Comment by alialkhatib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alialkhatib | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was also somewhat skeptical of the author's claim that the barrier to entry for Wikipedia editors was the editor itself. I've read a few papers concluding that Wikipedia contributions are declining because of the community pushing out people who don't understand the many rules that have been developed[1], or in other cases because editors have gotten into turf wars over articles they feel some sense of ownership over[2]. Meanwhile, I haven't read anything concluding that the editing environment was a strong deterrent (although I haven't been looking, so I could be willfully blind).

Edit: more articles identifying interpersonal friction as the leading factor deterring would-be editors [3,4]. At this point I'm suspicious of the author's due diligence in studying the problem, making the proposed solution more dubious.

[1] Suh, Bongwon, et al. "The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia." Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. ACM, 2009.

[2] Thom-Santelli, Jennifer, Dan R. Cosley, and Geri Gay. "What's mine is mine: territoriality in collaborative authoring." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2009.

[3] Kittur, Aniket, and Robert E. Kraut. "Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination." Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 2008.

[4] Halfaker, Aaron, Aniket Kittur, and John Riedl. "Don't bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work." Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration. ACM, 2011.

> editors have gotten into turf wars over articles they feel some sense of ownership over

That's exactly what killed my one and only attempt to substantially improve an article (not just typo-fixing and stuff):

The two guys with a lot of edits on that page couldn't stand someone else editing "their" article.

Sure, they tried to bring up superficial disagreements about the content, but that could have been resolved trivially. It was very obvious that they didn't want someone else on their lawn.

Unless Wikipedia fixes exactly that ownership problem, specifically, I doubt they can improve their attraction and retention rate of contributors.

And that is a social problem. I bet it will never be fixed.

You fix it by social engineering.

If you go in and blam an entire page, no doubt the original authors will cry foul; it probably took them a fair amount of time, even if what they wrote wasn't particularly good. It's also fairly rude without at least giving them a chance to improve sections.

Incremental editing will also give you a far stronger case when they get arsey, particularly if your inclusions are better than what was there already.

The key is trying to work with the grumpy people and reassure them that you're not trying to take their article away from them.

I tried to improve a very small section, about six or seven sentences. It was clearly wrong, I had lots of citations, but they preferred a wrong "my" article to a better "our article".

After the second or third edit, incorporating their feedback, someone called it "vandalism" and reverted everything.

Wikipedia is broken.

this hasn't been my experience at all, I guess it depends which areas you're contributing to. I've contributed to CS and art pages, with good success, I stay clear of opinion pages, or contentious topics.

There are certainly ways to make original authors justifiably upset, wikipedia definitely is a place where kindness pays dividends. While probably a factor in some cases, though, I don't think lack of socialization for new users is sufficient to explain what's going on.

I used to see more great collaborative experiences, now I see even incrementalism and conciliatory pleas get rebuffed.

I wouldn't think much of my (anecdotal) experiences, but with all these articles claiming the same thing, I'm willing to accept this might be a wider trend.

The key is trying to work with the grumpy people and reassure them that you're not trying to take their article away from them.

In my view, that right there is the problem with Wikipedia. Just because someone puts up content on a "commons" site does not give them sole ownership or even a moral claim to resist changes proposed by the those who come after them.

Why should the average Wikipedia user not have the chance to clearly see the differences of opinion (in terms of value of information) right on the article page itself? The answer is most likely because the Wikipedia UI is not designed for lucid presentation of such differences.

Wikipedia's (subconscious?) striving to be an authoritative source of information is in direct conflict with very nature of information (and human knowledge) to be non-self-consistent and ever evolving.

It would be technically trick to do though I guess you could have something like those little speech bubble symbols that they have alongside the articles on Medium which would give access to alternatives - and possibly allow voting/commenting on them in a Hacker News style.

The key problem is why bother trying to work with the grumpy people (...)?

FTFY

"It's also fairly rude without at least giving them a chance to improve sections."

To me, this only furthers and enhances problems with ownership. If my first approach to "collaborative editing" is "give the original writers a chance to improve" rather than "collaborate" and "edit", then it only enhances the perception or "reality" that that article belongs to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com