Number of Wikipedia editors steadily declining

Well let's hope the forking happens sooner than later. I still can't believe I was told stating that a cat was an animal would require citation.

"I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum."

That won't matter much. Google loves the wikipedia.org domain so much, that any new site will need seriously hard work to get it even moving. In short, it won't have the traffic necessary to compete.

> At some point it gets harder to find stuff that you can include on pages about historical events, objects and people.

That, and the standards have risen. It used to be that there were plenty of unwritten articles, so throwing together articles from common knowledge and anecdote was "good enough". Nowadays, there's a lot more focus on high-quality referenced work -- and, while that's a lot more useful in the long run, it's also a lot harder to write. And the majority new users simply aren't up to the task. High-quality writing is hard, and crowdsourcing doesn't make it any easier.

What powers, specifically, do you think the WP elite are wielding against the newcomers?

The nice thing about WP is that there's no place to hide on it. Give us an example of an article where this happened, and the rough time it occurred, and let's find it and talk about it. Maybe there's a good reason you got RV'd, or maybe there's a great example of something pathological about WP editing that we can add to the discussion.

Yes, "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" is a much better headline than "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Improves" (when "better" is defined to be "attention grabbing").

Even the HN headline does this: "Number of Wikipedia editors steadily declining". Maybe it should be "Quality of Wikipedia articles steadily improving". Which is the cause? Which is the effect?

The article says "Indeed, Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix." This would indicate Wikipedia itself is gaining in popularity even as the WSJ headline implies it is going downhill (precipitously, I might add).

FWIIW, I've tossed in my 2c occasionally, but only as an anonymous contributor. I don't contribute enough to qualify as an editor, but sometimes a fact is wrong, needs clarification, or some English is rough. So, is there any metrics of anonymous contributions? Are they up? Are they down?

Beyond that, the article is full of anecdotes of Things That Went Wrong (but were corrected). How is that not a success story? If nothing went wrong, it would be because nothing was contributed. For the risk adverse, the "optimal" trade-off of risk vs. change suppresses all change (this is endemic in large corporations).

Then the rest of the article rolls out the same old criticisms of lack of credentials among Wikipedia editors.

Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it -- Chinese Proverb

In my experience, it is more likely to be the immaturity of the articles that is putting people off.

I have contributed a few edits to Wikipedia over the years. Why not, if I can usefully fill in a blank and it costs me mere seconds to help?

More recently, though, I've been finding subjects where the entire article was so hopelessly wrong that I wouldn't know where to begin fixing it, other than deleting it completely and starting over. I looked for an appropriate marker in one case that would at least suggest that the article as a whole did not represent a neutral point of view or was completely unsupported by any factual evidence, but after a few minutes trying to navigate Wikipedia's absurdly overcomplicated self-documentation and finding nothing but reasons I wasn't allowed to fix anything or contribute, I gave up and found something else to do with my time.

I wonder whether the neutral point of view principle isn't a significant part of the problem. Many of the pages I find most misleading are deadlocked, because no-one can agree on what a neutral point of view is.

Under those circumstances, perhaps it would be more helpful to do what civilised discussion has done since forever: present two articles (or sections in an article) that, by construction and intent, take opposing viewpoints. Let the reader see both sides of the debate, making the best case they can and with the best sources they can find to support their point of view, and let the reader decide. As long as it is very clear when there is a single article trying to present a subject neutrally and when the adversarial system is in use, I don't see why this would cause a problem, and it would break a lot of the deadlocks I've seen and get constructive editing going again.

That is part of the Rupert Murdoch controversy: many (all?) of the News Corp. properties are behind a paywall, but the paywall has a hole in it the size of Google. ;-) Google pays them (but not enough to stop them from complaining) and indexes their sites. They intentionally allow users coming from a Google search to enter their fiefdom, but throw up a paywall for direct links.

http://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+paywall+google...

They have a serious conundrum: they want to be indexed by Google so that they can attract visitors, but they want to be paid by subscriptions (paywall), which is more lucrative than advertisements (assuming they can convert visitors into subscribers).

Even if they closed the "referred by Google" hole, they would still have to allow the googlebot unfettered access in order to index their site. This would make the hole slightly more obscure, but it would not close it.

I'm guessing some of that is wrapped up in here - they seem to be doing much more than just a simple redesign: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

EDIT: Just noticed you can actually turn on their improvements by clicking the "Try Beta" link in the upper-right corner of the page. Seems really nice, actually.

Thought about that too. I think http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is similar enough in at least one respect: You describe the part of the world that you understand and know best. But maybe contributors concentrate their effords on their own pet project or spend their time on twitter.

Hopefully they'll help clean up Wiktionary. I downloaded the English dataset the other day and it's a mess. IIRC, less than 1/3 of the words are properly tagged as English words, and a significant fraction of the words aren't even rendered in the English character set.

The good news is that the editorial standards are extremely consistent, so it's easy to extract information. They also allow batch updates, so if I find an easy way to correct vast swaths of this data, I could send a batch update file once