Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is Losing Contributors
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1. People with technical web expertise
2. People with deep domain knowledge
3. People willing to deal with bureaucracy
You will get a very tiny population.
Wikipedia wasn't always like this, the problem is that well established editors have built a fort to keep the noobs out—not because they are power thirsty—but because they don't want to deal with noob mistakes.
As with anyone new to a job, your first week will likely be a net loss to the company: they have to show you the ropes, set up your computer, take you out for lunch, make you feel welcome, etc. The wikipedia editors don't want to deal with this, so they just build technical and policy barriers to keep new people out.
Around three years ago I decided on "donating" one day of my life to Wikipedia in Spanish. I went around areas of intest, fixed some stuff, created two new articles of well recognized designers. The next day both articles were "nominated for deletion", one because it wasn't properly formatted or referenced, and the other for copyright infringement. An overzealous editor made a search on google and found a similar article in a blog, my own blog! which I release under public domain and which shares my wikipedia handle.
I ended up collaborating one day and fighting bureaucracy three days. No wonder they're having trouble finding new editors.
(1) rejecting articles for notability.
(2) no advertising
(3) reliance on a tiny population of unpaid editors.
(4) allowing anonymous edits.
Google tried with Knol but they focused on (2), (3) and (4) when in actuality the biggest weakness is (1) due to Kryder's Law.
What Google (or Microsoft or some startup) should do is create a third party wikipedia extension, call it notapedia (or whatever) and have it spider wikipedia and keep a fork of any page deleted for notability reasons.
Of course that's just the tip of the iceberg. People will be able to make their own (notable or not notapedia) info pages. Notapedia will hit a critical mass and the killing blow will come all at once as wikipedia is forked and most of their editors enticed with revenue deals.
Having swallowed it's father (patriphagicide?) notapedia grows even faster. Info pages are created for nearly every person on the planet, becoming the anti-facebook that Zuckerburg envisioned but replacing the real facebook and twitter and flickr and linked in and everything else as well. Businesses and government agencies will check your id against the datestamped photos of you on notapedia. An enormous network of private and government databases will be setup to work as extensions of notapedia.
Reducing/removing notability guidelines does not necessarily open the flood gates to some kind of social network with a wiki page for every individual on earth :P
That said, I really hope a wikipedia fork gains popularity and is merged back later.
Once the notability threshold is gone and people realize they could make a page for themselves, their family, friends, their dog, their band... Well some people will do that. This can easily be turned into a crowd sourced version of any social or blogging service. It grows faster because one user can make pages for 100, 1000 people. It grows faster because the total lack of privacy and editorial controls make it more interesting (right up Google's alley btw). Lack of anonymous commenting means people are ultimately subject to libel laws.
If you create a new article, it's likely to get deleted for not meeting high "notability" criteria.
Your first edits will likely end up being reverted for not having sources good enough. For overzealous admins it's easier to bin them rather than find a better source link or let someone else improve it.
Plus the problem mentioned in the article that it's no longer "okay" just to drop a url into an article, everything has to match some bizarro world template that no one would ever want to fill out given their lousy pay rates.
And for all that, the wiki staff is too stupid/poor/unimaginative to automatically download and archive what the urls in the articles point to, meaning that the whole thing suffers from increasing amounts of link rot.
It's also fun to contribute a new article and then see it nominated for swift deletion because it rubs someone the wrong way and has violated one of a trillion different little wiki policies all put up to justify reverting/deleting otherwise fine content.
Citations on Wikipedia are a joke. At least a quarter of the citations I check are broken links or go to a wildly inappropriate or biased source.
If you drop a URL in that's fine, one of our bots will come by, not to chastise your edit as possible vandalism, but to fill out the journal entry for you and download the url and archive it.
