Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors (vice.com) 224
From a report on Motherboard: According to the results of a recent study that looked at the 250 million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years, only about 1 percent of Wikipedia's editors have generated 77 percent of the site's content. "Wikipedia is both an organization and a social movement," Sorin Matei, the director of the Purdue University Data Storytelling Network and lead author of the study, told me on the phone. "The assumption is that it's a creation of the crowd, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Wikipedia wouldn't have been possible without a dedicated leadership." At the time of writing, there are roughly 132,000 registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month (there are also an unknown number of unregistered Wikipedians who contribute to the site). So statistically speaking, only about 1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day.
So... when does it get moved to fiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is that the main premise of Wikipedia is false.
It is not a crowd-sourced documentation of knowledge. It is the exact same encyclopaedia, written by a few experts, that Wikipedia was supposed to supplant.
Oh, except that instead of having verified and accountable experts like we had in the old format, we now have unverifiable non-experts that aren't accountable, and may put whatever biased crap they want in there.
If it's all the same to you, I'll stick with the merit-based format.
Somehow, I don't think this what founder Jimmy Wales envisioned.
Did everyone fail math in school? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be shocked if was even as many as 1%. First, they admit openly that there are a huge number of unregistered editors... I know that I've made plenty of edits and new pages there without ever thinking to register. Who wants to deal with yet another set of login info?
Second, the numbers are not showing that there is a group of editors, and 1% of that group is making nearly all of Wikipedia. In the article they even admit that who is in this "1%" is changing over time (whoever came up with this whole 99/1 percent recurring theme is an annoying idiot).
For those that are unaware, this is what's called a "push piece", where the point of view (the importance of a dedicated leadership) is determined in advance and then numbers are chosen to make it seem like it's the only valid one.
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Re: Did everyone fail math in school? (Score:2)
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Original research.
I am surprised your edits were not reverted; according to Wikipedia's rules, they should be.
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I am surprised your edits were not reverted; according to Wikipedia's rules, they should be.
Wikipedia won't let you make error fixes based on firsthand knowledge? Even if supported by pictures, in this case?
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Wikipedia won't let you make error fixes based on firsthand knowledge? Even if supported by pictures, in this case?
Technically. However, there's nothing preventing you from creating a blog and posting the pictures with a little writeup, and then citing that as a source.
Original Research (Score:2)
Yes and no, in practice.
If you dream up a new theory about Evolution (which is controversial), then yes, you had better get it published elsewhere properly. But people are less concerned about non-controversial details like a particular cave. And most of the maths articles are largely referenced.
So there is an element of common sense here. No Original Research is a way to get rid of wacky theories without getting into arguments into the details.
There certainly are Wikipedia Nazis that love to revert eve
Re:Did everyone fail math in school? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do the same thing, although I'm registered. Most of the time, I make tiny edits to correct issues in technical articles. At one time, for example, there was a code example with a typo. It's awesome to be able to go in and fix little issues like this. So, I'm part of the vast 99% that makes very few edits.
Sorry if it makes me a bad person, but I have no interest in spending serious amounts of my time editing Wikipedia articles. Honestly, though, I'm glad there are such people. I don't understand the general contempt of Wikipedia around here. It's got its flaws, but it's an amazing concept, and generally produces really good results, as far as I've seen. And it's been worth enough to me to donate a few bucks each year. I consider it to be a wonder of the information age.
So, people complain about the turf wars by a few editors with power over their tiny pond? So what? Let me introduce you to the species we call "humans", where such things happen all the time, in every social environment you can imagine, from politics to mega-corporations to open-source development teams to your local homeowner's association board.
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Re:Did everyone fail math in school? (Score:4, Interesting)
I do the same thing, although I'm registered. Most of the time, I make tiny edits to correct issues in technical articles. At one time, for example, there was a code example with a typo. It's awesome to be able to go in and fix little issues like this. So, I'm part of the vast 99% that makes very few edits.
