The rise and decline of Wikipedia [pdf]
www-users.cs.umn.edu
www-users.cs.umn.edu
I don't think it's necessarily an existential problem that the public image of Wikipedia's relevance is reaching a sort of "trough of disillusionment" due to some of its governance issues. It has simply reached a scale where it faces a new set or hurdles to overcome.
Personally, I've learned more from Wikipedia than I did in high school and college combined, and considering that, despite all of Wikipedia's problems, the content therein is more accurate and verifiable than the corrupted corpus whence our primary and secondary educations are derived, I really appreciate its existence.
Also, the public perception is related to the drop of users and vice versa. There has been a lot of negative press lately, specifically related to problems in the community.
The point about there being less new stuff to write about seems apt, what do you think about the counter points that the article had?
"First, as noted above, the vast majority of articles in Wikipedia are still below community standards for “good” articles. Second, underrepresented groups still find it challenging to join. For instance, one study found that only 9% of edits are made by female editors, and that articles of particular interest to women are shorter than articles of interest to men (Lam, 2011). Until editors are representative of the population of potential contributors, it is difficult to argue that the socialization practices are sufficiently effective."
1. Isn't this a moving target? In the beginning, all you had to do was throw up text; standards evolved (and probably continue to, I don't follow it), and now you have to cite references, adhere to standards, etc. As more articles are reviewed, more probably "become" substandard.
2. Is this really a decline issue? I guess it is if you are considering decline not as failure to maintain but failure to grow.
Which is fine, IMO they should just change the name to Webpedia or something if they don't want new edits.
PS: As to being 'full' they have 2.7 million stubs, that's a lot of missing content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
Those problems were recognised and so things are a bit better now, but still.
Yet I cannot remember one technical forum that was as unhelpful as stack-sites sometimes turns into.
Was onerous enough that I quickly found other things to do with my time.
In am extremely small geek bubble. Your non-HN/Reddit neighbors aren't aware of such press.
I'd imagine an S-curve for editors. A few, early adopters in the beginning, then a surge of editors filling in the bulk of articles, then after the majority of articles have been written, a slow decline of need for editors.
I'd imagine the remaining work to be completed would be editorial defense of existing articles and the new amount of articles generated by current events/technology/politics.
Well, in fairness, the declining number of active editors is likely linked to the public perception of Wikipedia.
Teachers and professors hound into students Wikipedia is not for academic use and is full of nonsense and other wrong information.
Most of the time, this is not true.
We would be better off teaching students Wikipedia isn't an appropriate source to cite, but rather a great research tool which links to it's proper sources, which you may cite.
The stigma the education system has built up around Wikipedia is surely effecting the number of people contributing to it.
I do not have time to write a well written concise article, so I have just copypastaed some stuff I don't understand.
This is emphatically not the case in my experience. I believe I wrote a runge-kutta numeric solver using the wikipedia articles as the source. It was sufficient for my purposes. And yes, Wikipedia is not a textbook. You might want to be more specific what "improvements" were attempted. If you mean something like exercises and lengthy, worked out examples, then that's right, I'm not sure that fits in wikipedia more than it fits in a book.
You know what grinds my gears? Pages upon pages of 'useless'[1] anime guest-characters, and yet when I tried to add pages for real-life artistes from my (3rd world) country, I had the pages deleted for "lack of notability". This must have happened a decade ago, but I told myself "never again". Now I ignore Wikipedia's pleas for content under their "Wikipedia loves X" campaigns because I know they don't mean it. I doubt Wikipedia's cultural bias can ever be cured with the current editorial structures.
1. Useless to me! This is very much tongue-in-cheek
Sadly, wikipedia doesn't support the notion of citing "art installed at so and so location, viewed by so and so people" unless someone wrote it down in a western publication.
In a real sense, an encyclopedia is a history of books, not a history of the world. This is an unfortunate consequence of writing's special "viral" place among forms of communication, and the medium is the message etc
I've seen this with charities, open source projects, and it was a constant problem when I worked in film/tv (interns). Things always go south when you have volunteers bossing around other volunteers. Newcomers show up eager but depart quickly, normally after some dressing down by a more senior volunteer. Without pay in dispute, they rarely make complaint. They just stop showing up. And who can blame them?