An interesting project for HN folks might be to write bots to take care of stuff that isn't currently being automated. Of course, perhaps instead we want the Wikimedia Foundation doing more of this. They're moving in that direction to some extent, though I don't much like that. In the past I've argued against that direction, because I think one of Wikipedia's strengths is its open, volunteer-run nature, rather than being a professionalized/bureaucratized NGO type organization with paid staff and centralized organization--- I'd rather WMF just ran the servers.
(disclaimer: I barely know what Pokemon is)
Are U2 an "Irish band" or simply a band that happen to be
from Ireland, since two of their members were born in the
UKAt least, that's what I can glean from 5 minutes on the discussion page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_(599%....
The one time I ran into trouble was a pretty edge case: my article on internet-meme rapper "Average Homeboy" was deleted, though it seems to now have been recreated. When I write articles on almost anything that isn't internet culture, there doesn't seem to be an army of evildoers looking to hassle me about them (say, on a CS theorem, castle in Greece, Prussian general, or a city hall in Minnesota).
Way too often I find a math article jumps straight into the equations without a good overview that can be understood by someone without a math background. Example applications, for example, would greatly reduce the abstract nature of these pages.
Here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controllability
We can compare that with articles on physics, which is pretty close to math, after all: they are almost always excellent and mostly understandable even to complete laymen (ie, me). [3][4]
If Wikipedia's goal is indeed making all human knowledge freely accessible, then that does not just consist of putting up the words. It means making the content accessible, not just available. While Wikipedia succeeds magnificently in many areas, math is not one of them.
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_product
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple
What you want is something that would be more useful, but harder to produce.
Really? That's the exact opposite of how I think of it. An encyclopedia is something you learn an initial shallow understanding from. A field specific reference text is something you reference. eg. My linear algebra text book.
For sure re usefulness, which is why moultano's work is greatly appreciated.
Is this a garden path sentence? I hope so because the beginning almost completely contradicts the ending.
Something to learn from, to me, means tutorial-like material. Something that gives an overview, examples, general theory, more examples, exercises, cross-correlations, and other things intended to help you to learn.
Something you reference means, to me, something in which you go and check facts. Hence the contrast with the idea of learning from it.
Some people can learn from reference works. In my experience they are in a minority. Most people need extensive examples, context, relationships, and exercises.
I believe WikiPedia is intended to be a reference work, something to be referred to in order to check facts. I believe WikiPedia is intended not to have tutorial material or other aspects designed to aid learning.
I hope that makes my beliefs clear, as well as my understanding of the specific terms used.
And I'm confused by your use of the term "Garden Path Sentence." The sentence you quote doesn't seem to offer any opportunity to re-interpret it partway through, nor to have an alternative interpretation (which suddenly becomes impossible to continue) up to some point. So I guess all you mean is that you don't understand, because you think the sentence is oxymoronic or, more simply, self-contradictory. If that's the case, I hope I've clarified it sufficiently.
Sorry if I came off a bit flippant earlier, WP is definitely a pet peeve of mine (or rather, what WP could be vs. the disaster minority of wrong headed admins have turned it into)
I actually agree with you -- that WP is different than say a tutorial or other path to learning. But reference works are one of the primary tools of pretty much any sort of pedagogy.
I agree that it's a different kind of learning...or rather perhaps reference books are something used as part of a tutorial of other teaching system.
But I give up. When so many people take what I say in a sense other than I intend, I know it's time to give up for the night. Clearly I'm not expressing myself very well, so I'm outta here.
Consider the continuous linear time-variant system
<equations!>
so, bad.
There are also way too many articles with either no sources at all or with really crappy or biased sources. If the articles are obscure enough, they often never even get challenged or deleted. Many of those that do get challenged or deleted deserve to be.
The real problem comes in when articles which really are notable and information from sources which are credible get deleted for ideological, political, or other biased reasons (though, of course, the people doing the deletion will always claim otherwise). Wikipedia really has no good solution for this than letting the parties involved argue it out, or draw in more editors/admins (who have their own biases) in to the argument.
