Wikipedia’s Emergency
markbernstein.org
markbernstein.org
I don't see a problem with most links being nouns and noun phrases. Wikipedia is a reference, not a literary masterwork, and so consistency and the principle of least surprise should be followed. There's also no guideline that I know of that forbids the use of links creatively or intelligently for non-nouns, as long as they wouldn't negatively impact readability.
I also don't believe Wikipedia/Mediawiki has required link labels to match link targets in something like ten years. It's often desirable or necessary to do that purely for semantic reasons.
> we do not recommend putting verb phrases in link text
More generally, links should identify what they link to, and more often than not that will mean a noun phrase, not a verb phrase.
Wikipedia's core admins are pretty notorious for lording over the content they consider their domain in pretty unforgiving ways. Luckily, Wikipedia is an implementation of a specific type of platform, of which many free hosting options are readily available for your own wiki.
I think it's pretty naive to think that editorialization hasn't happened in some flavor throughout the history of the encyclopedia, as far back as Diderot. Those biases just happened to be engrained in different ways: platonism, the academy system, ethnic or national bigotry, etc.
As human knowledge expands, so comes the need for all willing people to contribute to our collective intelligence. There will always be stories of people gaming the system for their own end. MediaWiki as a platform has a revision system that allows us to review specific changes made by authors and revert them if they are in some way problematic or unacceptable.
So without getting around to the inscrutability of facts in general, I think it's preposterous to claim that Wikipedia faces an insurmountable problem due to its issues with taxonomy (a non-primary concern) or sexism (a concern relating to specific members of the community, and not of the knowledge being produced). So that being said, what's the point of this post?
Everyone has a bias. That much is taken for granted, right?
Now, the questions:
Is everyone equally biased?
Can anyone overcome bias?
Are all biases equally severe?
Are all biases bad?
Is it futile to attempt to overcome bias?
How you answer these questions will determine whether you think encyclopedias are even a valid enterprise, let alone your ideas on how to construct one. The point remains, however, that none of these questions are new, and bringing all of them up at once, implicitly or explicitly, every time the topic is discussed does nothing to move anything forwards.
It seems fundamental and exactly the kind of thing we need to get hammered out before anything else can begin, but it's really a pointless waste of time, like arguing about whether the physical world really exists every time you want to decide what to eat.
> Everyone has a bias. That much is taken for granted, right?
Do I smell a challenge? :)
Nobody has perfect knowledge, and many people are motivated in bad ways. But "everyone has a bias" is, I think, a subtle attack on the idea that anyone can actually know anything. Most philosophy of science courses would endorse some version of that view, but I don't.
I know that 2+2 is 4, and that's not biased. I know a lot of other things, too, that aren't biased.
There are people who will claim that, say, 2+2=4 is just a way for Western imperialists to get their way over others, or even that math is a figment of the imagination without correspondence to the real world (many math professors would defend this), and those people are wrong.
Hell, some people would claim that assuming there is a "real world" is biased, but they are wrong, too. I'm not going to prove it here in the comments, though.
2+2 is actually ... 11. Your bias to the base 10 system has been exposed.
I would ask this question instead: Is the editorial environment of Wikipedia specifically a place where the worst biases can flourish? Subtle edits over a long period of time from a malicious actor are one thing, but the same from someone who is simply oblivious to their bias on a set of topics is quite another. If the answer is yes, how in the heck can it be fixed?
I don't know that it can be fixed.
The good news, though, is that there's enough transparency to in most cases make it clear to the careful observer what's going on. On any politically-sensitive topic, the experienced wikipedia user eventually learns that you need to check the talk page and see what points of view are being deliberately and actively excluded from the main page. Checking the page history helps too - bad pages tend to have a lot of reverts with angry check-in comments.
The journal Nature disagrees.
Until I can get the same level of information (quantity wise) from another source, Wikipedia has immense value that fills a very large market gap -- even if they can't get their taxonomy of American authors quite right.
To say "Wikipedia’s about over" ignores the actual value of the site and greatly over-reacts to another mishap in the history of the user-run site.
Snort. Explain this then: Wikipedia's getting more views than ever, more edits than ever, and more editors than ever.
There are plenty of things broken in Wikipedia alright, but none of them fatal, least of all some misguided categorization (oh, the humanity!) by some two-bit hack with an axe to grind. Everybody on Wikipedia has their own point of view, and while some people manage to game the system for a while, Wikipedia's core strength is precisely that it's self-correcting in the long run.
• 'active editors' are stagnant to slightly declining globally for the last 3 years – and definitely down in EN and DE (largest) Wikipedias
• 'pageviews' growth has been slowing for a while, and since the start of 2013, total pageviews are down for 'all', EN, and DE
• 'edits per month' (on the secondary page) seems stagnant-to-very-slightly-improving globally, but definitely on the downtrend in EN
Sure, the the original article is an opinionated, possibly premature diagnosis of crisis... but your confident assertion of 'more activity than ever' isn't supported by those graphs!
