Can Wikipedia Survive? | Hacker News Reader

Can Wikipedia Survive?

nytimes.com

53 pointsdctoedt55 comments

I'm hypothesizing here, so I'm willing for someone with actual data to tell me otherwise, but I don't believe that the traditional desktop users have gone anywhere.

The massive increase in mobile traffic is coming from people who formerly didn't use the internet except when they had to. Mothers, cricketers, grandfathers, plumbers. All those people who you could never see hunched in front of a keyboard are now discovering the internet via their fancy status-symbol phones.

Which is cool and all, but importantly it means wikipedias editors, and desktop users in general, aren't reducing. There's as many of them as there ever were, and their growth rate probably hasn't slowed either. I imagine the venn diagram of "people inclined to edit an online encyclopedia" and "people who will find a mobile phone claustrophobic" is probably pretty much a perfect circle.

I agree that the number of mobile users isn't a factor in declining editor numbers, but the absolute number of editors is in serious decline. It's already evident that many lightly trafficked pages are not being updated. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...

As a Facebook stock owner, yes the desktop numbers are going down in general. They took a huge hit when traffic started moving to mobile and they weren't showing ads there yet, then a corresponding rise when they moved the ads to where the people are going. You can find it in their reports. Wikipedia is no doubt the same.

What is the relevance of you being a FB stock owner to the rest of your comment?

It presumably means s/he was paying closer attention than most.

Yeah, traditional desktop users who were "casual" are dropping the desktop for mobile. #DayJob is primarily used by non-technical people and we've actually lost a significant amount of traffic on the Desktop.

I'm talking based on user accounts that are still active after at least a year. [e.g. YoY, we'll see them switch from 100% Desktop to 100% Mobile in some cases.]

Its too hard to tell the difference on "newer" accounts but the share of Mobile to Desktop traffic is definitely moving in Mobile's favor.

One of the best, directly measured sources for this:

https://www.quantcast.com/wikia.com

Says that desktop is mostly flat, more than it is evaporating.

Wikia has a vast amount of traffic, as one of the top ~20 sites in the US. If you take their average monthly desktop numbers from August 1st 2013 to now, there has been zero decline.

Would this premise hold true for sites like Twitter and Facebook? Probably not. Social sites with photo sharing are likely far more prone to erosion on the desktop.

Wikia has a lot of content that is desktop gaming related. Does that skew their figures?

Personally, I just quit editing after 15 years (12 as an administrator) in protest at the deletion of good encyclopedic content. Frankly, I can see clearly why new editors don't want to become involved in Wikipedia - the community these days is positively toxic. I think, subconsciously, I was rather hoping someone would fix the problem and invite me back, but not only has the problem not been fixed but nobody seem to give a damn. There was a time when I even attended Wikimedia physical meetings with governments and academics and so forth. Well... no more: so long, and thanks for all the free edits.

My solution? Remove all the bullshit policies, reduce things back to a core of spirit-of-the-word driven basics, and then have a random selection of a panel of community judges (extra/uninvolved eyeballs) for anything at all that people want to dispute. This would do far better than the mob rule of yore, while lowering cognitive overhead and friction for new editors.

The press really loves to write pieces about how Wikipedia is in a constant state of disrepair. If you were to go off what's written about Wikipedia in the press, you'd think it was filled with child pornography and that the project was a horrible, miserable failure. That said,

"One board member, María Sefidari, warned that 'some communities have become so change-resistant and innovation-averse” that they risk staying “stuck in 2006 while the rest of the Internet is thinking about 2020 and the next three billion users.'"

..is probably the best quote from this article. Wikipedia has a new set of growing pains now that it's a fully-established project. It will never be done, but a lack of increase of new contributors, month-on-month, isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world for Wikipedia. A focus on long-term maintenance (which includes not pissing off long-term editors, as the article mentions) and mobile growth seems smart.

The English Wikipedia has a lot of contributors but smaller siblings such as new.wikipedia do not have this luxury. To be fair though, the problem isn't unique to Wikipedia as few people read and write in the language.

https://new.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=special:RecentCha...