The answer is to keep all volunteers equal. That's probably impossible for a project like wikipedia, but they could certainly do more to ensure new volunteers are not so bullied by the old guard.
It would be really nice to have more extensive work on how to mitigate these kinds of dynamics as I'm certain we will see more and more of these projects and I'd like them to be healthy for a change.
Humanity: Evolve! ;-)
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor
VestedContributors think the rules can be bent for them because they've been around so long and done so much good work.
As for keeping volunteers equal to avoid the problem, that need not mean keeping everyone identical. Leadership roles can rotate, with finite term limits. That way every leader today knows they will be the underling tomorrow. (This also keeps everyone interested and motivated as nobody is every stuck on one task/job).
But is that inherently a bad thing? The way you state it, I'm getting that you're implying that it's bad 100% of the time. If you're looking at it in terms of black and white, I guess just hearing "rules can be bent" is bad, but I don't think it's that simple.
I think there are times where the rules can be bent which creates an outcome that is beneficial to all. Times where the rules don't account for certain variables/situations and those incidents need to be handled differently (or with care). I think it's a complex problem and it may need a complex solution.
The best, and I mean absolute best volunteer teams I've been a part of have always had a leader at the top with absolute authority. However, he or she never abused their power, and rarely flexed their absolute authority, preferring to take up the mantle of "benevolent dictator". In those cases, some amazing things happened. We got our work done ahead of time, group moral was sky-high, and the projects were a massive success. Things "just worked".
Point being that it's much easier for them to maintain high quality with low effort.
You showed this well. Thank you for finding this pattern and telling about it clearly.
> The answer is to keep all volunteers equal.
(Un)Fortunately this would break. Logically, how can you have one group of equals enforce their rules with unequal power? Naturally, influence (roles(?)) emerge(s). For social animals to want to stick together over the long haul, (1) an elder's view needs to carry a good bit of weight. This makes it possible to retain experience and membership, because these elders are our gateway to the past and they get tired and battle worn. The young learn from those with the experience and use it to build their future. (2) Members need to both use influence and limit it. Mocking leaders and their work, behind their backs and in-front of them, joking with them over the flaws in their work help them to keep their heads from filling with hot air. When someone takes on more responsibility, people will naturally and comfortably give them uneven support if they mutually respect and believe in eachother. This means some have more influence than others. When this flowing power gets a kink in it and builds up in any one place, then it will flood the basin. As long as work gets done and individuals cultivate good relationships, then a community will stick together and most everyone will feel like the community has good balance.
My experience with this: studied this a bit within anthropology and sociology, lived with these dynamics in and among Drupal (a self-described do-ocracy, perhaps a holocracy) community members for over ~10 years, and have a deep interest in natural processes that contribute to social order.
A related snippet from you guessed it with several links to springboard into related research:
Anthropologists maintain that hunter/gatherers don't have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.[13][14][15] In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies, there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well.[13] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.[16] Postmarital residence among hunter-gatherers tends to be matrilocal, at least initially.[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_eco...
If you are walking in the woods, everyone has down/slow days. Hiking/climbing groups know this and so rarely have dedicated leaders. Look at the military groups that occasionally climb mountains (ie wounded warriors on everest). On day one they throw the entire "rank" thing out the window. They know it doesn't work for mountaineering. Instead decisions are generally made by the person least tired/hungry/dehydrated at the time. That's how a hunting party would work: If Bob's got a sore foot today, he isn't going to be the one flushing the deer and instead might be today's planner/leader.
Some are spending a very big chunk of their time to make sure articles stay as they wish to. Being a former or an active editor on an article is not always related to how much you know about the topic but Wikipedia favorites the biggest editors. There is very little chance to convince if you're new unless you commit to spend a lot of your valuable time contributing which is not possible for everyone and not a good idea for most.
