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.'"
And the "editors" are just as bad as ever (Score:4, Interesting)
An entire article about a british financial journalist and author was deleted recently by some french guy because he'd never heard of her. Well duh, he's from France, she's an english language journalist, why would he have heard of her? Until these sorts of idiots are weeded out I'll keep wikipedia at arms length and double check everything.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Interesting)
Who is actually pulling the strings? (Score:2, Interesting)
Amen to that (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had stuff reverted which I've known to be 100% true (because it was about some software I personally wrote) and yet some muppet halfway across the world who probably knows next to nothing about the software thinks its wrong because theres no other source to verify against. In the end I just kept re-adding it until he gave up but it really pissed me off and I suspect I'm not alone.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone know if there is a meta-wiki somewhere that keeps a list of wikis?
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2, Interesting)
"Precisely. But that's fine, I mean there are wikis for many other subjects so that you can delve into those subjects in much more detail."
And what do you know, Wales' for-profit company Wikia offers those!
Re:Quality standards (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah it is getting to be of a higher quality. Tuesday I checked out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon [wikipedia.org] as I just listened to a podcast about them. I was under the mistaken belief that they have virulent bacteria in their mouth. Wednesday I unearthed my account name and set to work, and someone had greatly improved the article, added a citation and corrected this information. I was impressed.
Then again, for some things, it's important to consider the systematic bias presenting itself in many articles. I think wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has a good article on it... :P
The Incestuous Cesspool (Score:5, Interesting)
>>Wikipedia has gone from "the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit" to the "encyclopedia of things we like and some people may edit."
Pretty much. Elitism on the part of the core editors combined with a provincial desire to have articles "their way" combined with healthy doses of fucktardery has basically made me give up on contributing to wikipedia.
Case in point:
I went to an article, saw that it was missing ISBN numbers for the books the subject was written.
I looked up the ISBN numbers, and added them to the bibliography.
The core editor who claimed it as part of his domain reverted the edit. Within a matter of seconds; certainly less than a minute. No comment on the revert.
I waited a day, added the ISBN numbers again. He reverted the edit again, again no comment.
I tried it a third time, then left a notice on his user page telling him that he shouldn't be acting like that.
One of his admin friends came onto his user page, reverted out my warning to him, said there was no evidence the editor was rejecting edits arbitrarily (even though I'd linked the reverts in the notice), and that I essentially shouldn't say such things to my betters.
So yeah, I waited a month, did it again, and they were accepted without comment. Because, you know, there's nothing controversial about ISBN numbers. :/
But that was enough for me. Wikipedia is an incestuous cesspool.
Saw this coming (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
It was a genuine attempt to create a new way of gathering and ordering human knowledge, but ultimately it failed to overcome the problems in the society that it occupied. Petty politics and corruption ate away at the original vision. I am not intellectually lazy enough to just shrug and say 'human nature' - I think there is more to it than that.
Wikipedia, like the rest of the Internet, might appear to be a new cultural space but the fact remains that everyone who contributed to it still occupies a real world cultural space. Real life Democrats are wikipedian democrats. Real life creationists are wikipedian creationists. Technology itself doesn't let you outrun who you are, so ultimately the same conflicts that make real life debate and conflict suck made Wikipedia suck as well.
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. Having a single, flawed, starting point for finding out information on the Internet (as many people do with Wikipedia) reduces its utility for research.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:4, Interesting)
OTOH there are cases of people trying to correct info only to have it "corrected" by people who break Wikipedias guidelines. An example of this would be "BUFF" in the article about the B-52 Stratofortress, it means "Big Ugly Fat Fucker" but last time I checked someone had decided to make the article "child-friendly" by changing this to "Big Ugly Fat Fellow" despite Wikipedia guidelines stating that one should not bowdlerize articles, and this was also pointed out multiple times on the discussion page.
No reference, no update (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Interesting)
An example of this would be "BUFF" in the article about the B-52 Stratofortress, it means "Big Ugly Fat Fucker" but last time I checked someone had decided to make the article "child-friendly" by changing this to "Big Ugly Fat Fellow"
That's pretty ironic when I can go to this article [wikipedia.org] and see a picture of the female sex organs. Won't someone please think of the children?
Time for a new take on Wikipedia? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have only made a few contributions to Wikipedia, and the experience of having my changes reverted has killed my interest in contributing again.
