Has Wikipedia Peaked? 484
An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year with no official statistics, an independent analysis reported Wednesday showed that activity in Wikipedia's community has been declining over the last six months. Editing is down 20% and new account creation is down 30%. After six years of rapid growth and more than 2 million articles, is Wikipedia's development now past its peak? Are Wikipedians simply running out of things to write about, or is the community collapsing under the weight of external vandalism and internal conflicts? A new collection of charts and graphs help to tell the tale."
Running Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I find it hard to imagine that given the diversity of things in the universe and then number of people on the planet, that there is nothing left to write about. Perhaps all the stright-forward, easy topics have been covered, but there are vast ranges of experience and knowledge still to be discovered. And after all, Wikipedia is a living thing -- nothing in it not of a historic nature can remain static for very long.
Frankly, I think everyone wants a breather.
Re:Running Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Or at least that is what I believe.
Re:Running Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but when I want to find the volume isotope shift of Gallium-69 II's hyperfine structure for the 4s5p triplet S_0 - 4s5p triplet P_0 transition, then I'm out of luck. So no, Wikipedia isn't running out of things to document, us geeks just haven't had the time to upload
Woah! (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you saying that because a computerized knowledge base, owned, operated, and edited by people with computers, has a lot of stuff about computers in it, that it must therefore have a lot of stuff about everything in it? What about needlepoint? String collecting? Mayan hunting techniques? No, my friend, there's a lot more stuff to wiki about.
They had pixels before us... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you saying that because a computerized knowledge base, owned, operated, and edited by people with computers, has a lot of stuff about computers in it, that it must therefore have a lot of stuff about everything in it? What about needlepoint?
Seems pretty well researched. Huh, lookadat... didn't know they had an "embroidery" category
Re:They had pixels before us... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's here: Wikipedia:Requested articles [wikipedia.org].
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Or should we look it up in Wikipedia?
Natural? (Score:5, Insightful)
Either way, I think this is a little over the top - there's still a million and one things to write about. Hell, if it has peaked - it's not going anywhere!
Re:Natural? (Score:5, Interesting)
I second that. As a "hobbiest-contributor" myself I have written or expanded around 10 specialist articles. There is not a lot more specialist knowledge I feel that I have to contribute to Wikipedia - hence I've not added anything in the last 6 months or so.
Re:Natural? (Score:5, Funny)
I second that. As a "hobbiest-contributor" myself I have written or expanded around 10 specialist articles. There is not a lot more specialist knowledge I feel that I have to contribute to Wikipedia - hence I've not added anything in the last 6 months or so.
Re:Natural? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Natural? (Score:5, Insightful)
The set of all human knowledge is near infinite in its breadth, but the subset of "notable" human knowledge, depending on how you define that, is much smaller. It would be expected that as the site matures, the new information being added would be more obscure, and there would be more battles about the notability of that information.
Re:Natural? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to trot out the tired old Pokemon example again, but it's so easily applied. There are tons of Wiki pages dedicated to describing every Pokemon, while Viva Pinata (another video game with tons of fictional animals) isn't allowed to have more than one page. And, of course, at the same time they're aggressively deleting the trivia section of movies, books, and games because trivia isn't "encyclopedic."
That all said, I do believe they need to encourage the creation and expansion of "encyclopedic" topics... there are tons of historical events and figures that have far too little coverage. But deleting content isn't the right way to go about it, not in my opinion. I say have hundreds of Pokemon pages, have thousands of them. But at the same time, make sure that your coverage of the important native American leader Weetamoo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weetamoo [wikipedia.org] ) has a full bio. (For example; there are tons of articles like this that are extremely important topics, but have too little coverage.)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Netcraft won'
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure some maths boffin will correct me here.
Wikiphobia (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Interesting)
One new article with comments from a long-timer and you'll be off to the races.
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, I can't even argue with them because it says things like "However, extreme summer humidity often boosts the heat index to around 110 F (43 C)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami,_Florida [wikipedia.org] Try as I might, I could find no information on historic heat indexes in Miami on the web. The best I could find was high-low temperature and humidity charts, and since the heat index deals with the temperature and humidity at any given moment, it isn't very useful for calculating the heat index after the fact. Especially if you want to find out how often it hits 110.
Just about everything I've looked up on Wikipedia in the last month has been someone's personal view with no facts to sustain it. As a starting point for research, I can't even say it's a good idea because things are stated as fact that are personal observation (anecdotes) or opinion, and that can quickly taint your view of whatever you are searching and lead you down a bad path.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Interesting)
Now add in the agendas of A, B and C and you get quite funny twists and "quotes". Bet I can prove with the help of the WHO and a few other "sources" that second hand smoking is actually good for your health?