Off topic, I get why ne.wikipedia.org is in Nepali, but why does new.wikipedia.org have different content in the same language?

new is nepal bhasa or NEWari which is the language of the Nepal valley (also commonly known as Kathmandu valley).

Ah, different language, same script. TIL.

There is Ranjana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_alphabet and Devnagari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari

From what I understand, language and alphabets are related but not the same. For example, you can write in Japanese with roman alphabets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese

Thus, it is possible to write in Newari (also known as Nepal Bhasa which literally translates to Nepal Language) in devnagari as well as ranjana.

I cannot read or write in Ranjana. I can read or write Devnagari.

If I were to go off only what I read on HN, I'd think Wikipedia was weak, completely flawed and inaccurate. In my experience, it's excellent - informative and free. But then I read it through a lens knowing that it's created by volunteers and may suffer graffiti, and I'm surprised more on HN don't do the same rather than cut it down.

The media are just happy to cut down any tall poppy with public recognition because it incites interest.

So as an experiment, about a year ago, I helped created this page [1][2] (it had been around for a while, but had been deleted a few times). Some editor keeps deleting it or redirecting it to "cold chills" which it isn't. It's also not ASMR.

I've never had any edit to WP last longer than 24 hours, so I was surprise some version of what I helped resurrect still around. It's been worked on, edited, and even had some warning flags placed on it. In general, it's an improvement over what I originally provided.

Trouble is, I can't tell if this is because this is a weird and obscure topic area, or because what I provided (with links to research papers) was good enough for some bot not to automatically submit for deletion. Some of my original phrases have even survived which is pretty amazing.

Contributing to WP is terrifying.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson

2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8190451

> In 2005, during Wikipedia’s peak years, there were months when more than 60 editors were made administrator — a position with special privileges in editing the English-language edition. For the past year, it has sometimes struggled to promote even one per month.

Or has Wikipedia reached a point of maturity where the group of contributors is largely stable and the core content written and refined?

Yeah, normally once an encyclopedia has been produced there is only a fraction of ongoing work.

Administrator used to be no big deal. Users got a small number of extra tools to help them do the work.

Now adminship is a big deal. Getting adminship is hard and has caused some editors to make sub-optimal choices. (See vandal patrol or the various admin-wannabe schemes.)

I think the lack of participation now has more to do with Wikipedia becoming mature, where it doesn't really need a lot more added, except actual new information.

There was a long period where most anyone with the inclination could find something to add. It's a lot harder now. Contributions are much more scrutinized now, and there are much more stringent requirements for citations. Which is good...that means that it is being refined, rather than just bulked up. But that takes less people.

Even if the organization were to go away (which doesn't seem at all likely), all the work that has gone into it is there for eternity. Others can build upon it.

Bingo. I'd edit wikipedia if it was needed, but it's just not needed. And you would too, and you over there, and that guy too. We're all standing by, but there's people doing it already. It has nothing to do with phones. There's a term for what this article is doing, but I forget the expression... it's trying to make a story out of nothing.

I've found editing Wikipedia (as a casual user) to be more daunting than it was five or so years ago, much in part due to figuring out the citation system. Also, uploading images (even those you own) was a headache that took a while to navigate.

I don't think though that people will all transition to mobile and forget how to edit markup on keyboards, as the article suggests ... at least not anytime soon.

I agree with both those criticisms. The citation templates are hard to find (I had to google them), bury their example usages, and you can't even find out if you did it wrong until the bot that rewrites the particular citation template you used comes by and fails. When I was uploading images I think I managed to get all the way to the last step of five before realizing I was supposed to be using wikimedia instead.

The actual user experience for citing should be "just give me the link". Then wikipedia should do the rest. Is it an arxiv link? That's a very common site; scrap the data. Is it a docid link? Ditto. Is it some random pdf? Do your best to parse out the title and authors.

Actually, even the URL might be overkill. A random bag of words about the paper (its title, or author and year, or just half-remembered fragments) could be more than enough. A naive search of google scholar with that bag of words, augmented with context from the surrounding article, could potentially have an excellent hit rate.

