Craiglist presentation hasn't changed either.
I don't think this point is relevant if the UI is good enough or have been this way for so long that people are used to it. Changing it would be weird.
> No innovation.
You want to innovate an online encyclopedia? How exactly do you do that? And without sacrificing integrity?
> It's just a matter of time.
What is this time to event thing that you speak of?
There are many problems with Wikipedia's presentation of information [1], but the point is that, even if Wikipedia's UI was the best there was, new media inevitably come along that change the way customers want to access their information. For example, you may think it's 'weird' to change Wikipedia's text-heavy UI, but kids brought up on Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram might want a more visual interface for their encyclopedia.
>You want to innovate an online encyclopedia? How exactly do you do that? And without sacrificing integrity?
Beyond UI, Wikipedia has many problems in its data structure, policies, and integrity, by which I mean the veracity of its information, and its endemic bias. Rather than discuss them here, please read my blog post: Wikipedia's 13 deadly Sins. [1]
>What is this time to event thing that you speak of?
The rapid collapse of an incumbent site due to its monopoly position and consequent lack of innovation i.e. the point of the original post.
Your response appears to confirm that the lack of imagination that goes hand-in-hand with monopoly products is not just confined to their creators. Their customers want the monopoly, until they don't. Wikipedia, Craigslist, Google and Facebook are not unassailable. Everything dies.
The true competitor to Wikipedia will probably look nothing like Wikipedia. It will likely appear "suddenly" to those not in the know. And Wikipedia probably won't die die... After all, Myspace still exists. It will just be a place no one goes to anymore, or maybe as a last resort when other options are fruitless.
I think you mean 7. They changed their default theme to Vector in 2010, replacing Monobook, which had itself replaced Standard/Classic in 2004.
Moreover, Wikipedia has also acquired a mobile theme, which is very “modern”.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Dantman-Skin-monobook.pn...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin... and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin...
The encyclopedia itself is the largest and most comprehensive ever created. Its accuracy rivals or exceeds any general-interest encyclopedia, and most special-purpose ones.
Wikipedia has gotten tremendous mileage out of ordinary contributions, but I suspect is starting to test the limits of what a crowdsourced project can accomplish.
Moreover, it's specifically the question of who finds it appealing to volunteer, or in cases, "volunteer", their efforts to the project, which is becoming a problem. It's been a problem for some time, but it's becoming more of one.
Several major areas are already political minefields, not only among actual and qualified experts within the fields, but of those who seek to control models and understanding for other reasons. Climate change is certainly one of these.
There are more mundane issues as well. Wikipedia is quite good on any events or facts based after roughly 2004, but coverage can become quite thin for earlier periods, particularly those which aren't popular.
There's the problem of sourcing material, especially as Wikipedia itself is online, but many of its primary sources aren't, at least not cheaply and legally.
The upshot: the problems Wikipedia faces today are not those that it faced starting out, at least not for the most part. Much of the real work and innovation is going behind the scenes. Part of that is technical, part is managing the emergent social dynamics of the project and its contributors.
It would be trivial for any other competing project to match Wikipedia -- it simply has to copy the content. For it to actually exceed Wikipedia, in accuracy, as an epistemic system, it would have to improve on the process overall.
That's a harder problem.
The problems wikipedia faced at the start was the dubious source of funding by a shady founder, the problems wikipedia faces today is the colossal amount of money they don't actually need but ask for and receive anyways and drop conspicuously in private pockets.
So not much has changed basically except maybe the core of people in control behind the scenes managed to drive away newcomers and contributors to keep the control and power they have.
The good thing is that the licensing issue is mostly fixed and we should be able to fork wikipedia and salvage the data (if they ever fix their data structures and resume offerings usable dumps).