I'd like to see a new/competing version of the online encyclopedia which attempts to be more inclusive of all information. Rather than removing information because it is not deemed notable, contributions should be rated for how notable and essential they are. However, the less notable information would still be there - it just wouldn't be the first thing to come up in search results.
This could even apply within specific articles. The main article would contain the most important information, and would look much like an article on Wikipedia today. However, more arcane / tangential information on the topic would be available for those who wanted it. They would just click on a link for "all details" or click to expand certain sections of the article.
several explanations (Score:4, Interesting)
There's the problems with inaccurate information being cited and then very publicly refuted, which is likely engendering feelings of reluctance to be associated with that sort of public failing by potential contributors. Some of these people probably should be discouraged from contributing, given that's how those errors got there, so this is not entirely a bad thing.
Then there's the reason given in TFA, regarding the core group of editors. There very much appears to be an attitude of exclusivity, if not outright elitism, among some of the more outspoken "regular" editors, to the point where a person such as myself who may have some specific knowledge on a particular topic doesn't feel that the reward is worth the effort to fight the system.
There are several topic that are either woefully incomplete (numismatics) or contain both explicit errors and copious errors of omission, presumably in attempt to present a "neutral point of view" (uss pueblo), that there are many opportunities for contribution to existing articles. However, the perception of the effort required to amend an existing article quickly brings me to the conclusion that it's not worth the time needed to do the research simply to have it removed by some editor for no other reason than because I'm not an accepted authority by virtue of not being part of the elite circle.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2, Interesting)
Having everything into one place is easier, and means you don't have to search for that subject-specific wiki.
More to the point, these specific wikis are often hosted on Wikia, which is bloated with JavaScript and has a horrible lay-out. Lately, Wikipedia has also started bloating its pages with JavaScript, though...
This is what I'd expect... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Interesting)
No kidding.
The problem is the incestuous "culture" - or more to the point, the haves-and-have-nots attitude of the majority of their administrators and so-called "respected users" - that works on the basis of gaming the system.
Words by a former wikipedia administrator [livejournal.com] that showed me how their system really works. And then of course there's scandal [newsvine.com] after scandal [textfiles.com] after scandal [theregister.co.uk] after scandal [theregister.co.uk] (the last one is incredible fun, too... if you think that's the only secret organizing list for abusive wikipedians, admin or no, you're delusional).
Wikipedia doesn't work. It hasn't worked for a long time and I don't think it ever really did. It has horrible bias [kuro5hin.org] against anyone who is a verifiable expert in their field. It has MASSIVE problems with cliques going around pushing their agendas and claiming that anyone new coming to an article or set of articles on their favorite topic (global warming, middle eastern conflict/culture, scientology, etc). If you show up with well-researched refutals to the crap that is 99% of wikipedia, you are labeled a "troll", or abused, or targeted by one of their throwaway accounts so that a friendly behind-the-scenes admin can slap an indefinite ban on you. This is deliberate: 20 newcomers to an article might be able to outweigh the morons pushing bad information, but as long as they can pick them off one at a time, they "win" in the wikipedian system.
A few wikipedians have been there "Forever." They'll never go away. More have been there "A very long time" and have developed incestuous, corrupt relationships with each other and with the "forever" types. Meanwhile, anyone new coming in is instantly accused of being a "sockpuppet", "meatpuppet", or whatever other epithet can be thrown at them.
It's no coincidence that the "Checkuser" tool, which was originally ripped out of David Gerard's corrupt grasp after a series of false-attack incidents (privately hushed up, naturally) has on en.wp been removed from the ability to "prove innocence." The accusation of "sockpuppetry" is an abuser's tool of force, pure and simple. In the Wikipedia "judge, jury, and executioner" administrator zone, any tool that could prove someone is innocent is to be neutered as soon as possible.
The statistics on blockings/bannings and responses to them are likewise hidden. Why? Because analysis of these shows what really goes on. Most administrators don't bother to communicate with users when placing a block. They drop indefinites immediately with no remorse, using wikispeak code rather than plain language. The "appeal" process is a laughable joke as well, with maybe 5-8 active "reviewers" who basically use it as a stress-relief tool, beating up on people who are helpless (because they don't have the admin bit) to begin with.
Face it. Wikipedia is worthless with the current "leadership." All the good editors and conscientious administrators were driven away long ago.
good science (Score:3, Interesting)
Excellent study. Lots of people have felt this way for a few years now, but this is what science is for: Replacing "gut feeling" with hard facts.
