Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewjho | Hacker News Reader

I'll charitably assume that you're arguing from a position of ignorance, not malice. Read before writing: https://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

(1) The metric that matters, active user growth, has been declining since 2007.

(2) Right, the 1 MB of bandwidth I took up and 5 KB of storage space I consumed with userspace pages outweighs the hundreds of minor corrections I've submitted over the course of a decade. By the way, Wikipedia does have a shortage of editors relative to its popularity and potential.

(3) Deletionism destroys more information than it protects. This is easy to establish. Educate yourself.

(4) You are circularly using the status quo to justify itself without having explored alternatives and without having performed any research into the historical evolution of Wikipedia and Wikipedian culture. Again, educate yourself before posting.

View on HN

Active user growth is categorically not a relevant metric. Spammers and trolls count as active users. A superb editor who spends 30 hours a week on Wikipedia counts the same as someone who makes two bad edits a month. There is no clear evidence that the overall quality and quantity of editing is in decline.

There are many legitimate concerns about deletionism. There is a legitimate debate about what the word "encyclopaedia" means and should mean. There are legitimate concerns about how Wikipedia manages human resources. Your complaints vis-a-vis your personal recipes are emblematic of nothing other than your sense of entitlement to use someone else's server space.

You can choose to present yourself as an innocent newbie who was ambushed by a nasty editor. You can choose to present yourself as a time-served Wikipedian with deep insights into their editorial process. You can't choose both.

> The metric that matters, active user growth, has been declining since 2007.

How do you expect it to continue growing? There aren't enough people to continue active user growth. It's like your expecting it to be a pyramid scheme that makes money as long as you sign up more people than exist on the planet.

You're strawmanning my argument. I did not say, as you imply, that active user growth should continue indefinitely.

Take a look at this graph: https://www.gwern.net/images/2012-henkvd-activewikipedians.p...

First, one would typically expect the number of active users to keep increasing but for the rate of increase to gradually decline, not for the number of active users to actually start decreasing gradually after multiple years of very rapid increase.

Second, if you don't see something wrong with that graph, get your eyes checked out.

There comes a point where everything that should be in wikipedia is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com