at any organization that is run by the left and show me the diversity of thought there and how it is tolerated.
In my experience, they come down on no one harder than one of their own flock that has gone astray.
The best example of this is the moderation system on slashdot.
Instead of a well-worded reply to a well worded (but contrary) opinion, it is modded down in a cowardly way (overrated). The goal is to suppress contrary ideas.
This does not speak well for the confidence of the majority - does it?
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's leave defamation to the side - first off, to be defamatory, the facts stated must be false, so they don't belong in an encyclopedia anyhow. Other than that, though, who decides what content is "useless"? Why is some information so unimportant that it cannot be stored in Wikipedia?
Wikipedia's article on itself declares that it is an encyclopedia. Its article on encyclopedias defines the term as "a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge." Wikipedia is clearly not a subject-specific encyclopedia. It is therefore intended to be a compendium of knowledge.
What is the difference between Wikipedia editors deleting "useless" articles (that do in fact contain knowledge, albeit knowledge that they deem useless) and outright censorship?
Re:and yet (Score:3, Insightful)
What would be the point? Wikipedias problems *are* the people you're entrusting to fix it, the long-term editors and admins. I mean, obvious improvements, like adding a mode to view deleted articles, haven't been made. Why would you expect them to make any more wide-ranging changes?
It's goofy as hell in the first place that wiki keeps a detailed change log of everything ever by anyone-- except deletions. Deletions are holy, beyond reproach.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfection has two basic meanings. It can mean 'done' or it can mean 'flawless.' Wikipedia is definitely approaching the former, but will never attain the latter.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2, Insightful)
What is the difference between Wikipedia editors deleting "useless" articles (that do in fact contain knowledge, albeit knowledge that they deem useless) and outright censorship?
Because "outright censorship" can only be imposed by the Government and Wikipedia is a private foundation that is free to set whatever rules they want? It's not "censorship" when you are free to go and start your own wiki if you disagree with the policies of Wikipedia.
Re:Amen to that (Score:5, Insightful)
That kind of mindset is exactly the problem.
It's the dichotomy of reality and truth. In the beginning, Wikipedia was pretty good about mixing reality and truth. There was a little bit of both. Most articles contained reality, and when there were disputes on what was reality, truth was substituted.
At some point, the mindset started to skew towards truth. People with a stake in it started trying to make it respectable. At around that time, there were a large volume of articles online and off about how Wikipedia can't be sourced in research or considered a good source of information and whatnot. Looking back, it's pretty apparent the truth movement was a result of all the publicity.
What has happened to Wikipedia is that it has grown too popular too fast, and got lost somewhere along the way. It has lost its direction. The higher ups are trying to make it what it wasn't, isn't, and shouldn't be. They are trying to force Wikipedia to become an encyclopedia like Britannica or World Book when it's really a wikipedia.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2, Insightful)
Congratulations on missing the forest for the trees.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking pride in doing the work is great. That's what keeps them coming back and doing good work. That's not the problem - You neglected this (very important) piece of that post:
...the new pack of cyber nerds is defending it's territory.
That's really bad. You want to dig a well for orphans? Great! Want to brag about how you donated your time to help them? Cool. But if you get so excited about being the honored 'orphan-well-digger' that you deny others the opportunity to pitch in, and you've got the clout due to your good history to maintain your charity-monopoly, that's bad for everyone.
Re:Why I edited (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need to be an expert on the topic, just having a reasonable grasp of the English language and (roughly) a high school level of knowledge on how to write a report... Too many Wikipedia articles are confusing masses, with facts all over the place, repetitive and redundant bits, and confusing and inconsistent organization.
And even when you are an expert - you're often judged not on the facts, but on the opinions of the soi-disant 'experts' who have appointed themselves guardians of the article. (Which you, unwittingly, admit in the following sentence.)
"Them darkies love being slaves, a bit of the lash is good for them".
Seriously, when you start using phrases like "a good Wikipedia edit" you starkly display just how deeply the rot has spread. It's no longer about facts, clarity, and organization - it's about being a good little Wikipedian who defers to his elders and the convoluted and often bizarre rituals and fetishes of their culture.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:4, Insightful)
That, in a nutshell, is wikipedia's problem.
Look at the "top echelon" - the elites, the "friends of jimbo" clique. Most of them have been around forever (in relative terms to wikipedia's age).
Look at the next level - the bureaucrats and laughably corrupt "Arbitration Committee". Same thing.
Look at the ranks of the admins. What do you have? For the most part, a circle-jerk of backslapping nerds who congratulate each other on being abusive and rude in the exercise of their powers.