I did that once after encountering an article that was in really bad shape. Among other things, it had pretty much every spelling variant possible of words that have multiple valid spellings (e.g. aluminum-aluminium, adaptor-adapter, etc.). I spent an hour or so cleaning up some atrocious sentence structures, and then looked up what spelling wikipedia used for a word in its corresponding page (e.g. "aluminum" redirects to "aluminium") and then standardized all of the variants based on that. I even left a fairly good log of all the changes I had made. The next day the changes had been reverted by the guy who had made a bunch of edits to it previously claiming that my edits were vandalism.
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So, people complain about the turf wars by a few editors with power over their tiny pond? So what? Let me introduce you to the species we call "humans", where such things happen all the time, in every social environment you can imagine, from politics to mega-corporations to open-source development teams to your local homeowner's association board.
So after dealing with it all day in all those other environments, you expect people to put up with it for a volunteer cause? There are plenty of other good causes one can devote themselves to that wouldn't take their time and expertise for granted the way Wikipedia does.
This is a problem with the platform. If enough people complain, they could fix it. On the other hand, if everyone ignores it, then Wikipedia will simply alienate more and more infrequent contributors until nobody but those possessive edit
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...citing Wikipedia...
Do people do this? Wikipedia is largely a collection of summaries and links to actual references. If somebody cited Wikipedia itself for a paper, an 'F' seems entirely appropriate.
Re:Social Movement (Score:5, Interesting)
"Wikipedia is both an organization and a social movement,"
That, is why it fails.
Remember boys and girls,. citing Wikipedia is still a reason for an automatic fail for most university professors
That's irrelevant. First up, because everything in Wikipedia is sourced, you don't need to cite Wikipedia -- you can pick up the source and look it up in the library. Secondly, Wikipedia isn't disregarded as a citation source because it's normally inaccurate, but for two reasons: 1) it changes frequently, so it's too much work to verify it as a source and 2) the student could theoretically change it to say whatever they want to put in their essay.
Banning citing Wikipedia actually makes Wikipedia more reliable in the long term.
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Lots of pages are setup with minimal info and never touched again as well.
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Put another way, experts are experts because they represent the very top end of the population in knowledge of particular subjects. I know a lot about certain subjects, but I'm not an expert in any of them. I can write something informative for the masses, sometimes even for people in my field, but I'll listen to my old profs when it comes to deep understanding, they know their shit.
Having wikipedia, does make us all smarter. But not everyone, or even the vast majority can contribute. It's definitely lopsid
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I have not seen this be the case for subjects of academic value. I have seen current events and figures of celebrity status get heavily ... mis-moderated, and certain subjects still under legal debate get dumbed down so that it's impossible to understand the issue anymore.
But I haven't seen the fourier transform page get turned into a discussion about the oppressive math patriarchy or any such shit.
Dummies Guide to bare-chest buttcheeks (Score:2)
The cognitive style of your remarks demonstrates that you have none of the attributes of the superforecaster as described by Tetlock's book. To begin with—to a good first approximation—Wikipedia resembles no other project in the history of human endeavour.
So let's ponder a
Re:So... when does it get moved to fiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the main premise of WP is false. More importantly, many of its articles are incomplete or factually false, especially whenever they enter territory where it needs a subject matter expert to write a correct description. But according to official WP policy, a factually false entry with easy-to-understand third-party sources (which can all point back to the same one long since falsified study) will take precedence over a properly sourced references that are more difficult to understand or judge.
There were a couple other WP-like projects a decade ago, which had a concept of "experts" where you would send in your credentials and only then get proper editing privileges on specific topics or areas. Their quality was considerably higher, but their quantity was so much lower that they lost out and disappeared.
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I suppose the question then becomes where do you find a more diverse, yet vaguely coherent collection of knowledge? I can't think of any knowledge base with more than 1,3000 contributors.
Re: So... (Score:2)
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I don't think they generally have 1,300 contirbutors on the payroll.
Experts? (Score:2)
Who certifies an editor as an expert?
Do we get to see their credentials?
You have no way of knowing if theses"experts" are real or just some bored house wife.
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Who certifies an editor as an expert?
Do we get to see their credentials?
You have no way of knowing if theses"experts" are real or just some bored house wife.