What usually emerges from these arguments is not "neutrality" or "objectivity", but rather a biased point of view of those people who managed to out-Wikilawyer, outnumber, or outlast the other side.
If you think your article's deletion need to be reviewed, try contacting one of the admins, if your article was deleted by me I would be more than happy to tell you why I deleted it, and if I made a mistake I would not hestitate to revert the deletion.
I could see this being a problem if the band's name is ambiguous with existing, important articles. But if there's no conflict, how is that a bad thing? Perhaps it would encourage people to contribute more if Wikipedia is a little too lenient rather than a little too strict.
Note: I'm pretty much summarizing what's on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:N If you think I'm biased, please read the policy directly on Wikipedia itself.
Despite it being phrased as "notability", to me it's the "verifiability" requirement that's a better argument: there should only be Wikipedia articles on things where there exist enough good sources to write a reasonably well sourced article. That's more of a pragmatic than a philosophical decision; not "this subject deserves/doesn't-deserve an article", but rather "we have/don't-have enough sources to write a good article about this subject".
sarcasm alert wikipedia appear to operate under the principle that hard drive space is expensive
But there are people editing WP who just loathe the idea of anything that's not mainstream science staining the purity that is Wikipedia, so the article was nominated for deletion and had to go through a tedious process which should never have happened.
If a couple of people hadn't had the time or energy to defend the article it would have died, not because it wasn't notable, but just because a bunch of people wanted to censor it.
Define "reliable source." Could it ever include a thread on Hacker News, or a blog post written by an expert in the field?
They're guidelines. Why is that such a hard concept for wikipedia admins and editors to understand?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
"This page is an article notability guideline."
In fact Wikipedia has a page called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IAR which encourages editors to ignore policies and guidelines that hinders them from improving Wikipedia. (How well this policy is applied these days, I honestly do not know)
However, just because notability is a guideline, doesn't mean I should make up a word like "xryzcbslmrwp463vnfd" and define that using Wikipedia.
Now, with regards to wikipedia admins deleting articles overzealously, this is indeed a problem in my opionion, and I have undeleted articles that would of be kept if it was actually discussed in Articles for Deletion. The thing is, most Wikipedia newbies, do not know how to contest the deletion of their article, or even know they should be contesting it because the notability is there and can be asserted.
I find it fascinating that whenever a WP deletionist bothers to engage with the world outside of WP, they act like everything they do is perfectly reasonable and justified. Yet you and I both know that the actual reality is that its virtually impossible to add knowledge/contribute to WP these days without having that material deleted...often within minutes.
Here's a perfect, relatively recent example http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168
The original person who nominated these for deletion did it in bad faith, and the admins treated it like a legitimate deletion -- as if he had nominated litter like "xryzcbslmrwp463vnfd" for deletion. However, reasonable people viewed the entire debacle not as cleaning up the litter off the street, but the same as destructive vandalism and were right to do so.
Yeah, sure, after an interminable, and completely opaque process, involving two (2) rounds of discussion, the articles were restored (after first being deleted). But in every case involving the original deletion by an admin, there was both ample reference material verifying the content of the articles, and a clear consensus to keep the articles.
I bring this up not because it's unusual, or I have a particular axe to grind regarding the inclusion/exclusion of languages in WP, but because it's absolutely typical of the kind of crap not only new users have to suffer through, but even active contributors.
Point being, contributing to WP is a waste of time, with hours and hours of work being hauled off to /dev/null at the whim of an overzealous editor with some kind of chip on their shoulder.
The current crop of admins and editors on the site seem to be suffering from the mistaken that the point of WP is not to collect the world's knowledge, but to replicate a 19th century print encyclopedia that just "happens" to have a few pop-culture topics in them, completely oblivious to the magnificent advancements of modern technology.
And like any in-group, the highly embedded clique of admins and editors refuse to self-police, instead they'll reinforce the bad decisions of their brothers-in-arms.