Crossref is a non-google site, sponsored by the publishers, that, in my opinion, is friendlier for automation. Anecdotally, I get better results from them, too.

> The actual user experience for citing should be "just give me the link". Then wikipedia should do the rest.

You're absolutely right. And Wikipedia's Visual Editor[1] does just that: http://i.imgur.com/0yM2koH.png http://i.imgur.com/opVTplc.png

It isn't perfect, but it's constantly being improved. It was at one point rolled out as the default editing experience on the English Wikipedia[2], but was made opt-in after feedback from the community[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor#History [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC

Their iOS app[1] looks promising, but the reviews seem to indicate it's still not there yet. Back in 2004, I had friends who grew addicted to casual browsing of Wikipedia in the browser. I'm not sure if that activity translates well to mobile browsers, but that it's probably a variety of factors: lack of integration with the device OS, longer average latency, more user actions to navigate content (accordion interface). As far as editing, not having input accessories for the markup syntax makes editing on mobile painful. Luckily, these problems all seem surmountable.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipedia-mobile/id324715238...

I also don't think that the problem is the rise of mobile devices here.

My perception is that Wikipedia has developed a culture that where new people are really discouraged from starting and contributing. The problem is both social and technological.

And while the MediaWiki software is open source, it forms a rather closed / restricted sub-area of open source software. They reinvent alot within their community. I'd be very happy if they did some steps like Drupal 8, integrating part of the Symfony 2 Framework.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia / MediaWiki are still very powerful and I don't see any viable alternative to them as of now. It was / is a highly successful project. Not many software projects grow so old and are still relevant.

We keep hearing this argument, usually from print authors who are struggling to remain relevant. Really, Wikipedia is in good shape, having reached the point where there are articles on most things of significance.

Let's take a look at the last 10 new articles on Wikipedia right now:

    EDULITE Institute 
    Air Reserve Component 
    New York Declaration on Forests 
    Daniel lopez lauber 
    Northeastern Conference (Wisconsin) 
    Embassy of the United States, Mexico City 
    RU.TV 
    Castle of Evil 
    Diagnosis of multiple sclerosis 
    Arlington Beardtime

Some of those subject might be worth an article, but it's not like Wikipedia really needs an article on any of those subjects. Most of the important stuff was covered in the first 500K articles.

Of course Wikipedia is hard to edit from a phone. Small screen devices are for mostly-output applications. Writing anything longer than a text message is hard on a phone. Editing documents is hard on a phone. Writing a footnoted paper on a phone or tablet is painful, even though you can now run Microsoft Word on Android devices. Does anyone on HN program from a phone except in dire emergencies? Writers use keyboards. Readers use tablets and phones.

Wikipedia's bureaucracy is somewhat complex, but it beats having some group of "moderators" with unquestionable authority. Editing Wikipedia has become daunting mostly because it's now expected that almost everything be cited. That's a good thing, because it prevents blog-type blithering. But many people aren't used to that, especially if they never went to a reasonably tough high school or college.

Is it really such a bad sign if the number of editors goes down after most content that many people know about has already been written and refined for a number of years?

I would be very surprised if the difficulty of writing wikipedia articles on 6" screens has anything to do with it.

But the quality of that refined content is not very good. There's still huge amounts of work that need to be done. But trying to do that is sometimes like walking through molasses.

So yes, it does matter.

The problem is that the quality is better than most people's expertise on the subject. Back when there were no articles on some subjects, many could make a contribution because many knew more than nothing about the subject.

In any event, I don't see how that relates to editing on a 6" screen.

Wikipedia needs people to check citations and provide citations.

That's really freaking hard on a mobile phone.

That's a good point.

As a note at the end of the article points out, Andrew Lih, the author of the article kindly submitted here, is someone who literally wrote the book about Wikipedia, namely the book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.[1] His book is one of the books I read as I transitioned from being a reader of Wikipedia to being an editor of Wikipedia in 2010.

I think the best point he made in the current article needs more emphasis in the article, and more discussion here on Hacker News. "The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes — the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in." Big time. The governance on Wikipedia is basically a mobocracy, and it is not producing good improvements to articles.