Does it matter? If she has some knowledge of the subject writes a factual article backed up with sources, why does it matter if it was written by a bored housewife? You don't get to see their credentials, but you do get to see the references backing up what they write in the wikipedia articles.
I just looked at a half dozen random [wikipedia.org] articles. 2 were short one paragraph biographies, one was a well referenced article about a school district, one was a multipage biography about an author with links to individual
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I haven't been in a long while, but I recall lots of cites to wikipedia in wikipedia articles.
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You are absolutely correct, I mixed up my numbers before putting pen to paper. I apologize.
There are 600 articles written per day.
That means over the past 30 days, 1320 editors have written 13,860 articles (77% of 18,000 articles). That comes down to 10.5 articles each, in a single month. While that number is but a fraction of what I wrote earlier, the point stands. There is no way that people who have all that time to waste on Wikipedia are experts in anything at all, much less 10.5 things per month.
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A lot of content doesn't require expertise. It really, really doesn't.
I clicked random article three times:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's a bunch of straightforward simple facts sourced from other places. Sure, there are much more in-depth bits of content and I'm not stating that Wikipedia does not have any issues at all, but the notion that all Wikipedia articles need to be written by experts is silly.
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I'm not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a Wikipedia clique that won't accept any additions or changes by anyone who isn't in on it. I have tried to contribute to Wikipedia in the past and have had every single edit reverted. It wasn't because I was breaking rules or adding unsourced data, it was because it conflicted with what the self-appointed arbiters of the articles in question believed or wanted readers to believe.
Because of this, I have given up on Wikipedia completely. I have seen incorrect information and outright vandalism, but I won't lift a finger to help because it will probably get reverted without even being checked.
Re:I'm not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Different AC, similar experience. Any time I tried to make corrections (with well regarded sources to back them up) or additions, everything I did was instantly reverted.
It is NOT a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, it belongs to the people whose lives let them camp on it and treat it as "theirs".
Re:I'm not surprised (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I'm not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Just what I was coming here to say. I'd contribute more if that 1% of editors would let me. After having one too many articles (about historical events, I might add) I'd put real time into researching get deleted for not being notable, I gave up.
Re:I'm not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
While I was in grad school I naturally looked at a couple of the pages that touched on the research I was doing. All were 20-30 years out of date, poorly written, and in many areas incorrect even based on the old research. So I spent a couple of days, re-wrote one of them, added citations to current research, and then posted the re-write. And less than an hour later it was entirely reverted.
I messaged the editor, and was met with silence. I tried to escalate the issue and got nowhere.
So yeah, no wonder that 1% of editors "write" everything. If you look at all of the solid content that was reverted by those asshats, I wonder how many actual authors there would be.
And like the rest of you, I gave up. I go to google now and find other sources, because I can't trust that anything on wikipedia is of accurate and of decent quality, no matter how it looks.
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There is a Wikipedia clique that won't accept any additions or changes by anyone who isn't in on it. I have tried to contribute to Wikipedia in the past and have had every single edit reverted. It wasn't because I was breaking rules or adding unsourced data, it was because it conflicted with what the self-appointed arbiters of the articles in question believed or wanted readers to believe.
Because of this, I have given up on Wikipedia completely. I have seen incorrect information and outright vandalism, but I won't lift a finger to help because it will probably get reverted without even being checked.
agree. I have stop using it for the same reason.
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Indeed. I have also tried to add an article about a new subject only to find that it already exists as a rejected and locked page because someone at one time several years ago misunderstood what it was and deemed it "not notable". Also, with no possibility of changing it or adding to the "talk" page.
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I literally just wrote the exact same comment, in different words. Seems to be a common experience.
Oh really? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Wikipedia wouldn't have been possible without a dedicated leadership" who have created bots, notifiers, and other mechanisms to zealously "curate" Wikipedia content by reverting any editing contributed by the other 99% of Wikipedia users.
"The assumption is that it's a creation of the crowd, but this couldn't be further from the truth" because Wikipedia tolerates these practices and cannot be bothered so long as donations far in excess of its operating needs continue to roll in in response to never ending "we need money" campaigns.
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This.