WP had so much promise, but it's taken half a decade for any of the people who actually run the site to finally notice this culture of nepotism, laziness, exclusion and failure that's completely permeated the site.
Designers of user interfaces have learned over time that you need to engage gradually and give positive feedback for the good bits, while gently removing the bad bits. WikiPedia seems to do exactly the opposite.
User Hostile rather than User Friendly.
More, in the push to become a "proper" encyclopedia the markup has become remarkably baroque, making it almost impossible to get to know what to do. The macros and other procedures that work behind the scenes are nearly impossible to grok given the lack of tools to help.
Overall, it's simply groaning under the mass of twiddles and has no elegance.
Except for technical, completely uncontroversial articles, Wikipedia is dominated by people with apparently unlimited time on their hands to devote to pushing their point of view.
I got really tired of the endless arguments I needed to engage in to contribute new information or improve the wording of existing articles.
Some person or group of people with apparently unlimited time on their hands and who feel they "own" the article would inevitably come by and start reverting and endlessly arguing every little change.
I just don't have the infinite time on my hands (or interest, frankly) that it would require to out-argue these people. They can keep their articles. I've got better things to do with my time than argue with no-life Wikilawyers all day, every day.
Why so many deletions? The significance of a topic is very important for paper encyclopedias because shelf space is finite. A regular encyclopedia collection can have only so many books before no one can afford to buy one.
But when most of the Wikipedia contents are text - why all the deletions?
Is the data accurate and up-to-date? Are the links still viable? Do the citations check out? etc.
It's just like having a project with a huge number of lines of code. It's an important maintenance task to delete outdated or obsolete code - not because you will run out of disk space to store your .c files, but because unused, unmaintained code is very likely to be confusing or wrong.
Remember also the power rule for user contribution: 90% of all users do not contribute anything ever. 9% of users contribute at least once. 1% of users contribute everything else. If an article is not very notable, it's extremely likely that the person who originally contributes it will be the only person who ever contributes anything to the article, and contributing the original is very likely to be the only contribution to the subject they make. This will hold true even if there are some number of "long tail" readers interested in the article, because readers are drastically more common than writers, and infrequent writers drastically more common than writers who consistently attempt to improve the articles they read.
So: Articles with low notability are probably poorly maintained, out of date, and/or consisting entirely of the statements of a single person. Making them better imposes a cost which relatively few people in Wikipedia's community actually pay - the cost of taking time to edit something.
All of Wikipedia's pains and stretch marks will become much clearer if you restate the purpose and function of the site. If you approach Wikipedia as a server farm that takes in user contributions and produces a compilation of same, then it's strange to have any limits on contributions, since the cost of storing text data is extremely small. If you approach Wikipedia as a group of people that takes in the members' time and energy and produces agreement between the members, then you see where their problems come from.
Remember, a Wikipedia article gets to stay in a particular state only when everyone who potentially could change it agrees that no changes are necessary. Wikipedia produces consensus, not data. Its limiting factor is the time and patience of the people who work on edits.
If you need consensus - the kind that will not be repeatedly challenged by latecomers - and you are limited in the number of people who will voluntarily "meet" in the editing area to discuss a particular subject, then low-popularity articles are a cost with no benefit. The opinions of a single person - possibly an oddball, since they're the only one who submitted the article - will produce no agreement, and it will consume more time and energy to find people who could hammer out a lasting consensus.
That's a great description of what Wikipedia is.
I keep thinking of it as an open source repository of human knowledge, like an infinitely large encyclopedia. But in reality it is more like a forum where useful information "gets voted to top", so to speak.
A requirement for consensus is incompatible with individual rights, since people have the right to disagree. For low-interest topics, Wikipedia eventually succeeds anyway because less-motivated contributors become bored or exhausted and stop arguing. For high-interest topics, the search for consensus becomes more and more explicitly political - political as in "determining the governing rules of a body of disparate people", rather than political as in "are Republicans better than Democrats", although the two kinds of 'political' are both present in many edit wars.
