Who Writes Wikipedia?
aaronsw.com
aaronsw.com
This is four years ago, anyone knows if that happened?
Edited to add: One thing that has been annoying me a little, is when articles, regardless of their quality, are deleted because they lack notoriety. If these deletes adhere to the conclusions in this article (written by an outsider, then deleted by an insider, rather than both written and deleted by insiders), this strikes me as an example of a policy that should be changed in face of this evidence, since capturing the knowledge of these drive-by contributors seems more important than "saving space".
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http://marc.info/?l=wikipedia-l&m=111502457428025
There are a ton of interesting posts from Jimbo, SJ, et al. Here are a couple of key comments by Jimbo about where his beliefs came from:
Do you remember when anonymous page creation was disabled after Seigenthaler? The Foundation promised us a study of the effects.
Years later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...
They never bothered.
For most topics it is possible to do so without expert knowledge. Of course; some areas have always needed experts to write. I'd never touch a medical article, or macro-biology, for example as it is all double dutch to me :) But, say, history is often easy to write if you have the source material.
It's a basic psychology 101 concept, but one thats easily missed: don't equate your operationalized variables with the phenomena you are trying to measure.
http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/new-editors-are-joining-e... (addendum: http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/12/why-i-changed-the-title-o...)
Newly-added bytes may be true or false. They may be useful or not useful even if true --- readers do not want every byte about a given topic, they want a few tens of thousands of the most useful ones. (This is entirely orthogonal to the inclusionist-deletionist debate about what topics should be included. Some bytes may be useless in the context of a main topical article about Alan Alda himself, but they would be very relevant to a subtopical article about Alan Alda's dental health).
For a popular topic, you'll have dozens of people adding bytes of varying quality. Insiders subtract the false or useless bytes (an action easily captured in statistics and then maligned on the internet by pundits), but also look at the true and useful bytes, fact-check them, and then leave them in place. This contribution --- curation --- is not captured in any statistics, but it is an important part of the mechanism by which you can have 1 expert and two enthusiastic amateurs stop by every few weeks on their lunch break to expand an article with no centralised notice or approval, without having have the place turned into a mess by the 97 vandals and well-meaning incompetents who came by in the meantime.
The real problem Wikipedia faces is in the long tail of topics, where there is only one person adding the bytes, and that person is either grinding an axe, self-promoting, or afflicted with incurable "nerdview". The well-meaning, harried, underinformed Wikipedia insiders inevitably screw up when they try to distinguish useless vs. useful bytes on these topics, but I wouldn't call the outsiders who added the bytes in the first place "experts". Unfortunately both sides' conduct may be scaring away the people who are actual experts on those long-tail topics ...
Correct. But not just long-tail topics, but any topic that can only be properly treated by deep immersion in the subject, and especially any topic that is controversial. A lot of point-of-view pushers on Wikipedia do a lot of their POV-pushing by "framing," just making sure that some wikilinks to articles they like persist, while others are deleted, or that navigation templates or article categories play up the articles that best represent their point of view. And that's before we even get to the issue of deleting reliable sources.
Now, researching & writing articles on moderately-important-to-obscure historical subjects is something I do as an odd form of relaxation. I occasionally edit articles in my actual area of expertise, but that feels more like "work". Collecting a few sources to write a decent first cut at an article on a historical figure or event feels like recreation. Plus, I learn some things.
There'a also very little controversy and conflict compared to writing about hot topics and recent events, so not much wikidrama. People will argue over all sorts of things, but strangely enough I've never had an edit war over an article like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Gradnauer or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Pasquale_Ricci. =]
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/15/Deletionis...
The article's point resonated with me, because it seems that the whole process is based on the assumption that you're a no-lifer who spends all day patrolling Wikipedia.
They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases".
Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal.
Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git repos, which may or may not be a suitable base to build upon: https://github.com/scy/levitation
Also, how would forking be useful in any way? It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right? Could you explain the advantages ?
What I mean is that Wikipedia could learn from GitHub how a lot of forks plus easy pull requests can exponentially increase participation and generation of new content while still being able to retain quality.
It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right?