Contrary to what several comments posted earlier in this thread (while I was examining my Wikipedia watchlist) say, I don't think much of Wikipedia is very good at all yet. There was the famous study that suggested that Wikipedia was no worse (based on a sampling of articles in the study) than the Encyclopedia Britannica at that time, and plainly a typical Wikipedia article is better than a typical single-author website on the same topic somewhere on the Internet, but Wikipedia is actually a LOT worse than the content of other reference books college-educated people can find by consulting an academic library. Wikipedia currently wins reader attention because of the extreme convenience of doing ill-formed Google searches on the Internet as a whole and then examining whatever Wikipedia articles show up highest in the search results. Yes, that is a contribution to the quality of freely available online information. But remarkably few of the 5,000 most viewed articles on Wikipedia each week[2] are even up to "B class" on Wikipedia's very generous quality rating scale, and "good article" or "featured article" quality articles on highly viewed topics are even rarer.

I work at improving some of the high-page-view articles. Two of the 5,000 articles on the weekly top 5,000 list (they are there every week without fail) that are at "good article" quality level are articles that I helped improve. But the petty edit warring and endless wikilawyering about silly issues, often solely in the interest of pushing fringe points of view, has ruined a lot of Wikipedia's articles and has driven away many productive editors who are disgusted by all that interpersonal drama with unaccountable strangers.

What I would like to see tried is a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize, with careful work done on prize criteria and funding for a substantial prize by a philanthropist, to see if there is a better way to organize a crowd-sourced project to build a free, online encyclopedia, both as to software base and as to organizational structure. I suspect that there are two or three models of a new encyclopedia that could force Wikipedia to change or be left in the dust. Elon Musk could really make himself famous by trying to fund a prize like this, but he is by far not the only Silicon Valley entrepreneur who could afford to fund a meaningful prize in this space.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Wikipedia-Revolution-Nobodies-Ency...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pag...

I don't think your X Prize idea is good. The last thing we want is the people who are willing to donate time to editing to split between many competing sites. 10 wikipedias each a fifth the size would not be an improvement.

The WMF collects over $50 million each year in donations. Don't you think they would be best to use some of that money for the prize?

It's taken 15 years and while there are a huge number of articles, the quality of each is, as you say, rather poor. The question is why? Why so much effort, so much pain, for such a low-quality result? Why are you still working on improving articles. years later? I think it's because the wiki software itself, while allowing initially fast content creation, is very poor at creating quality content.

Wikipedia should integrate NLP querying so you can ask it questions and it can attempt/succeed at presenting relevant and useful information from its graph.

edit voice search for mobile as well

Good riddance. It is a hateful, bullying, propaganda pile.

Not all of it. Just the contentious stuff. If you want to learn about chlorophyll, for example, it's a great resource. The periodic table on Wiki is also really great. The rest that could be classified as editorials is somewhat troubling, though. That said, it is a product that has not had a rethink of its internals or structure in ~20 years? So it had a great run. Either become the next World Book or the first social encyclopedia, but trying to balance both has been a journey indeed.

It's not the keyboards that are the problem. Wikipedia will not survive because the site has a huge amount of software issues, the most notable being the wiki-software itself, which is almost 15 years old and simply not suited to the demands of the modern web. The software is the cause of almost every problem the site has (including bias, harassment, censorship, Gender Gap, lack of media support, hideous textbook like formatting and more) but the cult-like status attached to it ensures it cannot be meaningfully updated. Decline is inevitable. For more on these issues see this blog post [1]

Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. While it was dealing with "encyclopedic" topics it was fine, but now that the encyclopedia part is pretty much done, editors are building up pages that are actually news archives, a task the wiki software does not handle well.

As for the author's claims that that Wikipedia has no substantial competition -- it's coming. My site, Newslines, aims to take away all Wikipedia's news and biography pages, replacing Wikipedia's article-based writing system with a news event-driven approach that results in far less bias, and pages that readers can sort and filter. We even have video! You can see a couple of pages we are working on here [2][3]. So far our writers, who receive revenue share for their efforts, have added over 30,000 posts on 8000 different topics.