Take the cool-off rules, for examples - locking an article for a period of time, or forbidding certain people from editing it. This is central to Wikipedia's functioning in highly controversial areas, but "nobody can edit this article today" is a policy, not a datapoint. Politics produces policy - a set of actions that can be acted upon by people who do NOT necessarily agree about the underlying facts.
Nasty edit-wars borrow from the tools of dictatorship and oppression - censorship, propaganda, exclusion from the body politic. It's not a coincidence; as mentioned above, consensus is incompatible with individual rights. You need to limit which individuals are allowed to participate, or negotiate the ways that their participation will be accepted. In a sufficiently small or like-minded group, consensus can work again.
A data server has a failure state where some of the data is lost. Wikipedia's failure state, on the other hand, resembles the internal rupture of a political party in a post-Soviet state. Like communist countries, Wikipedia articles demand consensus from their citizens in order to operate.
Of course, unlike Eastern Bloc revolutions, Wikipedia contributors typically do not get lined up against a wall and shot. =) That's also one of the reasons we tend to put Wikipedia edit wars in either the "tech company struggles with its architecture" bucket or the "people on the Internet are angry, news at 7" bucket, rather than the "fractured political unit experiences internal strife due to irreconcilable demands on limited resources" bucket where they actually belong.
(Welcome either in this thread or in direct communication; I am trying to devise better computer-mediated systems for this. While conflict and politics are intrinsic to human affairs I think proper system design can reduce the number of zero- or negative-sum interactions.)
Instead of deleting articles, it might be better to "age" articles and let interested parties know when an article hasn't been viewed or edited or linked to 90 days, six months, 1 year, 2 years, etc.
Those articles could then either be freshened, merged, or potentially deleted (after say a decade of never being edited or looked at or linked to.)
You've got to be kidding. I no longer edit Wikipedia in part to the deletionism, but a decade of zero interest before deletion? Wikipedia itself is only a decade old. They'd just now be deleting the first vanity pages.
Similar situations happen with respect to geography. Maybe someone has appeared a number of times in a local newspaper and may even be considered notable on a local basis for some activity. Maybe they're a star on their high school football team. Should they be notable in the context of Wikipedia? I dunno. I've read some good debates on the topic and all I know is that it's really hard to think of universal rules.
The article for video games is a good example of this. There's clearly someone on wikipedia who has made it his life's work to ensure that there cannot exist an article which doesn't explicitly state that "video game" can only refer to something that has a raster display.
The irony is palpable. Upon reading this, I went to the Wikipedia article on Pregnancy and looked at the talk page. I found a lot of surprisingly decent and rational discussion about the choice of the image, including some gems:
"There is no profanity in any of the later 3 images. These images depict the natural condition of pregnancy (external manifestation, physical changes, etc), to which image 1 alone would not be able to do justice."
"Someone recently used the phrase "adolescent glee" to describe the attitudes of some editors who argue for the most prominent possible placement of nudity, and that resonates with me. Just because we can (and IMO should) include this image somewhere in the article does not mean that we should make it be the first and largest image—or that we should have zero images of pregnant women who aren't in a state of undress. If you want to present pregnancy as a part of normal life, then showing exclusively images of women who are undressed isn't the way to go about it."
Regardless of whom you agree with, both sides are putting forth legitimate arguments. Your intentional misrepresentation of the discussion raises questions about your motives.
As a specific example, consider the pregnancy article already under question. In my mind, a reasonable compromise would be to move to image (not remove it) and put it behind a link labeled "image of nude pregnant woman" or a mask (like the spoiler codes in game forms) or some other easily identifiable method. I won't argue whether images like that has value or not [1], but the clash between opposing moral standards (if you'll pardon the potentially charged term) is pervasive in the talk pages.