The next step, of course, will be the most interesting: Research into what one can do, how one has to build a community to avoid these problems, and keep it running along the successful path.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
My bad Wikipedia experience (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't want to create a user - sorry Jimbo, I just don't want to join your fan club. As a form of punishment, I was tormented with like a 17-step wizard with questions such as whether I am writing about a "MUSICAL GROUP, DJ, ALBUM, or SONG". After I finally got to the part where I write my part, it was unceremoniously deleted by the EarWig robot (eh?), because some of the text - basically the address of the place in Moscow - was copy-pasted from memorial.ru. And this is the site with a 10-page article listing the secondary characters in the Final Fantasy world. Sorry, somebody else would have to create this article instead of me and yes, I was shocked at how bad Wikipedia had got.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Interesting)
The top editors quite obviously revert edits from "lesser" users for no reason other than disagreement with POV, or just pride in what they initially wrote. Wikipedia at this point has so many rules that someone who spends a lot of time on Wikipedia can almost entirely control articles with them.
If you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of these rules(even though many are selectively enforced) you really have no control over the article. It's quite similar to the idea that police have so many laws at their disposal that they can nearly always find something wrong with your driving/car if they really want to give you a ticket(such as slight overhangs of the license plate frame)
One glaring example I remember is Bristol Palin. Someone managed to get her article removed(though she was obviously notable), redirected it a section about Sarah Palin's family, then changed the the anchor so that the place it was redirecting to had nothing to do with her. Could it be an accident? Yeah. But there's a lot of similar examples.
Also, despite the number of articles with built in criticism sections, large corporations and political figures will often remove the criticism section entirely, or move it to a separate article. Why? Because those locations get a fraction of the traffic.
Wikipedia ranks too well in the search engines for special interest groups and PR/reputation management companies to ignore. Slowly but surely, they've been building up influence and sockpuppet accounts. And Wikipedia has changed a lot as a result.
Obviously I can't cite any of this, so I understand if you guys take it with a grain of salt. But it's been something I've been seeing for quite awhile now, and I'm quite confident it's happening.
Re:Amen to that (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had a simmilar experience. I am a subject matter expert on a particular area of optical physics and periodically edit a section I initiated. Lately I find these edits reverted within minutes. it's truly aggravating. It's not for lack of citations since the citations there contain the info. and Moreover many of the edits I make are neutral in content but simply refactor the description or consolidate repetitious parts. Sometimes I this revert battle goes on and on.
Stand up for the Wikipedia (Score:4, Interesting)
I am one of those who edits a page once a month. I have a few pages and topics a like and have added to my watch-list. Most of the reverts I see and do myself are plain vandalism. The remainder are punctuation and a bit of grammar.
I have had few cases of something I thought to be good being reverted. Recently on a page I added a few new facts that had been reported in the news, with citations. They where reverted by a moderator without a comment (I call that rude). After confronting him on his personal page, he argued that he could not read Spanish, therefore could not confirm my citation. Oddly, as I pointed out, the topic was a topic for which you absolutely need to be fluent in Spanish to read primary and secondary sources. Well, after a bit he got a moderator who could read Spanish to check my citations. But did not revert his revert, I had to do it myself.
Did this make me stop contributing to the Wikipedia. NO! It is our duty to confront such morons until they give in.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:5, Interesting)
You need only check-out a few of their pages - most are pedestals from which to gloat about their Wikipedia penis, and yet these are the people IN CHARGE.
So those people take pride in their voluntary work for a good cause and as a result were elected by the community to have a few more responsibilities beyond just editing articles. I don't see how that is a bad thing at all.
Room for a lot more (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Amen to that (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you provide a link to the software as a reference?
Galt's Gulch, year 8 (Score:4, Interesting)
Wales is himself, a professed objectivist, and Wikipedia is his society. Ayn Rand fanboys should take note.
Underneath the exterior, its a complete hash of bickering, factionalism, vicious territorial disputes and power struggles. Its policed by a secretive clique that tolerates neither criticism nor dissent. Were it a real life territory of any kind, it would be a hell hole. What is now done with harsh words and moderator privileges would be done with truncheons and bullets. There would be a cult of personality surrounding Wales himself, backed by force, and no personal freedom.
