Honestly, that's probably the most "measurable" kind of toxicity, but Wikipedia has a much bigger problem with toxicity than that. The whole place is infused with passive-aggression (by policy) and toxic double-standards. IMHO, you have to be deeply weird to be a frequent contributor.
A culture develops to create a power structure that favors those who have devoted a large portion of their personal identity to the success of the organization. This culture serves as a moat against anyone who would integrate themselves within the organization and attempt drastic changes that would disrupt the existing power balance or pose an existential threat to the organization.
As time passes, more layers get added in response to various perceived attempts to subvert the organization until a critical mass is reached in which the organization suffers from a brain drain (via retirement, loss of interest, etc.) with the barriers too high and rewards too meager for new(er) qualified individuals to consider filling the void. The organization then continues forward in a zombie-like state until it either fails or becomes irrelevant.
For companies this usually means pushing product cannibalisation and accepting to forgo additional profit in exchange for better long term viability.
I think Apple was good at this during most of Steve Jobs's second term. Didn't last long though. Perhaps too much success is the biggest issue ?
I'm not sure you noticed it, but the people complaining about "editors" being toxic are actually those who are confronted with these "very clear rules and goals" already specified by the community , and they are calling foul once they see their edits being edited based on these established and time-tested processes.
And by the way, wikipedia supports conflict resolution processes which can culminate in articles being temporarily blocked to prevent endless revertions. You just need to flag the article and ask people their opinion.
It's strange how this whole debate centers around abuse, offers all kinds of solutions to perceived problems, but not only fails to acknowledge these processes are already in place in Wikipedia for over a decade but also they don't even wonder what content was added by the editors complaining their edits were reverted. I mean, think about it for a second. Do you think wikipedia achieved a notable level of quality because all edits, regardless of their content, remain untouched in place as-is?
Countering it means to cultivate an open and egalitarian platform, where vulnerability is part of the equation as well as the associated trust that is needed. Good faith over bad faith. Selfless behavior vs “I am gonna get mine.”
My sources are my experience in organisations as well as a good friend who manages such an organization.
I bet the top Wiki editors don't think there is an issue. That is the hard part. How do you get the people with the most vested interest accept change?
So you need a new synthesis in a dialectic system of two opposing wills. Like you say, how do you get people to accept less? Only if you can make them see what you are seeing, and if they can see different points of view. For some this is impossible I find, depending on character and circumstances. Also can you make them see that their behavior is detrimental in the long run? Or that they might have their heart in the right place (they care about the subject) but it is forced?
But yeah, the ability or willingness to see through other eyes is definitely “good faith” to me. You still don’t always have to agree, you don’t have to become a hivemind. But knowing that your ideas or critiques are heard, echoed makes you feel part of the whole, just being seen or heard makes a world of difference I think.
You could with the right people across the entire organization succeed without and actively combat the manifestation of this effect for as long as those, or like minded, people remain… but given the fact that organizations have a bidirectional relationship with people and culture, over a long enough period of time the organization will inevitably revert to the mean.
In more broad terms, I described the path of least resistance for a complex system (the default mode), while “you” are asking for a system that deviates from that path, which requires the introduction of entropy. As can be observed in many other fields, the total entropy of a system over a long enough period of time will always trend towards zero.
Given the specifics of this particular model are bound by social behaviors you could in theory create a culture that has a default mode that does not have the issue described, but to do so you would have to start at a much higher level than a single organization and thus for the purposes of the point I was making it is moot.
Even having said all of this, there is still a great deal more left unsaid that lead me to believe this to be true.
I've seen volunteer organizations founded on mild anarchistic principles thrive for a few decades while occasionally reinventing themselves. The key is a culture focusing on people working together for a common purpose. Keeping in mind that the purpose of the organization is more important than the organization itself.
There may be formal stakeholders and formal power hierarchies, but their role is kept to a minimum. Some people need to be in charge for legal and practical reasons, but leadership positions are not associated with high status. Ideally, the leaders are selected through a deliberative process, and they voluntarily step down after a while. Some people inevitably acquire high status within the community, but they are expected to recognize it and avoid being too vocal.
actively encouraging structures made up of almost-competing interests that sum towards a common goal helps guide our individual competitive natures towards accomplishing larger-than-one projects
picture a bunch of sticks leaning against each other; individually they'd fall, but their combined vector gives the total structure strength
Example: Guido van Rossum
Maybe competent moderators, and a kind of rock-paper-scissors rule structure. Where you have rules, but excessive rules lawyering is a grave, bannable offense.
That pretty much directly describes a once-marvelous Q&A site, where I almost never go, anymore, and which is rapidly declining, in search results.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/394772/lets-talk-ab...
I'm a power user on SO with some moderation capabilities. There's no mods per se I think just people who have different functions enabled to them (editing questions, closing, review etc). Admittedly I don't moderate it much (never did)
I still use it daily as a lazy reference. Haven't noticed any decline apart from it having covered all topics so there's mostly nothing new left to ask. Which is the best thing that can happen to Q&A site
Honestly, another major deficiency of their approach is the lack of any meta-moderation. If you gamify moderation, it really behooves you to also have some mechanism for gamifying finding and punishing users who abuse that moderation. You’ve created a predator-prey cycle between content generation and content moderation, without some mechanism to drain the “economy” of moderation eventually the predators will exhaust all available prey and then starve. Even HN has the “vouch” button and that’s on top of a generally less toxic culture in the first place.
