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Comment by lawpoop | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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