This is how your world would turn out, Randroids. It doesn't matter one iota what you say, or even what you believe, about liberty; the simple fact that you believe you have access to a perfect, immutable truth means your world would be doomed to look like this - because people disagree with you and you think such disagreement is evil.
Re:Room for a lot more (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Saw this coming (Score:3, Interesting)
Give it about two generations, if society doesn't clam up even further. Knowledge is power. Knowledge empowers people to become better than those that hold power over them. The internet is an enabler of such.
Why do you think there's so much noise coming from the far right? These people who thrive on ignorance are seeing their power base erode, slowly but surely, by technology that enables people to see the world beyond their own borders. But that's neither here nor there.
In two generations, if the internet continues to be open the way it is now, people might just be able to rise above their dogmas and phobias and become true intellectuals. There will still be debate, and conflict, but the subject and nature of the debate will be different. And then, an entity like Wikipedia may actually work the way it was designed to work. Or we might become idiocracy.
A different viewpoint? (Score:1, Interesting)
First of all, let me surmise that the days where one might replace an entire, well-written article with "lololol these guyse r fagguts" and have it last for more then a matter of milliseconds before being reverted is over, thank goodness for that!
Now allow me to elaborate on that...
I've seen a lot of "The Ever Over-dramatised Wiki Wars!" and there is the odd corrupt editor, it's true, but the real nature of the Wikipedia editor is that they're so afraid of giving into any kind of bias that they've become pedantic, and it's the kind of pedantry one might find in an Accountant. I actually think this is a Good Thingâ.
There are many places where it's easier to simply revert an edit than spend time examining every edit that might or might not be hostile, and I think it's reasonable to revert an edit that hasn't been discussed or even requested first on those grounds, due to the hostile editors out there.
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).
There are some articles on Wikipedia that I absolutely love because of this pedantry. One such article is one pertaining to the Furry Fandom, and as you can likely imagine there have been people trying to defame that with all manner of ill-considered edits designed to show the fandom in a poor light. These tend to get removed, but every once in a while, someone with a negative view of the fandom will actually come up with verifiable sources, and a properly written edit. They'll ask if they can include such an edit, and whether or not the editors like it personally, they'd include and defend it as though it was one of their own edits.
So I don't think there's any evil or corruption in Wikipedia at all, just a lot of pedantry, and book-keeping, it helps to keep in mind that a lot of Wikipedia editors are like librarians, they like things done by the numbers, and everything kept in order. If you can work within the rules and present your changes to them, then they'll get in. It's no different than a peer review for any written work.
And, in my opinion at least, Wikipedia is better for this pedantry.
For those who wish to spread slander that isn't at all quantifiable, then there's always Uncyclopedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica for their kind. And that's what Wikipedia would have been if the editors didn't give a damn about doing things properly and having a respectable resource.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Interesting)
The owner of a website I frequented was once added to Wikipedia. Moderators started debating whether him and his (albeit popular) website were notable enough for an entry. They pretty unanimously agreed that he was not.
Which was great, because the owner most definitely did not want the article on the site. He signed up and politely requested the article removed (Something along the lines of:"I'd rather have a cactus shoved up my ass then see an article about me and my website on wikipedia. Did I mention the cactus would be on fire and covered in bees?"
Almost immediately many of the moderators started rethinking their original decision and decided the topic was notable enough after all.
If that's not a group of people who have control issues, I don't know what is.
Re:Yeah, you know... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, you're incorrect... true "redheads" don't have the structures to produce it, they have a genetic anomaly that causes them to produce excessive quantities of pheomelanin rather than the normal, brownish eumelanin that everyone else produces. There are studies on this [wordpress.com], as the genetic anomaly also seems to relate to pain sensitivity.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2, Interesting)
Objectivism is the view that there is a single, objective, unquestionable reality - with the implication that the Objectivist him or herself perceives this reality. If you hold such a view, those that disagree with you must seem like dangerous lunatics or liars. It isn't a philosophy that tolerates criticism, as its founder repeatedly demonstrated during her lifetime.
Is this a joke ? Objectivism is a cult ? No objectivist has a low tolerance for criticism. Such an attitude would prohibit the formation of the correct objective opinion in the first place. On the contrary an objectivist would take note of criticism and check if said facts are objectively true, attempting to use dispassionate argument, logic (preferably pure logic), and nothing else.