Simply quoting a source is meaningless if you can't verify how good the source is.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As for your weather query, might I suggest weather underground's history
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia encourages censorship and deals with conflicts in a Nepotistic fashion - at least in my experience.
AIK
Re: (Score:2)
This would take some of the territorialism out of the equation by giving the die-hard a role in selecting which edits make it with a back up method of identifying really useful contributions vi
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Insightful)
If a piece of information is well-known but not part of a field that somebody would want to write a book about, then it won't ever appear in either of these things, so you can't source it. This is most common with the sort of basic, low-level knowledge that is passed around in communities. This also happens to be exactly the sort of information that Wikipedia should be collecting.
As people in the field say, "if you implement TCP to the specifications then you get something which doesn't work on the internet".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I've thought that, too. But just yesterday, I had yet another case of looking for something and getting the "no page yet" page inviting me to write it. My immediate reaction was "But I'm no expert on this". And, as so often happens, after digging the info out of a number of other places, I had the second reaction "Why don't I write the pag
It's accuracy, on the other hand (Score:5, Interesting)
--- PARAGRAPH FOR DEMOCRATS ---
Fox news started to edit it
--- PARAGRAPH FOR REPUBLICANS ---
CNN and BBC started editing it
Right now, a lot of articles are just plain dishonest. Just look up some controversial subjects. Contemporary forced subjugation and kidnapping children into slavery by muslims for example, or look at Bush's page that contains references to falsified news
Re:It's accuracy, on the other hand (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, I'm not even talking about abortion or rape or anything... look at the fight over "XOR" vs. "Exclusive-OR". Sheesh.
http://www.wikitruth.info/ [wikitruth.info] has some info... but don't take it's word on it. Give editing Wikipedia a shot and see the shitstorm it can raise.
Rantlet from a casual Wikipedia editor (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a casual Wikipedia editor -- I edit Wikipedia on and off, semi-regularly but certainly not enough to be part of any incrowd. I have never run into any shitstorms. In my impression, most of the people who keep running into conflicts are actively looking for them. The site you cite is a nice case in point -- the whole tone of it screams extreme, borderline-psycho
No (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd think that'd be a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I highly doubt it'll become a wasteland...
The answer is basically "No". (Score:5, Informative)
Request VfD on parent (Score:5, Funny)
The problem is "completed" articles (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, the C++ article was better than it is now a year ago. Looking at the history list, almost every edit is undone by someone else. Can the article be improved? Possibly, but the way to do that is not to allow anyone to edit it, then expect someone to put the time into undoing 95% of the edits... that's soul-destroying.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen that done. I've even done it myself. Problem is, much of the reverted content tends to be unencyclopedic, e.g. paragraphs which guide the reader into how to do things, and spelling tends to be argued over a lot, sometimes causing repeat
No such thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
But it'd be a bori
My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
People go around touting "Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia" in one discussion, and then in the next want to get rid or some article because "it's not encyclopedic." I guess I see my ideal Wikipedia as a complete collection. If someone writes a decent, complete article on something somewhat obscure, and it's deleted because it's not notable enough, that just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm just bitter and my view of Wikipedia doesn't agree with the majority? Don't know.
I am annoyed about how they're trying to rid of trivia sections. Those are some of the most interesting parts of an article if you ask me.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
It's more than this. Wikipedia seems to have shifted from a content creation phase, to a content editing phase.
I've noticed a lot over the past few weeks that more and more articles are being edited to remove things like trivia section, add citations, and trim things quite a bit. There's also been a big move to remove many images from the site that are deemed "unsafe", i.e. copyrighted, for whatever reason.
I've spoken with people who became disgruntled with Wikipedia. They had the usual concerns, which I personally deemed trivial. However, one thing that did catch my ear was their dislike of the Wikipedia admins, or super editors, or whatever they are called. The stories matched up and went something like this:
Administrators are less concerned about content than they are about the "quality" of that content. Quality usually means, spell checks, structure, copyrights, citations and general "encyclopedic worthiness" of the underlying material. One gets to be an administrator by doing things like, spell checking, minor editing, rearranging and moving articles, deleting "unworthy" articles, etc. There's also a great desire for articles to conform to the rules and polices of the site.
