>> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors
Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?
Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?
My most recent edit (a minor addition to a technical article) was instantaneously reverted as "suspected vandalism" by a bot, an unambiguous false positive. The bot seemed to think I was going to follow its instructions if I thought it was a false positive instead of finding that irritating and concluding that I should stop making edits if having them actually go through requires me to fight with a broken AI.
By the way, the bot will only revert an edit once, so you can undo that revert and the edit goes back in (at least until a human editor decides it should be reverted). The bot has available to it not just the change text and its placement in the existing article text, but also meta information such as the editor's account information (and I believe logged-out edits happen to get dinged more often simply because those are the major source of vandalizing edits).
To be fair I try to stay away from pop culture and politically sensitive topics.
There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. A shrinking pie forces cliquey political slugfests. It happened to IBM and can happen to StackOverflow/Wikipedia.
I hate it now. There's so much doxxing and meanness. There's also sizable contingents of propagandists in anything controversial. Most famously, pro-Israel Icewhiz, who creates hundreds of sockpuppets and harassed people IRL, but now more recently r/Palestine's sock farm. There's similar farms in trans issues or India-Pakistan.
The saddest part is that Wikipedia's original purpose was unbiased copyleft-style free knowledge.
LLMs have the potential to democratize access to knowledge more than any other technology. But they are an existential threat to editors that previously did this deep research manually and served as gatekeepers with the attendant social status.
As a result, there's a vitriolic hatred of any attempt to integrate LLMs into Wikipedia. Even if it's open-weights stuff running locally.
So, Google will continue to eat Wikipedia alive with AI summaries.
I hope Wikipedia is replaced by something AI-native run by a non-profit that has the interests of readers at heart.
What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it.
A lot of people do ask them not to do it.
Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them.
It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much easier than starting a blog.
"notability" means there are peer-reviewed/editorially controlled articles on the topic.
So, if I wanted to write an article on Gas Town, I couldn't. It got a lot of technical blogs and Arxiv preprints written about it by experts, but it won't be notable.
There has to be some mechanism of determining what should and shouldn't be usable as a source.
Ideological purity is enforced by the reliable source standard, not the notability standard. The Daily Stormer is unquestionably notable. And it has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer
> I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.
They're saying that main stream media sources are what can be used to define something is notable or not. The question isn't "Is the Daily Stormer" notable (it is), it's should the daily stormer be usable as a source to determine if something is notable or not (it shouldn't be, obviously).