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Comment by joshvm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

"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.

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

FTFY

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