Why not? You could extend an article or contribute some new articles for a topic, publish the content yourself, and try to get it into the main project. Then on the main site there could be a list of forks, and even a network graph exactly like on GitHub.
Also, i mean that the difference with forking source code is that you can work on something that will not get accepted into the mailine, but is useful to you, or your organization.
It does not seem to me that you can have a private wikipedia to which you refer people, it would be useless. Same with forks, if an officially blessed fork does not exist, you get anarchy and all of them become unreliable, cfr the rails foreign key plugins for reference: when strong active and clear leadership miss, projects fade into failure.
OTOH if you just want "easy merge" that does not seem to replace the gatekeeper, you just made him more visibile.
But if I am missing soemthing, I'd be happy to understand :)
(It's interesting to think about, but Wikipedia could never conceptualize distributed branching when they are currently doing the equivalent of developing right on the production server.)
This idea has been discussed many times over the years, but never adopted for whatever reason. My suspicion is the active Wikipedians have this system of scoring Wikipoints for quickly reverting vandalism and bad edits, and don't want a system which encourages actual editing.
I'm very turned off by the amount of poorly sourced point-of-view pushing that goes on on Wikipedia. I've tried to light a candle in the darkness by compiling source lists in my user space (which I link to from article talk pages), and by mostly adding current reliable sources to articles, but even at that a lot of my edits get reverted by POV-pushers (or their sock puppets or meat puppets) on ideological grounds. This continues to happen even after one group of articles I work on went through an Arbitration Committee case in August of this year. The sanctioned editors learned how to cheat on their sanctions, and the conscientious editors are still badly outnumbered (at least as to visible accounts actively editing the articles at any one time). The administrators are beleaguered, and aren't using their mops actively to clean up the mess.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
I have severe doubts about the statement made by Jimbo Wales quoted in the submitted link here: "'I’m not a wiki person who happened to go into encyclopedias,' Wales told the crowd at Oxford. 'I’m an encyclopedia person who happened to use a wiki.'" While I give many of the high-edit-count old hands a lot of credit for trying to maintain encyclopedic standards on Wikipedia, I can't agree that their sound editorial judgment characterizes most of Wikipedia's editorial culture. On any topic that is the least bit controversial, the culture is all about ideological edit-warring, and many active wikipedians seem to be quite proud of their lack of acquaintance with libraries or the other resources used by genuine scholars. There doesn't seem to be anyone at the top of the leadership of Wikipedia backing up the wikipedians who are doing the best work for the project and adding the most reliably sourced content.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...
If pg has said that someone could do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica (where and when did pg say that?), I'd like to know how to join that effort. What have any of you heard about efforts to bring about a friendly competitor to Wikipedia? The best way to help Wikipedia might be to build a point of comparison that does better work, just as East Germany was best helped by the continually visible example of West Germany until the Stasi couldn't make the East Germans afraid anymore.
About two years ago I went through about a six month period where I spent pretty much every day in a revert war with various people who definitely didn't know anything about the field/area I was trying to provide some information on.
I happen to have a fair amount of expertise and experience in a certain area (Music Trackers) and at the time thought I would lend a hand to flesh out the still woefully inadequate content to that part of Wikipedia and started or fleshed out dozens of pages of content. I probably spent north of 100 hours on content creation even going so far as to setup emulated environments in other OSs so I could get screen captures of some of the software. I spent dozens more cleaning up missing or outright incorrect information.
Every time I did something, the change was reverted. To this day, not a single edit I did ever stayed on Wikipedia longer than a week. Eventually, tired of endless arguing with editors who just wholesale reverted entire sections of material rather than edit or augment what I put in there, I just gave up.
Particularly egregious were the endless arguments over notoriety of this or that. Responses to the editors demonstrating conformance to Wikipedia's notoriety guidelines were met with silence and further reverts. One in particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sega, actually has a page now anyways -- but it's not mine. Fascinatingly, I think that two of the editors causing most of the problems didn't even know what the demoscene was! In a bizarre argument from one of the editors, I was called unqualified to write about the demoscene since I myself was a 'scener!