For my areas of interest (plain old Java, Python, C, C++, and JavaScript), the search results are still good. However, I can understand that your areas may be in decline.
I got used to the insults, as they usually came with useful answers, but that hasn't been the case, in quite a while.
I tend to get most of my actual help from blog posts and Substack articles (even clickbaity ones can be helpful). I'm seldom presented with "the answer," but they usually help to figure out how to get a start.
I have a high reputation that unlocks privileges, but I rarely go back these days to answer questions. If I can snipe someone that's trying to shut down a question prematurely then that's kind of fun.
Early on, I probably asked them badly, but I learned to ask them better, and the answers came much less frequently. So ask a question badly, and get an insult, but also a useful answer. Ask a question well, and ... crickets. Lately, I usually end up answering my own question, just so there might be something for someone else to find.
I'm usually quite capable of finding the answers; just not quickly. It used to be, I would get good answers, within seconds of asking the question. Nowadays, I usually end up answering it myself, hours or days later.
I used to like getting answers that were "done right." Many of the folks there, have a lot of structural and cultural knowledge, and the answers were often quite valuable; giving me advice on why we should do it this way. I may well find out how to do it wrong, left to my own devices. I didn't mind being told I was doing it wrong. We become right, by being wrong.
Most folks with very high karma, have very few (usually single-digit) question counts (the digit is often "0"). I am not one to ascribe motives, but there must be a reason that invested folks don't want to ask questions on that forum.
Early on, I probably asked them badly, but I learned to ask them better, and the answers came much less frequently. So ask a question badly, and get an insult, but also a useful answer. Ask a question well, and ... crickets. Lately, I usually end up answering my own question, just so there might be something for someone else to find.
You’re consciousness trapped in meat, everything you experience is an interpretation of your environment and entirely subject to that meat.
“The Republican Party exists” is an interpretation of each word, and is controversial on some axis. “2” is a concept, it literally does not exist outside of the mind.
This is to say: your desire for objectivity has failed, the best we can ever get are “well defined and explained rationalizations that many people agree with”.
- Google search results get worse every year.
- Stackoverflow lies in ruins (albeit the ruins are still useful).
- ICQ/Gtalk/AIM completely dead and all in silos now (Slack).
- Twitter is dead.
- Facebook is too annoying now.
Google Maps is still amazing, but I consider that more a miracle of the internet as opposed to a miracle of the WWW, since the data is essentially sourced commercially (satellites and maps), whereas with the examples above the data was sourced communally.
And so I think it's inevitable Wikipedia will die within my lifetime. Probably within the decade. I suspect my children will never get to enjoy the miraculous shockingly glorious human affirming paradox of Wikipedia. Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell them to avoid it. :-(
I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical or political reason. I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has, so why not Wikipedia?
- Cheap to host, just text and images
- Funded by non-profit with too much funding
- All images are permissively licensed
- Easily archived
- Easily forked
The only potential "death" I can ever see happening to Wikipedia is the kind that happens from some kind of fracturing, similar to what we often see with fan wikis. But this kind of outcome could be a good thing really, multiple competing Wikipedia's would probably help keep each other honest, and wouldn't functionally be too different than the non-english sections of Wikipedia that already exist.
If anything I'm a bit concerned that Wikipedia might be getting a bit too influential than an encyclopedia aught to be.
Right. The Wikimedia Foundation keeps trying other projects. They think they are supposed to grow. This leads to increasingly obnoxious demands for more contributions. "By 2022, it employed around 700 staff and contractors, with annual revenues of $155 million, annual expenses of $146 million, net assets of $240 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed $100 million in June 2021."
It's the disease of universities - too many administrators.
Either way, it functions but I feel it's simply a tool for 99.9% of people. They don't read the in depth heated arguments, they looks something up, get brief context, and dip. What they do with that information is honestly no better or worse than any news organization.
Ideally we teach to identify and take bias into account, but we've been at a trend for a while now to try and regulate tech instead of society.
I doubt it's cheap at this level of traffic.
One of the most basic features, saving a pin on a map, broke years ago and despite many complaints on their support forum it hasn't been fixed. Directions can be terrible in less traveled areas, and dangerous if followed blindly since they will happily lead you down roads that require 4x4 or are totally impassible. Not to mention saved offline maps are unreliable and the UI clutter has gotten drasticaly worse over the years.
Maps still works fine for the typical things a Google emplyee cares about like getting directions in a well traveled city or finding places to shop, but it's only a matter of time before those usecases get crushed under the ever-building pressures of short term monetization, enshittification, and Google's general apathy and lack of care for users.
Trying to use Google Maps in France usually ends up being send down a dirt road or up a mountain.
Trying to use Google Maps to check my train the other day and I showed the next train and then a train 2 hours later, I had to put the depart time to 1 minute after the train leaving to see the next one.