I used to spend quite a bit of time on Wikipedia, editing and adding articles in fields I am an expert in. But the constant reverting, and deletion requests finally tired me out. If you have a life outside of WP, you just can't persist in its atmosphere.
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"Notability" is a frequently used way to kill content. Somehow they're afraid of 'cluttering' or 'overloading' the wiki with 'useless' information?....
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There are definitely cliques of editors who are very.... let's say protective.....but I don't necessarily think it's indicative of all of Wikipedia.
Ok, but how do you determine whether you're looking at a topic where some asshat reverts all useful corrections and updates or one where some expert actually was able to provide their expertise without interference?
Knowing that some, potentially large percent of topics are managed by said asshats devalues all of them if there's no way to tell the difference. People generally don't go to wikipedia to look at stuff they know - they go to look at unfamiliar stuff.
Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
How does that compare to other encyclopedias ?
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It's an unimportant metric. Supposedly it has slightly fewer mistakes, which would be what really matters.
I'm not sure if Wikipedia already does this or not... but I'd love to see a 'confidence score' for articles based on the size and frequency of edits and counter-edits. It's generally the fighting between passionate idiots that introduces the most bias and falsehoods into such efforts, so a method for making those edit wars extremely visible and perhaps bringing them to the attention of higher-level mo
Solution: time delays (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an open secret the site is run by little dictators.
The solution to all of this is rather simple, time delays.
You make an edit or any type of change and you are forbidden from make any more changes for a pre-determined amount of time.
Re:Solution: time delays (Score:5, Insightful)
>It's an open secret the site is run by little dictators.
If you've ever been part of a volunteer-based club, you've seen this is human nature. Everyone gets together for a common cause, some people are better at some tasks than others and they gain respect... which then becomes central to their identity and they fight to protect their fiefdom.
It ultimately (usually) finds an equilibrium between significance and the required effort of any particular issue - the bigger the problem, the more likely the average member is willing to fight to fix it. Sometimes you get one or more assholes with more time and with an insane dedication level and everything falls apart.
Wikipedia is still the former in most cases - few people are fighting over the dry stuff, it's pretty detailed and accurate. Nobody's willing to start an edit war (or at least sustain one) over it. Something tells me that changes drastically once you get to a subject that has 'fans'.
Re:Solution: time delays (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried for a while to update various details around oil rigs and sites on the articles and every single one got immediately reverted with "Reverted vandalism" as the automatic reason.
Things like changing dates of installation for a living quarters module by 3 months. Article had original planned date but the project got delayed... with automatic bots reverting changes like that how would I trust that other details can get fixed?
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>with automatic bots reverting changes like that how would I trust that other details can get fixed?
You need to apply one more level of effort before giving up - report the bots' bad behaviour and see if you can get the account they're using blocked by Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I wouldn't necessarily expect success... but if you care enough to contribute in the first place, you should try before you throw up your arms and walk away.
Re:Solution: time delays (Score:4)
>with automatic bots reverting changes like that how would I trust that other details can get fixed?
You need to apply one more level of effort before giving up - report the bots' bad behaviour and see if you can get the account they're using blocked by Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I wouldn't necessarily expect success... but if you care enough to contribute in the first place, you should try before you throw up your arms and walk away.
You sound like part of the problem and not the solution. If someone makes an edit, with source material, and has it automatically reverted why should they make the effort of reporting those bots? Such effort is useless. They'll create a new sock puppet and the bot will go right back to work again reverting everything anyone actually tries to contribute. There has to be a cultural change at the foundation for anything meaningful to happen. I suspect that the only way that will happen is if people stop contributing to the website. You should be encouraging people to take useful action if you actually want change.
Re:Solution: time delays (Score:5, Informative)
It's an open secret the site is run by little dictators.
The solution to all of this is rather simple, time delays.
No, the solution is to have Wikipedia content managed by Wikipedia employees who are held accountable, just like the employees of any company.
Wikipedia currently has approximately 300 employees, NONE of whom are involved in creating or editing content. That is done entirely by unpaid volunteers.
Wikipedia currently has annual revenue of approximately $80 Million. About $3 Million is spent on the actual expense of webhosting and maintaining servers. NONE of the remaining $77 Million is spent on creating/maintaining content on Wikipedia.