Of course the same cannot be said of the socialists fighting objectivism. Of course, without denying reality they'd have to answer the truth : that socialism has never failed to produce mass genocide, even in "moderate" quantities. That government-run health care necessitates government "death panels", who decide if life-saving treatment will be granted to a person or not. There is simply no other way to do it.
Objectivism is the denial of personal viewpoints, to the advantage of one absolute truth, totally and utterly independant of an individual viewpoint.
Now obviously the very basis of science is that objectivism is true, and that objective reality can be measured (also called empirism).
But you're simply a totalitarian semi-collectivist "liberal" with a bone to pick, aren't you ? Ayn Rand was more than willing to entertain, analyse and debate criticisms on any point. She was, however, not prepared to accept the criticism that reality didn't exist. She was gladly willing to even entertain the notion that all real-world measurements were flawed, however she was not prepared to accept that communism (sorry "socialism") was never correctly implemented, and therefore was correct despite all objective history making such a viewpoint laughable.
Of course, idiots denying objective reality and historical data to push communism can count Obama amongst them these days. Of course, unless they find a way to make God (/nature/reality/... whatever tickles your fancy) one of them, their policies will keep failing, and they will keep blaming others. The Jews, infidels, capitalists, ... all are guilty of the failures of communism, except of course ... communism itself.
An objectivist with a low tolerance for criticism is quite simple an idiot that's bound to be wrong. Such objectivists would count people like Osama Bin Laden, and the Taliban ("muslim students") amongst their members.
Slowing growth is a good thing for Wikipedia. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's good that Wikipedia's growth is slowing. That's an indication that the job is approaching completion.
Most of the important articles were in the first 500,000. New articles at this point tend to be marginal or unwanted. Here are the last five articles added to Wikipedia:
That's what's coming in right now. Most of the articles being added to Wikipedia at this point are either junk like that, or on very obscure topics. That's why growth is slowing. This is a good thing. Throwing out the trash is a hassle for everyone involved.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:3, Interesting)
What kind of articles do you try to edit, and what sort of problems have you had? I keep hearing this about Wikipedia admins and it sounds dreadful but I haven't run into it myself (yet?). So I'd be curious to hear your stories.
Me, I just make minor edits to math/physics/engineering articles. It's either grammar/spelling, or technical details: e.g., changing "extremum" to "stationary point" in an article, to reflect the fact that solutions to a particular problem can also be saddle points. Maybe I simply haven't made extensive-enough edits. Or maybe it's that they're uncontroversial math articles?
Anyway: What has happened?
Re:Room for a lot more (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't like it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Then fork it.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Interesting)
I can understand you dubbing me a troll, the sarcasm I invoked is indeed a trite and overused tactic. I hope you'll forgive it.
[[WP:DUCK]].
I can wikilawyer with the best of them, I can link to nearly any guideline/policy as needed off the top of my head; the others, I can find within a few clicks. However, when I do so in discussions, I try to follow the policy Wikipedia:Assume Good Faith. There are, admittedly quite a lot of things to read, so it is of no fault of the editor if they were unaware of some policy or another. I'm happy to work with them to get the desired content included.
If you actually believe that, you're the first wikipedian I have ever met who assumes good faith and understands, even partially, how ridiculous and ill-considered the "policy" structure of wikipedia is.
Let's face it. One of the "rules" of wikipedia is NO WIKILAWYERING. What happens almost constantly? Wikilawyering! The "no wikilawyering" clause is only pulled out to beat up on new users, period. One of the other policies states that contentious topics will always attract new users, and yet what happens whenever anyone shows up and edits on something remotely contentious? That's right, they are accused of being a sockpuppet/meatpuppet, tarred, feathered, branded with a big scarlet letter "S" for "Sockpuppet" and then banned by the pet admin of whatever clique is currently ruling (or fighting on the opposite side of) that particular topic.
Look at RFA. How many users are told that their conduct is good, but that they lack the "edit count" to make admin?
Look at AN/I. Or rather, don't if you don't have a strong stomach to deal with the lies, abusive language towards anyone who's not an admin or an admin's friend, and constant taunting.
Grab a random user from the list of recent blocks/bans. Look at the standard responses of those who respond to the [[unblock]] template. I assure you it is disgusting the way they behave, and that every one of them is deliberately designing their responses not to end conflict, but to try to taunt and provoke an already-aggravated user into doing something "banworthy" (as simple as calling an admin names in anger).