Look at the next rank down - the "longtime respected users." How do they get there? By having admin friends to protect them during disputes. Why are they not on the next rank? Well, they're either just sockpuppet accounts for the admins, or they're the "enforcers" of one of the various cliques, designated to wade in and be as disruptive as possible to newcomers in order to provoke "ban-worthy" conduct while their friend the admin keeps them from getting banned.
How do you get to be an admin? Not by proving you can handle a job of watching for legitimate disruption. No, you prove it by "level grinding" using automated tools on the "Recent Changes Patrol", looking for "vandalism" and amassing an edit count that rises higher and higher. You prove it by keeping your personal head down and letting someone else from whatever clique you connect with do the dirty work of "enforcing", so that your name is not connected with a block or ban. You get it by brown-nosing your way around certain known-quantity administrators and agreeing with whatever they do, especially when they're involved in clique behavior. You get it by submitting your RFA at the right time, so that people who would have something to say against your POV-pushing ways "happen" to not be around because they have a real life to work on.
Wikipedia is illegitimate. Someone else pointed out that Wikipedia is like a game - most of the people who have admin bits or better have "leveled up". People who don't make RFA routinely are told it's because they haven't passed a certain edit-count threshold, whether or not they can keep a level head and use their tools sparingly as they should. It's a game, nothing more, and the behavior we see from them is "cyber nerds is defending it's territory" in the worst way.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:3, Insightful)
They're just trying to make a name for themselves in "teh intarwebs." You need only check-out a few of their pages - most [wikipedia.org] are [wikipedia.org] pedestals [wikipedia.org] from [wikipedia.org] which [wikipedia.org] to [wikipedia.org] gloat [wikipedia.org] about [wikipedia.org] their [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] penis [wikipedia.org], and yet these are the people IN CHARGE.
The pages that I checked out were no more self aggrandizing than any "webpage about me," they seemed like what the typical person does when given a chance to talk about themselves. They didn't scream "control freak trying to get famous for harsh wiki edits" they just screamed "typical lonely internet user." And didn't wiki start off being tended to by the same?
What edits or additions of yours got rejected?
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Insightful)
And after this process, the Objectivist always comes to confirm what Ayn Rand said. Funny how that happens!
Your idea of rational debate is calling anyone making a decision about the distribution of healthcare part of a "death panel"? You know what the word "Hyperbole" means don't you?
Also, you ignore the fact that with private healthcare, your employer gets to determine whether or not you have healthcare by controlling your employment status. Is the board of directors a "death panel" then?
A reality which the Objectivist claims to perceive himself, thus presenting a viewpoint. Your philosophy is laughably easy to debunk.
Science would be observing lower healthcare costs and longer live in countries with "death panels", whereas your philosophy sweeps such facts under the carpet
Ayn Rand could accept criticism? Bullshit. She was convinced she was right and exlcuded people from her cult when they dissented, even when they dissented within the framework of right-wing radical capitalism.
Your *snigger* objective reality doesn't differentiate between Obama and Stalin? I wonder how a Ukrainian reader would feel about such a statement.
You've just, without a hint of self-awareness, demonstrated the exact same thick-headed exclusion of all outside viewpoints I have been complaining about. Thankyou for being yourself, and demonstrating my point for me :)
Re:Time for a new take on Wikipedia? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikipedia could introduce quality modes. In the highest mode you'd just see the most notable articles with tons of citations, and in the lowest mode anything that remotely looks like information could be included.
But if they were interested in improving their system, they would have done this a long time ago.
Re:wikipedia, the 'open' encyclopedia? (Score:4, Insightful)
This shit bugs me.
Just like TFA said, the deletionists have won. And to me, "to become a respected, citable encyclopedia" was never the purpose of Wikipedia. Seriously, academia just isn't going to consider Wikipedia a valid source, no matter how much they clean up their act. Besides - who the fuck cites encyclopedias in their work? They're all full of general knowledge stuff anyway.
The goal, I thought, was to catalog the sum total of human knowledge - which would include local people, places, sights, and even those things considered "trivial" by most people - and present it in a readable, non-biased manner. I've long given up on creating or editing articles for exactly the same reasons.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:3, Insightful)
But is this different from any other movement, organization, business or community in history? You have pioneers with the vision, the dedicated hard core settlers, a bureaucracy that grows to preserve and efficiently ritualize that core workings and then a self-sustaining isolation and elitism that comes of being on a successful island in the tide of humanity sweeping past in search of their place in the world.