But they did spend £1,335 on business cards one year for the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. And €18,000 in Germany to send people to pop concerts as "accredited photographers". And €81,000 to people paid to photograph politicians. And €81,720 paid to a researcher to study... editing. And lots of fancy, expensive office space in major cities around the world.
And so on . . . . .
1% = ~ 1,300 (Score:2)
Here the raw number is a bit more informative than the percentage. In any very large open creative endeavor, there will be a massive number of people making a small handful of trivial edits to say they did and/or see if they can or because they notice one little thing in a very isolated incident. Such a large volume of trivial changes will bloat the total contributor list to unreasonable levels and distort percentages.
Similarly, take any big github hosted project. One I looked at had 3000 contributors, w
1% (Score:4, Insightful)
That's probably because:
1% signed up with an honest intent to be an editor and with knowledge to back it up.
4% signed up as a lark and to see what it was all about.
5% signed up with good intentions but don't have any knowledge to create pages with.
The other 90% are trolls that signed up to graffiti pages of politicians they don't like, or to edit Taylor Swift's page to talk about how she really has a penis.
Re:1% (Score:5, Insightful)
That's probably because:
1% signed up with an honest intent to be an editor and with knowledge to back it up. 4% signed up as a lark and to see what it was all about. 5% signed up with good intentions but don't have any knowledge to create pages with.
The other 90% are trolls that signed up to graffiti pages of politicians they don't like, or to edit Taylor Swift's page to talk about how she really has a penis.
You forgot those who signed up with good intentions and the knowledge but gave up in frustration because all of their edits are reverted by trolls or people with an agenda.
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Or just automatic bots that auto-revert anything on articles with the edit-comment "Reverted vandalism" or such... with no info on how to contact the human running said bot... Gave up correcting details on pages years ago due to this.
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Sounds good to me (Score:2)
Probably more editors than Encyclopedia Britannica.
Switched to Infogalactic (Score:2, Interesting)
No stupid fundraising page, and a more neutral worldview
Just like in real life (Score:2)
Most people are consumers, only few are producers.
Not sure why this is an issue for folks. (Score:2)
A lot of people sign up as an editor to correct their personal pet peeve issue or mistake. Others sign up because they think it might be a fun hobby, but the interest doesn't last.
The fact of the matter is that not everyone is qualified or given to the dedication to be a regular editor. For those who feel pulled towards regular contribution, great! Have at it! But why folks here expect that everyone who signs up will have the same dedication and quality of work once they are signed up is somewhat myster
Current events is the main generator of noise (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that Wikipedia allows current events and therefore the political arguments that inevitably occur.
In such a situation, the strongest group always wins an edit war, not the best arguments.
It's unprofessional to claim such information has any place in an encyclopedia.
They should, as a rule, point information under dispute to other sites.
That in itself should be reason enough for the disputing parties to eventually come to an agreement.
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They should, as a rule, point information under dispute to other sites.
So when the Holocaust deniers object they should just say the allegations are under dispute? The tin foil hatters who believe chemtrails are real and that you just bought the cover story? My guess is that which sites you'd point them to would be just as controversial. And you'd still have disputes over formulations and presentation, relevancy and notability, quality of sources... if you're not willing to have any sort of rules and referees they'd probably have to replace Wikipedia with a page that said "It'
Wikipedia is driving away editors (Score:5, Informative)
According to wikipedia stats, I had over 4500 edits on more than 500 pages in a little over 5 years. Rather large edits, with an average of >300 bytes per edit. I completely gave up editing when the main subject I was interested in (History of Romania and the Republic of Moldova) was hijacked by what I believe are institutional accounts with multiple editors, which enforced the presentation of only the official government view (and trust me, I do understand WP:POV). At the time I was pretty bitter about it, but then I came to believe that this outcome was predictable. However, the overall result was that I no longer edit.
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This type of government editing is a real danger to Wikipedia, and recognized.
It is worth your while to fight. I had a similar issue over a page on Terrorism. It took a lot of persistence, but got through.
Play the game. Get other editors involved. Make complaints to the adudicators etc.