The "rules" and "policies" of wikipedia don't mean anything except as weapons for the entrenched, and there is no oversight. That, right there, is a main reason the Wikipedia MMORPG has descended so far into madness.
what disgusted me with wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
Every couple months I make a trivial change to an article to correct a serious error. Basically that's the only kind of change that motivates me to contribute - one where a few minutes of my time can help the world at large.
I have about a 50% revert rate. Usually it's for not citing sources. I fully support and agree with the rationale for preferring well-cited works. But when I'm replacing misinformation with what is correct, and the misinformation had no citation either, I can't see how that is a legitimate complaint.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Interesting)
Classical logic has a direct correspondence with classical set theory. This means that if you're working in a formal system that can't be rigorously defined in terms of classical set theory, you have to accept some shades of gray between true and false.
It's clear that an objective reality that can be described this way exists. However, information theory shows us that there must be a minimum information content needed to describe it this way and this information content is greater than what will fit in your skull.
You haven't caught onto the big secret: analysis of historical data is ridiculously susceptible to confirmation bias. You can't pull hard conclusions out of it without cherry picking and you're capable of cherry picking without realizing it.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:4, Interesting)
My one experience with contributing a Wiki edit was to fix a spelling error. I don't mean one of those things where it would be correct in some form of English, like US vs UK spelling. I mean just a flat out mistake. My fix was reverted very quickly. I never did understand why. Sort of put me off wanting to make any more substantial contributions though.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can explain why. It's very simple.
Someone was trying to drive their edit count up.
That's all it takes. They're sitting on "Recent Changes" patrol, reverting everything in sight. They don't give a rat's ass what they revert, because when it comes time for the RFA level-up procedure in the Wikipedia MMORPG, all the entrenched group running RFA cares about is how many edits you have, not whether any of them were worth anything at all.
Making an edit that screws up the grammar and spelling in an article (doing damage), or making an edit that fixes it and makes the article better (an improvement) mean precisely the same thing as far as the MMORPG goes: one more tick in your edit count.
Wikipedia is Stable Now (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the reason why is pretty obvious, but I have no evidence to back it up (except for the fact that I'm a semi-regular editor, like 2-10 edits a month).
Many articles on Wikipedia have become "stable". This means several people have spent years fine-tuning the articles to the point that a large change better be damn good to warrant inclusion. On these stable articles, most changes will be minor edits or vandalism related. We are starting to see the law of diminishing returns in effect - each edit does far less, so casual people have less interest in making edits. There are still plenty of important articles that need work, but the number is fewer than it was a couple of years ago, which drives down the number of edits for everyone.
One reason why regular editors are still making a lot of edits is vandalism. This also explains why the one-off edits are reverted at a high rate. I'd like to see statistics on the number of edits VS the number of reverts for these groups of people.
Re:Doomed to fail by its very definition. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:wikipedia, the 'open' encyclopedia? (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried to contribute an article about a local person of note, and I had to fight with an editor for a week who kept deleting the article. Not flagging it, not posting messages about how it could be altered to improve content, but outright deleting it. After a few experiences like that, I gave up on contributing to Wikipedia at all.
This is similar to my bad experiences on Wikipedia.
Most recently, I improved an article about a controversial national television advertising campaign by describing the latest commercials. A senior editor came along and reverted my material with no explanation. I contacted him on his Talk page and he said he thought my material was vandalism, because it could simply not be true and accurate. I explained that it was most certainly quite true and accurate, and that anyone could turn on the TV to verify this fact. He declined to undo his reversions. (Since the article was entirely about the controversial nature of the commercials, you'd think he would have considered in the first place whether it might all be true!)
I've also had cases where my edits were deleted from articles about events in which I was a personal primary participant, and technical details about things I invented (in favor of editors who had merely heard about it decades later and were wildly speculating). In one case, the editors even deleted the Discussion logs to eliminate the evidence of their embarrassing behaviour!
Needless to say my opinion on Wikipedia is that it's a pile of crap that eschews reality and truth in favor of the distortions of a group of strange elite editors. There's no point in contributing or editing to such a thing. There is no real accountability - not even crowd consensus - it's just another elite power structure masquerading as something else. While the editors often have a POV and adgenda that they are enforcing, resulting in biased articles, that's just a side effect. Wikipedia is, as others have said here, really a system for the feted inner core to get their power play and masturbatory delusional ego boost.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why I quit editing Wikipedia. I got too sick of people not wanting their articles to be improved.