The complaints usually revolved around pedantic and often autocratic admins deleting entire articles or a series of articles on "unworthy" topics; say an anime series or a fairly geeky debate on memes. Often very interesting content, like trivia sections** are removed wholesale. It's usually the case that the admins have grouped together and implemented a new "policy" which justifies their actions, despite how every many editors might object.
I'm not overly familiar with the politics Wikipedia, so I can't personally attest to much of this. However, the tale has come to me in a pretty consistent fashion from a variety of sources; namely that Wikipedia is slowly but surely being taken over by a very anal retentive clique of "Wikicrats", and that the tone of the place is changing accordingly. It sounded a little hyperbolic at the time, but slowly I'm beginning to see changes in the tone of articles.
I think it's a shift that Wikipedia was probably always going to make. But it seems a pity that the place is to become burdened by rules, policies and general bureaucracy. Death by a thousand kilometers of red tape seems an ill fitting fate for a site that blossomed by a billion altruistic edits.
**Though personally, I do think a few trivia sections could do with trimming.
Re:My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
One of the most irritating aspects of the mass deletion is that the information isn't actually deleted as far as I know: it's just hidden from normal user view. Administrators can still read it.
Re:My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
On a serious note, maybe a sub-page of trivia for an article where the main article page randomly displays one trivia factoid, and if you're REALLY interested you can go to the trivia page?
That's what Wikia is (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe someone should start Wikitrivia, where every topic can have an unlimited amount of inane blather...
That's what Wikia really is. They have the Star Wars wiki, the Halo wiki, the Bioshock wiki, the Marvel Database, etc. It's all about monetizing fancruft.
Re:Why fancruft should be deleted... (Score:4, Interesting)
20% isn't exactly plateauing-out, but... (Score:2)
That loss of anonymity would cut down a lot of the spurious traffic, as would the reduction in the number and intensity of edit-wars (since there would be less need for editors to re-establish legitimate fact.)
if it is peaking (Score:4, Interesting)
that's because wikipedia benefits from the network effect far more than say google or yahoo. it is no small effort, but it is doable, to spider the web and compete with google or yahoo, and make a bid at becoming the defacto search standard instead of them. you need a platoon of programmers and a supply depot of big iron servers. but all that is required to do that is have a lot of cash
meanwhile, consider a hypothetical wikipedia competitor. you have to, somehow, remobilize millions of freelance editors and article contributors. cash can't do that, only passion can
all i'm saying is is that it is easier to bomb germany than it is to herd cats, because bombing germany just takes a lot of bombs and planes, but herding cats requires some sort of superhuman level of finesse no amount of money can buy
so if wikipedia is peaking, i think it is because wikipedia is maxing out on not its potential, but maxing out on the entire potential of its market segment. if wikipedia is peaking, it is not because interest is waning or a competitor is in sight, but simply because there is nowhere more to grow to. which is pretty impressive. wikipedia owns its space in the internet, and its not some subtle niche. its a huge and important market space. wikipedia is a massive success, by any measure
Spam analogy (Score:2, Insightful)
statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, "new user creation is down 30%" means that the number of users is still increasing, but the rate of increase is less. Which also means the rate of the rate of increase is now negative. Hey, how's that for a headline?
Deletionism (Score:5, Insightful)
This really is a pity because it's not as though there is a legitimate practical reason to make Wikipedia concise in any way. Even if there were, there would certainly be a better way to organize the effort than simply to have people going around deleting things. The biggest problem with self-selecting voluntary enforcers is that they're usually the last people who should be trusted to do such things.
People contribute voluntarily to spread knowledge and they may be biased or misleading but people who volunteer to delete others words are far more circumspect.
It is to push content and traffic to Wikia (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikia is a service that allows any niche group to create their own sort of "wikipedia" for their topic. And unlike Wikipedia, it is for-profit, and clearly belongs to Jimmy Wales.
Wales seeded the admin system on Wikipedia and continues to be influential in its direction. It is in his direct interest if Wikipedia takes the "notability" route to its logical conclusion--pushi
I partly blame the "validators" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I partly blame the "validators" (Score:5, Informative)
It's nearing "completion" (Score:4, Informative)
The days when e.g. you could discover that there was no article at all about the author Jessamyn West ("The Friendly Persuasion") and quickly throw in three paragraphs off the top of your head with a little bit of cross-checking, totally confident that you were improving Wikipedia, are gone.
Now, improving Wikipedia is hard work, and it's less fun, and it goes slowly.
In other words, it's now about quality, not quantity... and that's a Good Thing.