Yet another misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, these "1 percenters" have changed over the last decade and a half. According to Matei, roughly 40 percent of the top 1 percent of editors bow out about every five weeks.
So there's a tremendous turnover in this 1%. This is *exactly* what one would expect - someone comes in, writes an article on something they know about, make it nice, and then drop out.
They also don't seem to say what "70% of content" means since they are talking about edits. Are people writing 70% of the actual words by count, or are they making 70% of the edits? I actually have an account, but I rarely log in to make edits. The edits that I make nowadays are usually fixing a typo or grammatical error and not worth logging in. If I'm actually adding content I'll log in.
Pretty much par (Score:2)
....this is pretty much par for any volunteer thing that I've participated in.
99% do nothing, 1% do 90%+
(I'm not trying to virtue-signal here, I've been a member of both groups depending on the project.)
Nothing to see here (Score:2)
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Power law distribution. And yes, it is a fairly common pattern in cooperative endeavors.
Works as designed (Score:2)
Wikipedia is refined from the wisdom of the crowds. But crowds, by and large, are pretty dim. So, naturally, the more wise the knowledge, the fewer people carry it. I would expect the graph to look somewhat exponential.
As It Should Be (Score:2)
I edited Wikipedia a little bit a long time ago. There were a few articles that I knew I could improve easily, so I did.
Once that was done, there wasn't a lot I could contribute without doing a whole of research. I didn't have the time or the drive to do it. Honestly, I expect this is the norm. Most contributors will start with the low-hanging fruit, and they will drop out as it becomes increasingly difficult to contribute further.
If someone is smart, detailed-oriented, and dedicated then Wikipedia could be
History is written by the winners (Score:2)
Given this, I think they're going to have to do something significant to increase transparency (e.g., a pane that shows the top 5-10 contributors for the page and the percentage of content each contributed, and/or other co
Wikipedia is not only the written text (Score:2)
Wow, those guys sure know a lot. (Score:2)
Somehow that figure seems a bit low. Perhaps they are responsible for edits but I doubt they've done all of the submissions.
Wow! (Score:2)
1% owns all the Wikipedia content while another 1% owns all the money, by not paying taxes.
Who does more for humanity?
I was blocked for reporting a banned user (Score:4, Informative)
I saw that someone who was already banned by the Wikipedia community was editing articles again, so I reported it in the proper forum.
A Wikipedia administrator blocked me. That's right: I followed all the rules, reported someone else breaking the rules, yet I was blocked.
There are clearly rogue administrators out there, using their power in ways that should not be sanctioned.
Not Relevant (Score:2)
Not everyone is a WRITER (Score:2)
Not everyone is a WRITER. They're called EDITORS for a reason. The only editing I do on Wikipedia is primarily fixing grammar, spelling typos, or updating links for relevant sourced content. This isn't authorizing articles, so I'm not part of this "1%" group of writers, however these contributions are just as valuable.
Wasn't all that easy to edit or post (Score:2)
I posted a picture of the Kennewick man, a bust that sits at the entrance of the library. DRM kicked in, while fought for by Wikipedia, lost it's place under that subject.
That entry was easy, it was a transition time, program after program was being required to make posting easier. It got to the point one needed a dedicated system just for that purpose. I haven't attempted to add or edit an entry since.
Encyclopedia Britannica VS Wikipedia (Score:2)
There was a time Encyclopedia Britannica fought against Wikipedia. The flame wars were intense, a paid service against a free and open-source one. The outcome important and far reaching to us all.
1300 is pretty impressive core staff (Score:2)
Did Brittanica or The World Book employ more than 1300 people as core staff? They certainly hired more if "you write the article on Slovenia" counts as "hiring" but "writing one article" describes the other 99% of the 132,000 people, so you have to talk core staff.
There were 2300 *sales* staff at peak, but the editorial staff in the home office, number in the dozens. A figure I googled for extensively, but only found ... in the Wikipedia.
Editors or Man Child Bias Asshats (Score:2)
Doesn't matter because his craziness aligns with the majority of editors so they do nothing to stop his obnoxious edits no matter how wrong they might be. Everyone that disagrees with him is a sock puppet of
Of course (Score:2)
I edited some articles about Apple software that I knew works differently from what the article said. But I am unlikely to write a feature article. Probably half the edits is for grammar and tpyos?