A very hard problem to solve.
Wikipedia is still great though with no real better alternative.
You can't just contribute and consider it done. You have to be prepare to fight your way through, engage in edit wars, learn about the battlefield (the bureaucracy, the article sourcing) and in the end, if you fight long enough, you usually win.
You have to repeatedly, over and over, show that the other person (who 'owns' the article) is wrong, he will revert it, so you do a little dance of reverting and back, then you have to try to dig up some rule from the ruleset, and as I said, you will usually win because the other person gives up. Or he doesn't, but then some higher editor stumps him.
People with real knowledge usually have better things to do.
I haven't followed Wikipedia for a while but I assume that some rejected changes are due to that people throw in some changes that might be correct but are not worked on enough to fit in with the rest of the article. And one can't in general assume that someone else will do that work for you. Than the easy way out is often a revert instead of leaving a more unfinished article live.
I did most of my contributions to Wikipedia when I had that extra time.
Why do you do this?!
But it isn't for someone who just wants to write a bit of his knowledge and let it go.
It is a great site for facts or information where there is no ability to debate or need too, like top 40 songs, videos, and anime.
Also I don't really want to do that. It's just a necessity, otherwise your text gets immediately reverted. While when you stick with it and revert it back, you actually have a chance
And this is why only fundamentalists and paid editors edit Wikipedia. I spent days with such battles on a certain Wikipedia page only to have one "senior" editor come around and essentially say that I was wrong (no explanation given) and revert the changes. It's a completely useless waste of time. :)
I suppose the problem with that is ensuring that the system 'promotes' enough normal users to fill the gap; again, random assignment might work. Sort of like an online equivalent of Athenian democracy.
People might be keener to be active editors if they receive an unexpected invitation to participate, but with the understanding that it might only last a week.
And then there are political problems. The Tyson affair is a good example - Neil deGrasse Tyson spent many years spouting made-up quotes supposedly uttered by political opponents (Like this one, for instance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jG5kKfacY). Eventually someone compiled all the nonsense and it was something of a mini-scandal. The wiki editors refused to allow any mention of it on his page, so the whole affair is mostly down the memory hole now, just like they intended.
Wikipedia is good for historical references (pre 1900 or so), and a good place to start if you just don't know anything about the thing you're looking up. But to rely on it for anything that's the slightest bit controversial is daft.
Whenever I see people say stuff like this I mentally replace what they said with "Wikipedia is a general-knowledge encyclopedia." Not a dig at you, but this should have always gone without saying.
The wikipedia answer is that they want published sources that people can cite and review.
This seems a bit crazy when the famous person is someone you respect and trust, but as soon as self-publicists, frauds and quacks get involved, this becomes a useful guideline. And of course you can't have one rule for some and another rule for the rest.
Bingo. Just because the person in question may even be the topic of the article, it doesn't mean that person can't be biased or want to spin things a certain way. By requiring citations and sources, you're providing some validity and "proof". Granted, sources can be faked too, but the level of separation works to minimize much of that. The faking of sources isn't something that would be very common anyways.
It sort of falls back on the Perfect Solution fallacy. You can never have a perfect solution so you have to choose the "least bad" option. The option with the least drawbacks or negatives.
We can (and do) have recognition only for some (and not just for everybody, i.e. "the rest"). It may be a flawed solution, but that is how things work in the real life.
I have experienced this as well. It is difficult to believe and truly inexplicable, but there is some perceived status related to editing articles and making contributions to wikipedia.
It is very safe to generalize the young, white, male keyboard commandos who are staking out their turf in this way.
In the meantime, actual adults with real contributions to make (and normal, grown-up lives to lead elsewhere) cannot do so. In response to a child comment, below, No, no I will not learn to play the game and learn the tactics needed to bully my edits through.
I've contributed edits to maybe a dozen or so different Wikipedia articles, and would like to contribute more, but it's hard to get past a couple of hurdles.
