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Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia has problems, but I think it's worth noting that Wikipedia has enough content to fill 2,200x volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica[1], or, a small library.

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes

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How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.

I'm suggesting that there hasn't been as much of a decline in community as there has been a decline in the available encyclopedia-relevant information left in the world that isn't already published on Wikipedia.

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 decline in number of editors seems to have started at 2007 given figure 1. I wouldn't tie the amount of negative press to the decline in editors.

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."

Not OP, but

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.

I contributed to several Wikipedia articles over the years (~50-100). It's gotten to the point where it's pointless to improve even terrible articles like stubs as basically everything is automatically reversed. At best a mod may decide to add your content back, which means at this point it's basically stopped being a public wiki.

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

Just curious, why are your edits auto-reversed? That's very discouraging to hear.

Just to say that this is not my experience. Have made highly contentious edits and created entirely new articles on topics from Hoplomachus through Corpse Paint to planning law in the UK. None of my good edits have been reverted, but some of my poor edits have been manually reverted after review by a human editor.

For a whie there were some wikiprojects (Vandal Patrol; Rollback; twinkle) and some of the people involved were very aggressive in making reverts.

Those problems were recognised and so things are a bit better now, but still.

It's a shame, but any public forum seems to degenerate to this point. Stack exchange is another great example... The bureaucracy that emerges distracts from the original mission.

Interestingly lots of people seem to have a negative view of forums and fear that stack-sites will go the way of the forums if they don't continue their bureaucracy.

Yet I cannot remember one technical forum that was as unhelpful as stack-sites sometimes turns into.

Do you suppose one day, dang will be replaced by a RNN that auto rejects all possible dupes?

My experience too

I feel the same asking questions on Stackoverflow. Its purely read only for me now, since asking questions takes on the sense of masochism.

I wanted to join and contribute to some niches I have considerable value to add.

Was onerous enough that I quickly found other things to do with my time.

But the article addresses precisely that. In fact, only less than 10% of the core 1000 articles are deemed good quality. So that point is moot.

> There has been a lot of negative press lately,

In am extremely small geek bubble. Your non-HN/Reddit neighbors aren't aware of such press.

I read it as a criticism of the title - Wikipedia facing governance issues doesn't amount to a "fall".

What sort of shape would you expect from the number of active editors?

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.

> How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.

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.

educators have always hated everything new, and encyclopedia had never been a valid source for a research paper. That has nothing to do with wikipedia

This is a bug, not a feature. A huge proportion of that content is crap (eg it's perfectly reasonable to have entries for popular anime shows, but we don't need hundreds of stub pages for every character in the show), and even a lot of the good content is poorly curated. A lot of the math articles articles are very poorly written, for example, but attempts to improve them are often reverted on the grounds that 'Wikipedia is not a textbook,'

Is that really true? I'd rather Wikipedia contain all the character pages than have to go to a wikia that is even more poorly maintained, ad-written, and destined for death at an unknown point in time. The reason these articles exist are because there are more people available to provide feedback and write them. It is much harder to contribute to the Yoneda Lemma article than the Spike Spiegel article.

With apologies to Mark Twain:

I do not have time to write a well written concise article, so I have just copypastaed some stuff I don't understand.

>A lot of the math articles articles are very poorly written

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.

> it's perfectly reasonable to have entries for popular anime shows, but we don't need hundreds of stub pages for every character in the show

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

Did you have citations for those artists? We're you hindered by the lack of citations possible for artists who weren't written about?

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

99% of Wklikipedia's millions of satisfied users have no awareness or interest in its governance issues.

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