What are the missing edits? (Score:2)
Is there a reason that the posters complaining that their edits were reverted never give the name of the WP article and the edit they proposed? I would think the best way to convince me that the reversion was incorrect would be to post the details. Otherwise it is just "he said" without the "she said" and no evidence at all. I have to say that I have made two edits, both correcting errors and both have been accepted. In one case I expected to be reverted, since the correct information was widely contradicte
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Is there a reason that the posters complaining that their edits were reverted never give the name of the WP article and the edit they proposed?
Because people remember their emotions much better than facts. For me personally, it's been 10 years since I tried contributing and gotten my edits reverted without explanation. I don't remember what it was I tried to fix, but I do remember it was an incredibly frustrating experience. I wouldn't contribute now even if they paid me.
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How many Morons volunteer for lifesaving charities?
The only Moron i see here is you.
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Linux-GNU (Score:2)
Since Mr. Torvald's kernel was the enabling contribution, I propose calling it "Linux-GNU."
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Well, it's the linux kernel with toolchains, applications, etc. provided by several other sources of which the GNU project is but one. Calling the system GNU/Linux presumes that the GNU portions of the system are as critical to the existence of a functioning operating system as the kernel, but pieces like init and X11 are not.
Re: Speaking of tools... (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it... When the 1% deletes anything written by anyone else, then everything will be written by the 1%.
Yep. That's the problem. There are a small number of editors who believe that they personally own the articles they wrote, and will revert any changes made by anybody else. And, since they do this deletion a lot, they are very good with the Wikipedia bureaucracy and know exactly how far they can go without getting counted as "edit warring"-- and how to entice novice editors into breaking one of Wikipedia's invisible rules and getting banned.
The article says : "As detailed in a 2013 feature in the MIT Technology Review [technologyreview.com], the decline of active editors with more than 10 edits under their belt has been attributed to the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the editing process. The semi-automation and stricter editing process was initially launched as a way to combat vandalism on Wikipedia pages. Although the new protocols did result in a decrease in vandalism, it also resulted in a steep drop off of new editors that stayed 2 months after their first edit."
No. It's not the semi-automation, it's the bureaucracy being used by the "deletionists" who don't want you-- if you fail to follow obscure rules when responding to the asshole who deletes the stuff you just wrote, you will be banned.
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I think one possible solution is for Wikipedia to introduce a randomized element that allows for unbiased ratings of users. As in, a kind of meta-review, that allows a disinterested party to say, "OK, this kid obviously understands the review system, but he's a dick and he doesn't seem to understand what he's writing about", or "This drive-by editor actually seems to have a valid point".
I.e. there needs to be a system tha
Re: Speaking of tools... (Score:5, Informative)
Ditto.
I with a few others were contributing to an article when suddenly some undergraduate deleted all of the content and replaced it with his crappy, meandering school essay. We got into an edit war with him and his friends who now suddenly appeared from no-where to side with him and support this editorial lunacy.
Because the adults had jobs and he and his buddies had all day to dick around on Wikipedia, guess who won?
After that I gave up on Wiki.
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Re:132,000 suckers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:132,000 suckers (Score:4, Informative)
They actually don't, which is why you find extensive articles on geography, cities and stars, movies and a hundred other topics that are easy to understand and easily found in a Google search. But when you get into difficult subjects, a large number of articles are basically extended stubs that look like someone edited together a summary of the first 10 hits of a Google search. No in-depth information, less than five links to other sources, half of which are newspapers or magazines who published one article about this subject ten years ago.
Whenever I am researching something that's tricky or technical, I don't even bother with the WP article. The exception is if I need to write a very simple high-level summary for lay people (executives and managers). In that area there's a 50% chance that the WP article will be useful.
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What more amazing about that is that these 1% people do have a broad range of knowledge!
More importantly, all 26,000 forms of news; newspapers, magazines, radio, television, etc, are run by 6 corporations.
Are any of them biased? nah.
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