The main one is the byzantine and archaic editing tools. The markdown language that Wikipedia uses is a PITA to learn, and following a discussion on the talk page is almost impossible. Wikipedia presents a wonderful UX for browsing and reading. It has perhaps the worst UX I've ever seen for a beginner who wants to make a contribution.
Beyond that, I spent a significant amount of time editing some articles on a fringe religious group that I had studied extensively. (Apart from the group's own leaders, I arguably knew more about the group than anyone else in the world.) But the group that was the focus of the article kept backing out my edits and replacing them with propaganda. It was simply too much work to fight them (especially with the horrible edit/discussion tools), they were a lot more motivated than I was, and I eventually gave up.
Talk and discussion are completely different process than collaborative editing, and they demand different tools.
I also agree about the markup (it's markUP. "Markdown" is a specific type of markup language which, despite its flaws, probably is the easiest and now most common one)
Lean startup methodology was an inheritor of common wisdom such as "worse is better" and "best is the enemy of the good" but they're all in the same family tree.
In this case, "hey we need a way for people to talk to each other", "sure, we should make a discussion tool, but to get it right now we could use a wiki page that users edit one after another to add their answers".
The fact that it started as such is not an issue per se, but after so many years wikipedia should have replaced it with something better and easier.
I don't see MediaWiki markup as byzantine or archaic, except for whatever half-assed LaTeX processor they use. It seems to only recognize some random subset of features from various ams packages. Why they don't just use a fully-featured TeX distro is beyond me.
Wikipedia's talk page workflow (indenting to start a new comment, then inserting a special image to wrap around to the margin once too many indents have accumulated) is moronic.
While I admit that these processes work for consistency of content, I cannot in the least observe any noticeable quality improvements, and the reason is that valuable contributors with deep domain knowledge will not invest the time to satisfy the OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.
Is it really necessary to use mental illnesses in a pejorative way to make your point ? How do you think it makes people feel who legitimately suffer from those illnesses ?
I know these words are "ugly" or "not politically correct" but I think just looking the other way is not helping anybody.
That's not even a disorder, it's just plain stupid.
It's not about PC. It's about violating their rights. Please, post your full medical charts, prescription lists, and any mental health counseling notes or treatments for addiction you've ever undertaken, so I can use them to mock you.
And I'm not violating the rights of somebody by pointing out they have an illness, sorry.
He's not. That is, actually, the real problem. He's not just using it as some sort of insult but explaining the specific problem.
I've run into editors like that (they even proudly boast about it on their user page, so I'm not just projecting). I've had enough run-ins with them, and people like them, that I gave up on editing.
So all wikipedia editors have Asperger's and OCD ? That seems astronomically unlikely, don't you ?
It's enough that it's some, to make it impossible to edit anything. In fact it can even be a small minority, but given that they spend (as far as I can tell) almost their entire day on it, a small number can have a huge influence.
> I used deal with a self declared Asperger who was top class in his field. The thing is whenever I asked him do you know how to fix this problem. The answer was invariably, 'sorry I don't know how to do that'.
From your comment above:
> The worst [group of people] who shall remain nameless, were either augmentative dishonest or lazy and some were as thick as two very thick planks glued together. You had to speak to them in very short sentences and not use big words and still they didn't get it.
So...how do you know that either:
A. The "self-declared Asperger" is actually quite reasonable and you just happen to be in his "worst" group of people...I don't mean that you necessarily have those qualities, just that he's chosen to treat you as if you did, based on his past experiences with people of your kind?
B. That you yourself don't have the stereotypical behavioral symptoms Aspergers and that this "worst" group of people may not really deserve your harsh judgment?
"PC hypersensitive" coward
If you care about how you come across: You sound as ignorant as someone saying "I want my accountants to be Jews. They're good with money". (Although I accept that this level of ignorance about OCD is very common.)
http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-h...
>> Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is described as an anxiety disorder. The condition has two main parts: obsessions and compulsions.
>> Obsessions are unwelcome thoughts, images, urges or doubts that repeatedly appear in your mind; for example, thinking that you have been contaminated by dirt and germs, or experiencing a sudden urge to hurt someone.
