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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The point is that that fundamental principle seems to be ignored by people that prefer to bicker over the rules rather than to be otherwise productive:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596682

And that this in turn is what drives editors away. So it very much supports my point.

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Wikipedia at this point is one of the primary sources for everything on the internet. At the early days of wikipedia, you could pick any topic and there would be major articles unwritten. It was far best to have some article than a great article. I can't comment exactly on the editor situation of the wiki, but it's to be expected a shift to more specialized and aggressive "curation" of articles, specially of more solidified topics. Wikipedia's fantastic performance contradicts this argument.

> Wikipedia at this point is one of the primary sources for everything on the internet.

That is explicitly what it isn't, anything but that.

> I can't comment exactly on the editor situation of the wiki, but it's to be expected a shift to more specialized and aggressive "curation" of articles, specially of more solidified topics. Wikipedia's fantastic performance contradicts this argument.

Wikipedia would still be a fantastic resource if nobody contributed to it from today forward. But that does not mean it couldn't be a whole lot better without the army of lawyer wannabes that are in a tug of war over who gets to have the most power over others by citing policies until the cows come home.

Lots of long time contributors have left because of this and the exodus is far from over. I agree that there is an expected shift to curation but the fantastic performance of wikipedia is not in any way evidence for there not being a significant negative undercurrent at work.

That's just evidence of how good the concept originally was and how much momentum it has built up.

Any kind of success will attract two kinds of people: those that wish to contribute and those that see it as a means to their personal ends, to get a piece of that success. Since wikipedia is not big on credit for contributions the only place where people craving for recognition get to achieve their fix is in becoming 'editors', and unfortunately the motivations of those editors are not always pure.

See elsewhere in this thread for some of the more bizarre displays of such behavior.

Google uses it for their semantic searches and Apple/Microsoft use it for their personal assistants. So this idea that Wikipedia isn't a primary source of information is nonsense. It is.

Until it stops being the first search result for the majority of "typical" searches it will remain a primary source of information.

I think you're confusing the parent's use of "primary" + "source" with the lexical item "primary source". The parent presumably meant "one of the most main sources [to use as one's only or first point of research]".

Sort of separately, but as threeseed points out, Wikipedia is frequently used as a corpus for primary research, so technically it's that kind of "primary source" too.

Your point seems limited to the inclusionist / deletionist discussion.

But you don't address the problems that some good faith editors have with making edits to improve the project.

These problems include over-zealous reverts by people making rapid automatic edits -- sometimes in a misguided attempt to show they "work hard" is a drive for adminship; page ownership and the accusations of bad faith that go with that (BDR fails hard when you have a group owning a page).

Wikipedia has strict socking policies so most experienced editors never try making a new account to edit, but I recommend that any experienced wikipedia edit tries this at least once a year. (And socking is allowed in this case because IAR)

You're making leaps of logic based on the occasional HN anecdote. Numbers have been in decline since 2007, what percentage of those left over bickering about rules? Do you have any evidence for this given that IAR has been in place as a core principle throughout?

IAR can be and indeed is invoked all the time, making Wikipedia a bad example of how strict rule adherence stifles a community. It was quite a simple point that needn't warrant downvotes, italics and so many HN searches.

> Do you have any evidence for this given that IAR has been in place as a core principle throughout?

> It was quite a simple point that needn't warrant downvotes, italics and so many HN searches.

You ask for more evidence in the same comment in which you rant against 'so many HN searches', do you notice the inconsistency there?

Happy to continue to debate this point (possibly on another medium?) but no, a comment 437 days ago on HN saying "I once tried to edit but was reverted" is not evidence that too many rules have "murdered wikipedia", your original contention with which I took issue.

Can you provide any on-WP examples of people using IAR sucessfully?

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