[1] http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ [2] http://newslines.org/dylann-roof/?order=ASC [3] http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC

... which is almost 15 years old and simply not suited to the demands of the modern web.

What are the demands of the modern web?

Insatiable lust for cat/kitten videos, probably.

How about video and document embedding for a start. Wikipedia has almost zero embedding, which is kind of useful when you want to see more about news events (video and document embedding directly in the page), or even see an actor's performance, or a trailer, or a music clip. Wikipedia looks and acts like a textbook on the web, instead of a purpose-designed site that includes all relevant media about a topic. People have just got so used to it that they can't imagine doing things another way.

Video and audio embedding can certainly be done (if not because of MediaWiki directly, through virtue of HTML5 alone... though I believe MW has plenty of its own scaffolding), and is present where necessary for things like pronunciation, song samples, speech excerpts and so on.

Not sure exactly what you mean by "document embedding". Is that some Xanadu-grade transclusion thing? If so, can't blame the WWW much for the lack of it.

Like Scribd or even including PDFs of source material. There's also a policy issue in that Wikipedia does not like primary sources, and prefers secondary sources.

I don't think that that's so much a policy "issue" as just the policy of an encyclopedia. They're made of editors, not researchers.

I'm particularly interested in how the MediaWiki software is the cause of harassment and gender inequity. I think there may be a good argument for it, but I'd love to hear what GP thinks.

One theory is that the wp interface is off-putting to most women and some men, which leads to a gender imbalance.

That gender imbalance leads to odd situations. Many wp arguments are won by the people who have the time to outlast their opponents. So, for a long time some rape scenes in films were described as sex scenes, and the rape word was being removed. That's pretty hostile.

I wrote a blog post on how Wikipedia's software choices cause the Gender Gap [1]. In short, the MediaWiki software gave power to the initial users of the software, who were mainly men. As the site grew, the software was not updated to devolve power to other groups, such as women and minorities, in part because the dominant group thought they were/are doing good work. In Wikipedia might is right and the end justifies the means. It's not just women, men find themselves routinely harassed on Wikipedia, and that's IMHO a fault of software, that doesn't have enough checks and balances on its various power structures. I came to realize this empirically because my site, which also crowdsources news and biographies, has up to 80% female participation. [1] http://newslines.org/blog/the-sexists-at-the-top-of-wikipedi...

You might like Federated Wiki http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors

I've seen Federated wiki. Distributed publishing is interesting, but I think the wiki format, and even the article-based format of wikis and news sites is not suited to news on the web. We are basically making a database on news events that can be sorted and filtered by the readers, and wikis are not good at on-page sorting etc.

Your site seems interesting as a tool to look up chronology and deep dive into information, but it seems to me that the focus is completely different to Wikipedia even when it comes specifically to news events.

If you see yourself as providing competition to Wikipedia in the news space, your aim is frankly off. I'm saying that not as criticism of your site, which seems interesting and might be useful, but because if I go back to your site in the future, it will be for entirely different purposes than the purposes I'd have for going to Wikipedia:

If I go to Wikipedia to look up a recent news event, what I expect is a summary, and condensed background, coupled with references for further reading. In other words: I expect the starts of encyclopaedic information about the subject. I don't expect an in depth timeline of events.

You are correct. We are not a direct competitor, but fit into a space between Wikipedia and news sites, with a bit of YouTube thrown in.

> My site, Newslines, aims to take away all Wikipedia's news and biography pages

"Take away" is an odd turn of phrase: You're of course free to mirror them and to update the mirrors as much as you like (within reason), but that won't remove them from Wikipedia's own servers, and any attempt to do that would rightly be seen as vandalism and stopped. Quickly.

Wikipedia is explicitly not a newspaper. It can be a source of information about recent, newsworthy events, but it isn't written with headlines in mind and editors are encouraged to wait a bit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS

As for biographies, Wikipedia articles have to adhere to stringent standards (too stringent, perhaps) by policy. This is something your site could profitably focus on: Provide a platform for information about living people that Wikipedia doesn't think it's worth the risk to host:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:BLP

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