>> These obsessions are often frightening or seem so horrible that you can’t share them with others. The obsession interrupts your other thoughts and makes you feel very anxious.
[...]
>> Compulsions are repetitive activities that you feel you have to do. This could be something like repeatedly checking a door to make sure it is locked or repeating a specific phrase in your head to prevent harm coming to a loved one.
>> The aim of a compulsion is to try and deal with the distress caused by the obsessive thoughts and relieve the anxiety you are feeling. However, the process of repeating these compulsions is often distressing and any relief you feel is often short-lived.
You literally just press edit, make your changes, and then press save. There is zero bureaucracy in adding content. The bureaucracy comes into play with there is unresolved conflict and disagreement, when there is a controversy over how an article is written. In that case, there are definite, objective(ish) standards and rules by which those arguments can come to a resolution of some kind. I suppose in a more hierarchical structure there would be less bureaucracy when there are disagreements and the next person in charge would simply decide which view he thought was more correct. But the traditional structure of writing an encyclopedia is filled with gatekeepers who have the final, single decision without much of a need to reach consensus. Depending on your view this could be good or it could be bad.
You literally just press edit, make your changes, and then press save.
Seriously, though, it's disingenuous to suggest that editing is so simple - to be pedantic, yes, the edit itself is free of bureaucracy, but in the majority of cases I've observed, the real effort is in making an edit (not even a controversial one) stick.
Generally I'm either making minor fixes (basically nothing you would dispute), or when I add something, it's cited.
When there is a conflict, it's probably beyond most people to figure out how to handle the conflict resolution process (which generally, in my experience, is fruitful), but if you're adding high quality content, that rarely comes up - it's just that when it does it takes up a disproportionate amount of your time.
Why contribute when the idea of others actually seeing the benefit of doing it is so painful?
My personal experience is that under the crowdsourcing model the well meaning non experts outnumber the real experts and it's hard to police them while treating all as equals. In short, democracy brought content toward mediocrity.
Now it's dangerous to use it but for a cursory introduction to any in depth content, while non factual content is polarised toward whatever the bureaucrats decide it's a neutral tone, which may or may not work.
One line summary of the history of the United States ?
High quality, large system, lightweight dev process: choose at most two.
But now, thousands of wikis exist, about every subject under the sun. Many of those are very popular, have more welcoming communities, etc. So people don't join the general site any more. If they care for say, Star Wars, they join Wookiepedia. If they care for Pokemon, it'd be Bulbapedia. Or one of the many others listed here:
The fanatical fans now go to to Wikia or TVTropes, where they can write endlessly on their pet subjects without having to cite reliable third party sources. That's a good thing. You don't need the heavy scrutiny of Wikipedia on those subject.
In 2006-2007, there was an organized push on Wikipedia by pro-Israel editors to make Israel-related articles favorable to Israel. This provoked some major controversies, especially because at least one of the pro-Israel editors was a Wikipedia admin and abused their authority. (Eventually, they were "desysopped" for that, but it took years.) For a sense of this, see [1], including all the archived talk pages.
Wikipedia dealt with the problem by strictly applying the "reliable sources" rule. It became the practice that every single fact in Israel-related articles must be cited to a reliable source and properly footnoted. Anything that wasn't was deleted as "uncited" or "synthesis" by one side or the other. Until that time, articles often had text which wasn't cited to a specific source. The tough citation requirements anchored the dispute to factual information, and, though the process was painful, worked. The controversies settled down and the edit warring slowed to a crawl.
Those strict standards gradually spread to the rest of Wikipedia. Now, everything had to be footnoted like a doctoral thesis. Few people outside of academia write that way. This results in a big hammer coming down on someone new wanting to write an article about their new favorite DJ. Does he have mainstream press coverage that isn't from a press release, and did you cite it? If not, he's out of here.
Until you learn to write in that strict style, you can't contribute much to Wikipedia. For people used to blithering on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, this is hard. That's what's discouraging new editors.