I don't think it's not really a "problem", it's merely the natural wisdom and wrinkles of any collective "growing up", for all the good and ill that entails.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
"the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit", and it pretty much was until a ruling clique formed!
I think they are trying to keep it from degenerating into a blog, or a chat space, or an encyclopedia of trivial things like the Star Wars universe. Some wikis, like Wookiepedia, started out because Wikipedia kept kicking out certain stuff, like exhaustive detail of the Star Wars universe.
Preventing it from becoming a chat space or blog is fine.
But the so-called trivial elements like Star Wars universe make wikipedia a one stop shop for information. I know that I've looked up stuff and someone has flagged the article for deletion because it was supposedly trivial. If it were actually trivial, why am I as an end user looking at it?
Re:It's their own fault (Score:4, Insightful)
Why think up a rational argument when you can just call someone a stoner?
A government is just a form of monopoly. Why should a corporate monopoly be exempt from the same criticism as a government monopoly?
Re:wikipedia, the 'open' encyclopedia? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had several experiences like this as well with one editor deciding the he was the end all and be all of what was significant and worthy of note. I had other bad experiences as well. As a matter of fact every time I've tried to contribute I've had a bad experience. So no more for me... they have people on power trips that are out of control. It's sad because the idea behind Wikipedia is so good and solid as long as it's kept OPEN and FAIR. I don't think it's either at the moment.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps. But they used to be quite happy to be so. Then, perhaps entirely by coincidence, the co-founder, Jimmy Wales, started a for profit Wiki business on the side, Wikia. Devoid of content, it needed ad revenue, and lo, there came forth an edict, moving huge swathes, 100s of thousands of pages, to Wikia, which also became, completely coincidentally, the only external (and "independent") site that was able to get past the spam filters.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:1, Insightful)
"Today, they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for censoring others edits."
Re:My bad Wikipedia experience (Score:3, Insightful)
If this isn't something that should work on Wikipedia, perhaps we should change Wikipedia.
Um, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
One poster above mentioned adding ISBN numbers to an article, and apparently an evil, faceless editor reverted his edits, making him /sadface. What was not mentioned was whether they actually asked in the discussion page first if they may add these numbers in order to enrich the article, which would make the motives behind the edit known (and the account/IP for the comment and edit are the same, therefore anyone conducting an edit review can known the motivation for the edit).
How exactly would adding ISBN to an article be anything but an improvement? Are they violating NPoV or something? Is this defending Dewey Decimal against the evil ISBN virus? Or does the page have an alpha:numeric ratio quota they're violating?
ALL worthwhile human knowledge? (Score:3, Insightful)
This has been done. The English-language Wikipedia, at this point, is a summary of all worthwhile human knowledge.
At least all worthwhile human knowledge of interest to SF fans, Warcraft guild leaders, and antique computer collectors.
If you're looking for information on an Apple II clone from 1984 [wikipedia.org], you're good to go... you got details on slots and card cages and everything. If you're looking for information about a hot air balloon from 2005, you're not going to be so lucky.
Re:Saw this coming (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been saying for some time, the historical significance of Wikipedia will be as an extremely well documented social experiment, rather than as an encyclopedia.... I'm hoping, for the sake of the web and for the sake of Wikipedia itself (a victim of its own dominance; everyone wants access to the first hit on a Google search of their pet topic) that something else displaces it.
Well isn't the great thing about it, the thing which sets it apart from many other encyclopedias (and other similar sources of information) is that it's open source (Creative Commons license)? So not only can it be displaced if someone creates a better site with better rules and better editors, but that other site has the option to use as much of the Wikipedia's information as it wants.
So I think in that sense, you can't think of the Wikipedia alone as the thing we're talking about. We're talking about a collection of human knowledge that can't really be taken away by commercial interest or commercial failure. That set of knowledge is an achievement that can live on even if the Wikipedia turns out terribly.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:4, Insightful)
>But is this different from any other movement, organization, business or community in history?
Its not, but here on slashdot a lot of mom's basement nerds are experiencing this for the first time. I mean, how mature could the GP be? Using terms like "circle jerk" to describe an editing process is very much over the top. I just picture a lot of these guys as incredibly immature and having childish temper tantrums when they dont get what they want. Sadly, a lot of IT people just dont have good social or emotional skills, and we see this manifest itself on slashdot frequently. Immature mods mod them up, and every whiny complaint is suddenly +5 insightful while your excellent comment will go unnoticed or tagged as trolling.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:5, Insightful)
Using terms like "circle jerk" to describe an editing process is very much over the top.
You've obviously never been on wikipedia. Describing that "editing process" as a sequence in which a bunch of self-congratulatory dolts compare penis sizes is about right.