I think I'd still be contributing if the editors had...I don't know..."edited", instead of reverted. I would have happily participated in ensuring things like objectivity and article organization were well followed, but wholesale deleting information? Nah, I'm done with participating in Wikipedia as a contributor.
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/10-of-the-coolest-demoscene-creations-715166
e.g. the game industry in particular is stuffed full of demosceners
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedy_Entertainment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games
http://www.spore.com/ftl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PopCap_Games
(as well as a few others like the music biz)
http://www.pelulamu.net/timbaland/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sega
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lynne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothomstates
The recent resurgence in pixel art I find amusing since the demoscene has been carrying that torch for decades:
http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/frames.html
Print e-Sources though may include some of the scene-zines, a handful of books, Wired has run a few articles from time-to-time, but most of the scene exists either as web sites or chat logs to be honest.
http://www.scene.org/
http://www.demoscene.us/
http://www.pouet.net/
http://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/
http://datunnel.blogspot.com/
Thousands of people attend the events (called parties) which are loosely organized as competitions but are really just a chance to show off your creations to loads of like-minded folks.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4143/4868635967_19ec3ddc7c_z.jpg
http://www.demoscene.tv/page.php?id=172&lang=uk&vsmaction=view_prod&id_prod=13947
...is often abstract and at times quite evocative. videos of tons of productions here:
http://www.demoscene.tv/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Tracker_musicians
It is quite appreciated popular (not really underground here) movement in Finland. Many of our most successful game developers like Remedy (Alan Wake, Max Payne), Housemarque and Bugbear were founded by demoscene vets.
Only two months ago our National Broadcasting Agency ran a 7-part documentary series on Demoscene. It is available here with English subtitles: http://dome.fi/pelit/artikkelit/yleiset/ylen-demoscene-dokum...
The very least I could look into your reverted edits and try to salvage the useful bits :)
(btw, some of my biggest long distance bills ever came from calling Starport years ago to get the latest releases)
I just checked and my user pages don't even exist anymore. :(
[0]Lack of notability and lack of source information are the two big ones there.
With tools like huggle, it becomes trivially easy to scan hundreds of edits an hour, and reverting is as easy as pressing 'r'. The problem is, vandal patrolling with huggle is really boring. You're on the lookout for things to revert, and can quite easily misinterpret someone changing a number ("512" to "568") as subtle vandalism. So, someone comes along, fixes a figure that was wrong, and within 1 minute, their change is reverted. It presents a really uninviting face to the uninitiated.
As for xenophobia, the wikipedia community is almost paranoid when it comes to outside influence. This distrust isn't unwarranted, as there have been many instances of various groups plotting to have wikipedia reflect their reality. What this means, however, is that external calls to edit a particular article will likely wind up at AN/I (Administrator's Noticeboard / Incidents, basically where you go to tell on people), and the first thing any new editor would be greeted with would be a notice saying a diplomatic version of "we're on to you".
Policy itself isn't the problem; it's the community. Policy both reflects and shapes community dynamics. However, Wikipedia is a "Jimbotocracy". Jimbo can, has, and will continue to, overrule the community and do whatever he wants, usually in the form of banning / unbanning / stripping or granting of privileges. In addition, ArbCom, the "Supreme Court", if you will, defers to Jimbo. While Jimbo doesn't set policy directly (although he reserves the right to), he does heavily influence it. His views on what policy should be are often taken as passed down from the mountaintop on stone tablet, so it matters what he thinks and why he thinks it.
Plenty of articles I come across have "drive by additions" of some length that are unreadable, repetitive and disturbingly worded. There are contributors whose sole purpose is to go round and copyedit that content, which they may do in a number of edits... but change (by comparison) very few words. It can still take hours of effort.
A Wiki article is the sum of all those edits.
I don't know if greater access to its priestly class would mean a better or worse site, honestly. I'm sure there are thousands of people who are experts in their fields and could improve the content of the site greatly - but I can imagine that opening the floodgates and working to democratize authorship and editorship could also drag it further into the gutter.
http://www.christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-...
It seems like ever since I started working for myself, I don't have time for hobbies at all - everything I do has to go through a prism of how will this affect my bottom line...