Writing for Wikipedia is now like contributing to a major open source project like the Linux kernel. There's a big body of code, and your changes have to fit in well and be justified. That's necessary. Wikipedia faces a constant incoming stream of PR, vandalism, and general crap. (Check out the ever-changing list of recent changes.[2]) The petty vandalism is mostly reverted by AIs now; ClueBot, driven by an ANN and trained on known vandalism, is quite good. The other problems take human attention, by volunteers tired of seeing similar annoyances over and over.
For the other extreme, of writing about anything with no quality control, see 4chan.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Israeli_West_Bank_barrier [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Midd...
The default is, "go away, we have better things to do mere mortal" and while that may not be the intent, that is the impression a new contributor is often left with.
Then comes the funding page... really? Now, maintaining what is there is worth finding, but the negatives do impact the perception of this.
For example, I was once reading about a song, and at the bottom there was a link to a youtube video. The link was broken, so I replaced it with a working youtube link.
The edit was immediately reverted by a bot that was anti-all-links-to-youtube. Fine, maybe that is a problem. But it's also a problem that the anti-youtube bot replaced my youtube link with a youtube link.
When I went to the bot's page, it was filled with comments from dozens of others who had made similar edits that were blindly reverted. The bot author, who took a "it's me against the world" stance, proclaiming that his bot was doing the only sensible thing, and that he was "sick of arguing". As the paper proclaims, this immediate negative reinforcement had long term consequences of turning away many good faith editors.
I've stopped editing because it just feels like a drop in the pond every time I do. When I fix obvious bias it just reappears by the editors with ulterior motives. And I just don't have the energy to fight them on it. I've stopped reading as much because I've learned that for any topic there are much better and more thorough sources. Economics and medicine in particular have very little... quality control on Wikipedia.
With that said it's still a fantastic source for an overview of a topic that I know nothing about, especially for non-controversial topics.
Wikipedia will live on as a good starting place for deep research and a quick explanation for quick questions. There just aren't enough editors to make it into the "sum of human knowledge" some people want it to be.
Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.
Secondary problem is IMHO the caste nature of administrator privileges. I think if the privileges were more separated and it would be possible to recall them, this would reduce the ossification of the hierarchy.
I also think Wikipedia could benefit from having a stable branch into which the changes from unstable branch could be regularly reviewed for addition. It would be nice if unstable branch could return to the idea that someone can add things even if they are not perfect or immediately sourced; IMHO experts can always add sources later for content that is already present, and it would give them some incentive to contribute.
That being said, Wikipedia is amazing! I would really like to thank to people who put some work into it.
What I'm concerned about is that there's no way to get new administrators, which is what it would take to bring in new ideas that break up the unnecessary bureaucracy.
The process that used to create them got entirely paralyzed, both by ridiculous inflation of metrics (I saw the edit count requirements -- they call them suggestions but they're requirements -- increase by a factor of 20 while I participated), and by the requirement to convince a supermajority of long-standing editors to vote for you.
I became an administrator in '06, and by '08 I would never have been considered. Basically, you have to edit every part of the encyclopedia while upsetting nobody, then inflate your already prolific accomplishments to get your foot in the door, without looking like a liar. This is impossible.
Old administrators (like me) lose interest. New ones don't take their place. The work is being increasingly done by the most obsessive people, and by faceless bots.
Wikipedia may have its political issues, but to say it is "in decline" seems off. There is only so much that can be written and only so many new things can happen to document. Obviously no hard limit exists, but still.
If it was to be in general decline as the title conotates, I'd expect to see overall traffic lower over time and while I searched in earnest for 10 minutes, I couldn't find that data (alexa is pay service now, wtf?). But have a hard time seeing actual traffic declining.
Many people say that the toxic community is the problem, but the community issues IMHO are actually a symptom of poor software design. The wiki's open structure and article-based format, which allows the most powerful groups of editors to "own" pages, gives power to people who are interested in keeping and retaining control, rather than those who are interested in sharing knowledge. The power is centralized in these gatekeepers, leading to all the problems we see on the site.[1] This is also the reason the Gender Gap exists.[2]
The solution is to redesign the software to devolve power from entrenched groups, but this will never happen because there is no leadership, and the people who have the power are the survivors/fanatics that actually like the current system. Because they write the rules they will not give their power up easily.