I've said for years now the product owners of Google Maps are some of the most incompetent on the planet for the size of app they have.
Weren't they doing that from the beginning? I get the feeling this feeling has gone down not up.
>I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical or political reason. I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has, so why not Wikipedia?
It still seems to be surviving. Editor count may be down but a lot of the articles that have to be written already exist. It may stop improving much and only include new events but I don't think it will die until there's a replacement. Maybe people will just consult LLMs for general information and never visit Wikipedia?
Teachers have been telling students to avoid it since the beginning, this is not a new development. If anything, I think teachers may be more accepting of it than in the past, particularly for finding citable sources.
Nowadays, everybody wanna share like they've found the freshest link, But when they scroll, it's closer to the brink, Just echoes of the past, faster than you blink, And online crowds act like they forgot about Digg.
It's as if blogs became popular again. Though the days of simple RSS feeds with a high signal to noise ratio are probably long behind us. (I know some are still around, but I mean popular in the way podcasts are now).
Assuming this is true, what are the leading hypotheses? Regression to the mean? Eternal September? I know everyone likes to talk about "enshittification", but what is the actual mechanism?
Since this is HN, someone's going to say "capitalism", but "capitalism" doesn't explain why Google search results get worse or Facebook is too annoying.
not dismissing other points your making or questions you're asking, but what happens with search results is a phenomenon that's more or less related to monopoly power - so as they (Google) control more, the classical theories behind capitalism no longer hold. For example, they provide worse search, but there is no close second. Even if there is a close second, that "other guy" is unable to afford the 60+ billion Google is paying to other companies to make them the default.
There isn't a simple solution here.
I highly suggest reading the talk page of wikipedia articles. Not just the talk page, but read through the history of the talk page too. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Ada_Lovelace...
I mean, encyclopedias didn't have sources at all, and people were overly confident in books being correct.
On the niche topic part, I wonder if we'll ever be able to do something about it. I don't believe in AI check being a good fit for specialized or rare contexts, and as there's fewer eyes it's by definition more complicated to cross reference and have many active contributors on the same topics.
Even with more appeal to authority (let's say you get more power to edit if you're proven to be an expert in the field) I assume that would get abused to insert personal gripes in some place or another.
The main thing is to check out the talk pages. That's where the controversies crop up and at least you know the opposing view.
I think that concept is a fairy tale. It's kind of like open source software: just because the code is out there doesn't mean anyone's looking for bugs in or or fixing them.
Wikipedia articles settle on the stalemate between its most obsessive or motivated users, the result of which is frequently is wrong or biased. The quantity of eyeballs is irrelevant.
Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers, especially since the seventh one contained what many consider to be the first computer program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Other historians reject this perspective and point out that Babbage's personal notes from the years 1836/1837 contain the first programs for the engine.[6][better source needed] She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities.
Packet switching was invented in the UK by Donald Davies, yet somehow it’s always the Americans that get sole credit for the internet. :)
What made Wikipedia successful was that it was free in a time that people were more used to paying for that kind of information, and that it was open in the sense that anyone could contribute when many places were significantly gatekept.
It has now evolved it's own form of said gatekeeping, not because such is necessary for Wikipedia to be successful, but to harvest the residual success of that open system for the benefit of the parasites.
Weirdo here.
Actually, I don't contribute much to Wikipedia (aside from the occasional edit for clarity or grammar).
But I do upload a number of images to Wikimedia commons. And I occasionally nominate some of my photos for evaluation as Quality Images and Featured Images.
Some people definitely act as gatekeepers and can be harsh in their criticism. But in my experience, most people give courteous, constructive criticism--even when they're rejecting your nomination!
I pretty much ignore the impolite people--or I try to point out that they could have leveled their critique in a better way.
There are some truly bizarre things that I've encountered on Wikipedia (editing for almost 20 years now). Admins handwave blatant mistakes away by their friends, citing [[WP:NOTBURO]] and other such shenanigans. It seems to be getting worse over time.
Seems the nastier people are to contributors, the better the end product is for the 10000x more people reading it.
You know all those cruel piano teachers in Russia? But the audience actually wanted to hear the pianists later in life! It's like that... but collaborating on content, with NO CELEBRITIES :)
And the worst abuses come from moderators who are _encouraged_ to be abusive.
Rude and disrespectful are subjective. As a layperson learning biology for fun (e.g. Bob Sapolsky lectures) I often chuckle at how rude or shocking nature can be! I grimace at how nature videos (e.g. a pride of lions hunting a baby elephant) will garner comments like "you're sick for filming this!" or "do something to help!".
Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that microscopic particles (what we now know as bacteria) on the hands and body were causing women and babies to become infected during birth. He was considered a misinformation-spreading pariah for a quarter century until links were made between germs and diseases.
But for the 25 years it took the ideas to mature and reach mainstream, he was "toxic".
In simplest terms, ideas that threaten orthodoxy can be considered rude and disrespectful, and thus “toxic”.
So perhaps the definition of toxic needs more refinement, or toxicity isn't the right thing to be looking at, despite it sounding about right in everyday conversation.