Also, I think edits per month on EN and DE are slowly down simply because they're already so large and mature: these days most articles on most major topics that are, from a functional point of view, complete. This wasn't the case a few years ago, when even a layman could find things to fix everywhere and Wikipedia's article and edit counts were rocketing.
As for page views, my theory is that Google's Knowledge Graph has reduced the need for actually clicking through to WP, since most Google searches for basic Wikipedia-type info now come up with capsule summaries (often extracted from WP) that may well answer your question.
New editors don't assure Wikipedia's future unless they stay around; as of the last study I can find, 2010, retention had fallen to quite low numbers...
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Resul...
...and each year's cohort was sticking around less than the year before. I recognize much of this may be that, in the more-established Wikipedias, the core audience of potential editors has been found, and the fun/easy 'low-hanging fruit' content has been finished (or made less fun/approachable by policy).
But that means Wikipedia is in new territory, with fewer active and experienced editors over time, doing less-exciting maintenance and defense work, while search engines retain more 'reference' views and other competitive sites (especially in the Q&A space) improve their coverage and depth. Wikipedia needs positive attention to keep the forces of decay at bay; if the attentional indicators have shifted in the wrong direction, even very slightly for now, it risks nearing a tipping point into collapse.
That's like having the fastest-growing website on the internet - I got three views yesterday and 10 today, so I'm experiencing 330% growth!!! Statistics are meaningless without being scaled to something, in this case internet populations. I'm not about to write off wwikipedia, but your own graphs show the #s of editors and edits to the English language version stagnating over the last 2 years.
The decline in number/quality of editors is alarming, but what does it have to do with taxonomy? And how do the links fit into the picture?
TL;DR A random set of barely coherent assertions followed by OMG, Wikipedia is over
Although I do remember reading stories at one point about new contributors' edits getting frequently rolled back by Wikipedians with more permissions. That could be a barrier to entry, but it's unclear to me how much of a problem this really is.
It's amazing the wikipedia is as useful as it is given how utterly hostile it is to new contributors. I hope it continues to be useful and thrives, but I'm not so masochistic to actually fight to volunteer.
These are the sorts of losers that watch the RSS feeds of the little kingdom of bullshit they've carved out in their own corner of Wikipedia and relentlessly fight anyone trying to edit THEIR articles. Until Wikipedia gives some sort of weight to experts (paid perhaps?) instead of unemployed shut ins, the quality will continue to deteriorate.
Why does the Dewey Decimal System still have 10x as much space for Unitarianism as it does for all of Buddhism? [1] Well, think about what it would take to fix Dewey's initial biases post-hoc... either you have to get it exactly right the first time, or have a system that is designed to evolve.
It's unsurprising the wikipedia hive mind hasn't gotten it right. It's orthogonal to everything Wikipedia has generally done well. Seems like the best solution would be to have a separate taxonomy project that is overlaid on top of core wikipedia data by a set of flexible rules and not hardcoded in articles themselves.
[1] http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-sep03-04.html#dewey
Its a community site where decision is made through consensus, and consensus was to fix the problems. So where is the emergency, and why is this article trying to declare the site as doomed?
Unfortunately, I have no good solution to this problem. But then again, neither does Wikipedia.
Which is still deletionism.
I still get nuclear physics in "Nuclear Physics" article, amn't I?
I can't see how having more articles will make things worse.
Not at the same level of quality, because they also won't be deleting the nonsense crank pseudo-science version of "Nuclear Physics" which would confuse you terribly. Deleting crap is one of the best ways to make the project as a whole useful.
Bonus points: journalists and common folk will stop pretending everything in wikipedia is true like they do now.
You won't know which is which unless you already know enough to not need to look it up in a general reference such as Wikipedia. That's the point.
I personally find the next posting of the author much more revealing [1]. It is a discussion on how much meaning one can find in a simple sentence such as "____ is a Jewish-American politician" all the way to the suggestion that some by "tagging all the Jews in Wikipedia dream of a time when those lists might be of service to the police."
Just goes to illustrate how much subjectivity can be infused into a few words that are in itself unquestionable facts.
[1] http://www.markbernstein.org/May13/WikipediaAndTheJews.html
Edrogan said much the same thing about Twitter.
I gave up eventually. Last year they revoked my adminship for non-use, but I don't care, because I don't use it.
I was active for quite a while, but gave up eventually, under the crushing mind-numbness of endless layers of rules and procedures.
but i'm not a wikipedian.
Very strange article.
As an example of this bias, Wales appointed the rabid editor JayJG to the highest authority, the ArbCom in mid-2005. He was voted out in early 2006 - but Wales used his power to reappoint him any how. Most of Wales's political position pushing has been behind the scenes, but here it was blatantly obvious.
I got tired of this sort of thing and pulled back from Wikipedia around that time. I'm very skeptical of the idea that everything has changed since Wales has less power now though. It's kind of like when the military takes over in a coup, kills off or exiles the opposition, and then holds an election. Once you have sculpted the infrastructure enough to your advantage, you don't need to be as heavy-handed any more. I guess I would be one of the exiles (and some excellent editors threw in the towel over this sort of thing - very educated people who could write well).
http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-...