That's a shame.
Personally I have created 1 article in Wikipedia with the full intent of others to edit it.
Back in 2005 to my dismay I found that there was no article on the Gunkanjima island so I put together a three sentence article with some links [wikipedia.org] to show that it existed.
Now 4 years later the article evolved into this well done article with maps and pictures [wikipedia.org] and I have not edited the article once.
It went through some name changes and merges and I am sure I could have edit wars whether Gunkanjima or Hashima island was the better name but I was always pleased that someone more knowledgeable saw the article and put some real effort into it.
If I was determined that my early article was the best it could be... Then well I would be just dumb and stupid.
Still plenty to add - not a big deal to do so... (Score:3, Interesting)
An inevitable development... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I spent about three years at WP and have witnessed a lot of impolite, petty and downright childish behavior among some of the most active contributors and administrators. As a result, overall quality is not what it could be. For instance, regarding scientific subjects -- especially biology -- I found it very frustrating that so many people regarded article format and personal interest to be more important than content and accuracy. Once this changes, though, WP will definitely become more valuable, but it will also become even more difficult for the average person to edit without being reverted.
Policy and the types it attracts (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia has always (yes, since its' inception) suffered from two major problems.
a) Its' policy is terrible.
b) The people running it are a serious problem.
The policy is a continually moving target, with flavour-of-the-month, entirely subjective and arbitrary fads dictating editing style. Edits get rejected because of such vague and ridiculous notions as, "weasel words," or "peacock phrases." One of my edits, to the character bio of John MacClaine from the Die Hard movies, was rejected because it sounded "too much like a magazine article." WTF does that mean?
Another problem is overwhelming bias, particularly in the direction of materialistic/scientistic atheistic bias. The biographical article for Richard Stallman is a good case in point; it's a blatant, totally unrepentant whitewash. Stallman is a lot more controversial than that article makes him out to be; it's not NPOV at all. There were a number of people who for some time were trying to add information about the other side of that particular story, but the article's self-appointed keeper is an individual of the alias Gronky, whose slavish, utterly single-minded worship of Stallman would simply induce pity if it wasn't so disturbing. He has continually deflected every attempt to add links to any material that is in any way critical of Stallman at all, to the point where the people who were trying to add said links have apparently given up.
This type of scenario is also deeply typical for Wikipedia. It's very common for a single individual or small group of individuals to use a particular article as a podium for expressing their view, and only their view, about the given topic, and any attempts to make edits contrary to their perspective will be continually reverted.
The claim that it is "an encyclopedia which anyone can edit," is thus, in practice, a complete lie. You can make an edit, sure; but good luck having it last for more then thirty seconds before one the army of pedantic atheistic fanatics reverts it for some entirely arbitrary reason, that generally makes sense to them alone. A lot of the time they don't even bother citing a reason, now; there's no point. That more than anything else, is the reason why I haven't bothered trying to edit on a regular basis for probably nine months now.
Re:How many editors are retirees? (Score:4, Interesting)
A couple of years ago, I tried to update the then-current Atlantic hurricane season page with information on when hurricanes had been downgraded. I felt this would be useful as we could already see the rate at which a storm grew, and had some interested in its rate of decline. Within a short period of time, the changes had been reverted on the basis that none of the other pages had that, so it shouldn't be in that one, either. Nevermind that I simply hadn't had time to edit any of the others -- they were reverted without discussion. I was frustrated enough by the event that I didn't bother arguing the point. I have since edited a few other articles, mostly for grammar or clarity, but I'm still wary of most of the admins wandering by and deciding that my edits aren't up to snuff.
Re:It's their own fault (Score:3, Interesting)
"Of course the same cannot be said of the socialists fighting objectivism."
What fight does socialism (an economic philosophy based on objective analysis of historical data trends) have with objective reality?
And why did Randite big-O Objectivism ally itself - of all economic faiths - with *capitalism*, when capitalist economics is based purely on the idea of SUBJECTIVE value: that things are ONLY and always worth "whatever people will pay for them in the current market"?
Capitalism is nothing BUT subjectivism taken to its logical extreme. It's the socialists who hold to an objective theory of value: that a human life is worth something in real terms even if the 'market' chooses to decide otherwise.
That's the huge irony with Rand. Or contradiction, if you prefer.
Check your premises!