Re:Galt's Gulch, year 8 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Consensus (Score:3, Insightful)
Right Mr "I wipe my arse with the Mathematics manual of style!!". It was because of a cabal that you got tossed.
I don't know jack shit about the exponential function. But I know how to interact with other humans. That ain't it.
Re:Consensus (Score:3, Insightful)
May the Maths Be with you!
It's clear from your post that you're passionate about math, and with the name ObsessiveMathsFreak I dare say obsessed. It seems editing Wikipedia on any topic that we're passionate about is a recipe for disaster. No offense intended, but your experience and many other similar posts about fighting for your edit make you sound almost as rabid as the editors that refuse your change.
I've updated a few hundred articles over the years, usually minor changes in topics where I'm no expert. If, as others have mentioned, 25% of my edits have been reverted then I wouldn't give a damn. I've never gone back to check. If I made a good change then others will make similar edits someday and hopefully the article will improve over time.
Religion, politics, business criticism, censored history: I wouldn't rely on Wikipedia for any topic that has a passionate following. I never would have guessed that exponential functions have a passionate following, but maybe it's best that experts refrain from updating articles in their area. After all, the articles will never be flawless or complete. Wikipedia is just a great starting point to satisfy curiosity.
Wikipedia is a weird place (Score:1, Insightful)
In almost no way does it resemble what an actual English-speaking person would write on almost any given subject, even with the qualifier of a neutral point of view.
It uses citations for things like Barack Obama's wedding date.
It has sentences like "The exponential function is written as an exponentiation of the mathematical constant [[e (mathematical constant)|e]] because it is equal to ''e'' when applied to 1 and obeys the basic [[exponentiation]] identity, that is ..."
It has whole paragraphs about the use of incidental pop songs in Smallville.
It's littered with trivia ("On the June 17, 2009, episode of The Adam Carolla Podcast, Lange revealed that he had been sober for two and a half months, had lost 45 pounds and hoped to lose 45 more" -- [[Artie Lange]]) , thinly disguised self-promotion (go read [[Mink Deville]], which simply uses a bunch of fawning quotes to hide its sycophantic POV), fifth-grade compositional say-nothing blather ("The structure known as Ronald Reagan's Birthplace is most notable for being the place where Ronald Reagan was born on February 6, 1911." from the article titled [[Birthplace of Ronald Reagan]]!), and more.
It definitely favors current events over the past, often bizarrely so (the combined articles of [[Death of Michael Jackson]] and [[Michael Jackson memorial service]] are nearly as long as the [[Michael Jackson]] article) and of course, the articles about 17th century playwrights and royalty are inevitably better-written and researched than articles about 21st century entertainers and politicians (ironic in that most of the general research done and text presented for those pieces comes from dead-tree encyclopedias.)
The rules are byzantine, the administration petty and aloof, the slogan inaccurate, the prose awkward, the site inexplicably shallow.
It is the strangest beast on the Internet (yes, even stranger than 4chan.)
Re:For all the bitching, (Score:3, Insightful)
You've said that twice now. I don't see it, myself. It's pretty good for basic unchallenged facts like geography, for example. But as soon as you get into anything that even remotely touches on politics and ideologies it turns into a rat's nest of disinformation and dissent. Look at any Wikipedia entry involving the paranormal, UFOs, etc. and you'll see, inevitably, the 'psedoscience' label applied to people or ideas. It's a very clear bias and makes it feel like you're watching a Larry King show where the 'opposing point of view' is brought in to provide 'fair and balanced' reporting, with the effect that the idea is ridiculed and shut down. Maybe it deserves to be, but the point is, it's biased.
In academic circles, Wikipedia is not well thought of--even to the point of banning using Wikipedia as a source. Is this academic elitism? Oh, probably, just like Will Durant is not considered a 'real' historian, but if you sneak in his ideas without citing him, history professors think you are brilliant. I realize that has its own problems, but my point is that the reputation counts.
I am quite aware that 'studies have shown' that Wikipedia is as or more accurate than more standard works such as Britannica, but, IMO, if you are using Wikipedia for anything but a quick look-me-up to get an idea of the issue, then, just like a /. poll, you're insane.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2, Insightful)
Based on these comments you'd think it would be easy to link to dozens of _consistently_ vindicative and petty "moderators" so we could look at their edit history, and decide for ourselves. I'm sure there are bad apples there but the stories make it sound like every admin is evil to the core...
Interestingly I never see these links (or if I do, the stories turn out to be singular incidents or trivial things that were blown out of proportion).
Could you link to the moderators with control issues?