As for the quality arguments below: without new users and continuous evolution in software development, content presentation, and editorial review processes, the site cannot maintain quality. I believe that it is impossible for any wiki system to maintain a high quality anyway: the amount of time to improve articles to high quality is exponential, while the number of editors and work available is linear. Even in the best circumstances, something has to give. If the number of editors is actually declining then quality problems may also increase exponentially.
[1]http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
[2]http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedi...
An open structure means that you have to watch what others are doing constantly. But that doesn't explain the huge number of stories where reasonable edits are reverted. That can only happen because the wikipedia (editor) community is ok with that.
My conclusion is that wikipedia forgot to redefine itself. Originally, wikipedia was a summary based on existing literature. But pretty soon users took wikipedia way beyond that. Using it to document stuff, instead of summarising stuff documented else where.
Most wikis are a tool to collectively create documentation. And somehow wikipedia is stuck in older world, and not what most wikipedia users expect it to be.
My conclusion, until the project reforms and allows original content, I won't contribute.
I've never used it all that much, to be honest, but the information hiding aspect is what makes it so dangerous. Allow incorrect information to appear on the site and then explain why it's incorrect. Allow information on the site that might be incorrect, so that others can investigate further. But presenting the material as if it is correct, because there is a quality control mechanism in place, is simply dishonest.
If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, it would not bother me at all. No information would be lost. It would reappear elsewhere on the internet.
Is the political entity on Formosa "Taiwan", "Taiwan Province, Republic of China", "Taiwan Province, People's Republic of China", or "Taiwan, Province of China"?
At some point, I think, things will inevitably change. But for the moment, there's so many obvious things to work on that the confusing/subjective things don't really pop up too much.
Discussions about shop= vs amenity= are sometimes frustrating, but I bet they don't come anywhere near the discussions over using –,—, or - in page titles.
Here's 15,000 words. At the end of that? No consensus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...
The type of dash to use in "Mexican-American War" got over 20,000 words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...
Dash wars even got to Arbcom: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...
But how I got the awards basically illustrates the problem. One article I fixed I wrote entirely off-line in a text editor file, while commenting on the talk page of the previous lousy version of the article, and then I dropped in the new article text all at once. Every previous time when I tried piecemeal editing of that article, my best edits would be reverted, while other stuff that was entirely made up and without reliable sources would be inserted into the article. The second article I worked on fixing up was a collaborative effort. Again, I started with discussion on the article talk page. My first few edits were reverted, contrary to reliable sources, by editors who exerted "ownership" on the article but who refused to look up sources. Later I was joined by two other editors, and one of the other two made it his project to rewrite the article from top to bottom for one of the Wikipedia editing contests. He liberally threw out old unsourced crap and then layered in new, well sourced text. I mentioned on the article talk page I'd like to fix a few sections of the article, and proofread all of it, and after he deleted the old crap, I put in new good content in the sections I worked on and checked all of his references throughout the article. The former editors who let the article be bad for years slithered away. It's a slog and a struggle like this every time someone tries to improve Wikipedia--the established editing culture includes snap judgments without looking up reliable sources.
AFTER EDIT: I also mentioned in the previous thread about Wikipedia that I hope sometime soon a philanthropist funds a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize to put to the test what could be possible in building an accurate, well edited free, online encyclopedia if some new projects began and tried out some new models of project management and perhaps some new software. (I personally don't have any trouble dealing with Wikipedia's software, but I have been using various kinds of markup languages since the 1980s in earlier editing work.) The only way to know what's possible is to try to challenge the incumbent project with some competition, I think. Even if Wikipedia then just ended up winning a prize with reasonable criteria, it would still become better, and we would all have a better idea about what works and what doesn't.
Kind of like Urban Dictionary, except serious.