User:Daniel Christensen/decline

There is a decline

 * Aug 4, 2009
 * Nov 25, 2009
 * Having said that, I am not keen at all on them removing 'minor' entries. Very often they're the main reason for seaking out Wiki in the first place. The web is loaded with thousands of articles on the big stuff, so we don't need Wiki for those.
 * I jacked it in when I realised that properly referenced, accurate information from people who actually work in the field is ``original research'' and forbidden, while random crap from twelve-year olds whose references are other web sites written by children are just fine.
 * All these anonymous sites are for "entertainment purposes" only.
 * It's a fact of life that page creation is much more intensive than curation. So much of Wikipedia is now, relatively speaking, "finished" that you'd expect the number of real edits to decline.


 * March 3, 2010

Mahalo

Decline is good

 * Nov 25 UK one
 * Wiki doesn't need hundreds of thousands of editiors, so the 'drop-outs', if that's what they are, will not be missed.
 * Wikipedia doesn't need hordes of editors arguing it out, as long as the editors who are left are the intelligent ones...
 * Maybe the lack of editors means that WP now contains all knowledge.
 * Personally, I think that the fewer editors there are (depending on their level of commitment and willingness to collaborate) the easier it'll be to improve Wikipedia. Many hands make light work, but if you get enough chefs together sooner or later someone's going to try to sneak a meatloaf into the broth.
 * As for the growing numbers leaving the site, I suspect it might actually better off as a result. Wikipedia worked better when it was smaller; a larger 'community' is more prone to dispute and division. Besides, as Wikipedia has grown, there's less easy work to do; all of the obvious essential articles have been written. Ultimately, Wikipedia doesn't need as many editors as it used to; and if the ones who are leaving are the kind of 'wiki-warriors' I describe above,[(see ignore it)] while the ones who are staying are those like me who are more interested in the quiet business of improvement and administration, it might all be for the best.
 * But the lower number of editors may also be a sign of improvement. In the past you did not have to provide references so carefully, so you could tap away at the keyboard happily adding guesswork and private hypotheses. These days it's not as easy - in many cases, the extra effort required to look up a reference probably separates the wheat from the chaff.

corrupt

 * UK one
 * Wikipedia is pants, it's run by freaks who lord over it with their admin powers. Plus, pages about fictional characters are generally large than pages about real life events or places. Mind boggling.
 * I've been a Wikipedia editor since 2003 and I was an admin from 2004 until I resigned in 2009. Wikipedia has indeed changed a lot since the early days, and not always for the better, but there's a couple of issues that people here haven't really picked up on.

The first is politics. By the time I quit as an admin I was utterly disgusted by the corruption and backbiting behind the scenes, particularly among admins. There's a lot that usually doesn't see the light of day among non-admins, particularly on the admins' IRC channel. Too many of those at the top level have lost sight of Wikipedia's core goal of building an encyclopedia - to them, it's a political power trip. The current arbitration committee, for instance, is an utter disgrace, deeply discredited by resignations, scandals, power-grabs and overtly political decision-making.

The second is an unintended consequence of Wikipedia's success. It's now routinely targeted by cranks and interest groups who've taken effective control of articles or even entire topic areas. The example of the Israel lobby has been mentioned above, but there are other groups who are much worse, especially the ultra-nationalists; the Armenian and Iranian nationalists are among the worst, since they're actively dangerous. I know of editors who have received physical threats offline - that is, someone went to the trouble of tracking down their physical location - as a consequence of editing articles.

Wikipedia is dreadful at dealing with such problems; I found first-hand that most admins don't want to know (even if the person asking for help is a fellow admin!), and many are afraid of the personal consequences of getting involved. The current "quality assurance" drive is a joke, as it won't make any difference if the problem editors aren't being tackled at the same time. Wikipedia has got itself into a situation where those who shout loudest and are best able to organise can effectively take control of articles or topic areas and drive out anyone who doesn't agree with them, regardless of the merits. A lot of editors have quit simply because they find that intolerable. Who could blame them?

OR
UK:
 * For example I created an article about a particular marque of car which is not widely known, being very rare. However I used to own one, belonged to its owners club and know quite a few others who own one as well. Nearly all of the knowledge about this car is embodied in this group of people - there are no references to it that one can cite, because it's never been worth writing a book about.


 * Now the article is blighted by a "doesn't cite any sources" tag and queued for deletion. But everything it contains is a fact, and obscure as it may be, it does represent a tiny nugget of true human knowledge that will just disappear. The same scenario is being played out all over WP, so thousands of articles will suffer this fate. The original goal of 'creating a repository for all human knowledge' has been lost. While some will argue that it's no great loss that these kinds of articles will go (I'm not an enthusiast for hagiographic fan pages myself, but on the other hand they do little harm), one of the compelling things about WP in the early days was that obscure and little known subjects that would never be included in a 'real' encyclopaedia could finally get a fair shake - and why not? The idea that 'WP is not paper' also seems to have been lost.


 * For a few years I wrote articles for wikipedia, mostly in the area I do research in. I've written articles for "real" encyclopedias too, and it is far less work than for wikipedia. People on wikipedia expect far more referencing, even non-contentious statements that no reasonable person would doubt. There are so many really ignorant people on wikipedia that a good article, one up to academic standards is soon degraded by the contributions of people who have never read a reference work, let alone written one. It winds up being impossible to keep contributing meaningfully because the time requirements to keep the totally uninformed from "improving" that which one has written consumes all the time that could be spent writing new articles. Mostly I check into wikipedia now to see if anyone has vandalized the article about me.

what's better
UK:
 * The sad thing is not that Wikipedia is poor quality but that there is not really much else out there which is much better.

DEFENSE!!!!!
UK ONE!!!!
 * Wow, this is depressing. Guys, it's a fucking FREE encyclopedia. There are thousands of featured articles which are perfect overview (and even in-depth) sources and references of knowledge. The site has been built by anonymous volounteers in their spare time for free, and there isn't a single ad on there. Of course it isn't perfect - it's a human system. Stop hating something that is inherently good.


 * The net effect has been to make WP more useful in the sciences and facts areas, and less useful in the history and geopolitics areas. For the latter, I basically use it as a starting point and list of references. For the former, I have found it is rarely "wrong" when looking for as much detail as the layman usually wants.

ignore it
UK:
 * unfortunately, it has to be said, many of Wikipedia's users aren't there to improve it, but simply delight in having petty arguments and playing politics for its own sake. Many are also more interested in promoting their own personal cause than working together to achieve a 'consensus'. But no one forces you to interact with such people, and it's perfectly possible to have an enjoyable time working on Wikipedia while ignoring them entirely.

wtf?
UK:
 * Reputation technology will save Wikipedia.


 * Reputation is gained by creating edits that survive. Reputation is gained by making edits that others rate positively and do so with coherence of the ratings of others--and if you can stretch you minds high-levels of coherence between raters of ratings and even higher. Reputation mining is a complex field but it is possible to mine out quality from anonymous edits (and such things as admin decisions).


 * Imagine if that recommend button next to this comment had its information used to give a reputation next to future comments by a commenter (passed on their past ones). Imagine if allowed several judgments (quality of argument, writing, relevance, intelligent opposition). Imagine your own creating of such evaluations was then used to assess to rate your rating of reputation. That coherences between your and other's judgments were extracted (people's judgments about writing quality cohere). Hidden away there is information latent in anonymous contributions that can be turned into reputation about the quality of those contributions.


 * That will save Wikipedia.