There are some images that I don't feel the need to look at, and more particularly, don't wish my young children to look at. I understand that not everyone feels that way (I'm not telling anyone how to raise their kids), but by placing such images front-and-center, I feel blindsided or robbed of the choice to seek out such things. Yet on Wikipedia, this sort of perspective is consistently rejected ("No censorship!"). I see it as the amoral being preferred to the moral, and I'm uncomfortable supporting an organization that consistently acts in such a way. In recognition of opposing views I'm not suggesting that images like this be removed--just labeled or easily masked so that I can choose to see it if I want, and similarly choose not to.
I'm not trying to push my view on others, but Wikipedia (as embodied by its editors) pushes its view on me.
1: It seemed to me from the talk page that some of those in favor of keeping the nude pictures had emotional attachments to the image rather than objective reasoning.
It's hard for me to intentionally misrepresent the discussion since I refuse to visit the page from work because I don't want an image of a naked woman on my computer screen at work.
There are arguments there that say "hey, that's unnecessary, distracting, and this picture that would not be construed as inappropriate for work or school suits the article just as well". I don't recall what "the later 3 images" refers to. Assuming it was support of the naked image (because otherwise, you've presented no support of rational argument in favor of it), it supports my point: saying that people should not consider it vulgar is not a legitimate response to "we should not unnecessarily alienate users who may be uncomfortable accessing a site with unexpected naked women"
Your intentional assumptions regarding intent and motives raises questions about your motives. :P
That's how Wikipedia was supposed to work. Now every time I try to do something, I know it will be deleted over non-notability. It's not even a question anymore, it's just a matter of time.
Since we can break up articles into sub-topics very easily, there is absolutely no reason for this behaviour other than a love of power-tripping and some vague Wikipeida guidelines to fall back on. The editors are already in this thread, defending themselves. Nothing new, just the same "We don't want pages about your unknown indie band". Talk about baby & the bathwater.
But yeah, there are some problematic holes in MW, especially when you consider how wikipedia is used today.
Example: How many times have you clicked on a link, to be redirected to a page that seems to have no relevance? After a few seconds, you realise it was supposed to redirect to a specific subsection, but that subsection has been removed or renamed. That is a problem that could be solved with better technology.
The mods and admins have put a lot of their effort into pissing off the greater community with edit wars and rampant deletionism. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this would eventually take its toll on discouraging commenters.
English wikipedia has 3.7 million articles. Spanish has only 810,000, Chinese just 300,000-ish, and Hindi less than one hundred thousand. That's the top four most spoken languages in the world right there.
(Also, anecdotally, the South Indians I know would rather use English than Hindi; their own native-language Wikipedias, like Kannada, are too small for them to consider them viable, and they see English as more "neutral" than Hindi in domestic political terms.)
Basically Wikipedia has suffered the same fate as many mature online communities. In the beginning everyone is helping each other out and you are creating something great together. After a few years the older members of the community start getting really tired of the clueless newcomers and start complaining and setting up rules. New users no longer feel welcome and never stay long. Soon 90% are experienced members, and the newcomer perspective is lost completely. It is often not intentional, making it easier for moderators is just higher priority than letting more people participate.
I wonder if Stack Overflow will survive growing up.
Maybe a "forced retirement" rule should go in effect for long time editors?
I dunno, just a thought.
That way if a reader doesn't care for the hyper-strict top level, they can view more inclusive information down the lower levels.
If the site grows too big/strict and more levels are needed, it should be relatively trivial to add another level down.
I'm still pre-launch but I discuss the themes and motivations in a blog at:
So it appears that advice was not, in fact, given.
If anyone had delivered that advice, I would have pointed out: 'Infinithree' is just a pre-launch code name.
Any other feedback?
If people stop contributing, though, the bureaucrats will take over, and we cannot afford to let Wikipedia stagnate and die in this way. It's tempting to leave the administrative burden to someone else, but it will get heavier and heavier for those who stay.
On one memorable occasion my historically accurate change to a page was reverted by the 'page owner' on the grounds that "ask any man in the street and he will tell you different".