Statistics in context (Score:4, Informative)
As far as Wikipedia - it was a great idea by Larry Sanger, a "Web 2.0" encyclopedia built on wiki technology. This little R&D project by Sanger then gets taken over by the boss of the company, Jimbo Wales, who takes all the credit, and nowadays is concentrating on Wikia, while the project is being run by a mostly incompetent and increasingly nasty cabal. In a lot of ways, Wikipedia has survived despite the management due to Sanger's great idea and the normal user base. Right now it is successful because it is the only game in town, but I am quite sure that it will be knocked off the block by a competitor in the future.
well, obviously: It's Finished! (n/t) (Score:2)
Linda Mack and the Cabal (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not surprise to me that people are fed up with the likes of these and the duplicitous "Jimbo" Wales who claims to have an open encyclopedia. The problem is it only is only open to a few political extremists that have managed to get a foothold in the highest levels of adminstration and change phrases like "extrajudicial killing" or "assasination" to "targeted killing" or sex-trafficking to "human trafficking" to completely removed.
The "Human Rights in Israel" Article actually devotes a good part of its space to talking about why Amnesty International is actually anti-semitic for documenting violations Israel has made, and uses the lawyer that got OJ Simpson off a murder charge as the source!! I can't imagine why people would be fleeing this burning building in droves
Perhaps Citizendium is an answer (Score:2, Interesting)
Peaking is only natural. (Score:3, Interesting)
So, Radiohead's new album was announced about 10 days ago, and the In Rainbows article [wikipedia.org] makes Wikipedia look pretty "alive," if you ask me!
Wiki-entropy (Score:4, Interesting)
Wiki's great strength and great weakness has been its model. Anyone can contribute, but that then requires cops to police the anyones. Then who watches the watchers?
I read Wikipedia for articles regarding computer technologies and video games. On any other subject, it's often an inferior resource. Even further, I've found that most articles (which take the #1 Google spot) are plagiarized from the articles at Google spots 3-7.
For many topics, there are better specialized sources written by actual experts in the field, and not bitter grad students, and these are overshadowed by Wikipedia's prominence. This "decline" was long in the making.
What Wikipedia needs (Score:5, Insightful)
...is making it easier for people to start helping out. Decent discussion pages for starters. Right now they are plain wiki pages, relying on users to indent themselves to indicate whom they are replying to. They need proper methods for quoting and linking to individual posts. What is now called "archiving" (i.e., moving old comments to a separate page) wouldn't be so cumbersome anymore. As it is, you do it manually or with a program that parses the page. Silly.
A lot of other things confuse a newcomer as well. There are 9 policies [wikipedia.org] and 23 guidelines [wikipedia.org], each with a loong page of its own.
Uploading files isn't too simple either. (A lot of instructional text that would put anyone off.) Here is also one of many examples of poor separation between content and presentation. You specify a license by including the appropriate box on the description page of the file. It should be a flag, people!
Want to discuss something? First, you need to find out whether it should go on the Village pump [wikipedia.org] or the Request for comment [wikipedia.org].
Dispute? Gotta read up on negotiation [wikipedia.org], mediation [wikipedia.org] and arbitration [wikipedia.org]. I know I would sooner give up.
If you click on "Editing help [wikipedia.org]", you are greeted with one rudimentary page which probably don't cover what you want and tons of links to similar pages with overlapping content.
Explanations from a hardcore Wikipedian (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of Dragonfly's (the person who created those graphs) observations are fairly easy to explain, others require some knowledge of the site. Since I've been at Wikipedia (starting back in mid 2003) new article production has gone through 3 phases: (1) First it was super-linear. That is, each month, we produced slightly more new article than the previous month. Many people predicted that this would ultimately become exponential, and (2) eventually exponential growth is what we got. However, since last August, (3) that has mostly flattened out, to a relatively constant 40k-60k new article per month. I think the answer why is pretty obvious - all of the low-hanging fruit is long gone. When I started editing, there were lots of red links (links to articles that don't exist) that any non-expert might be able to churn out in 2 minutes. Many of the new articles I create nowadays [wikipedia.org] are highly esoteric, some of which I created after seeing them mentioned in journal papers I was peer reviewing. (Examples: Gustafson's law [wikipedia.org], Antigenic escape [wikipedia.org]).
As far as new account registration, that's a bit more complex to explain. First and most obviously, Wikipedia is not new anymore. We're not going to see the kind of new-user account registrations that we used to. But there's another, more complicated factor at work. For about 9 months (March to December 2006), there existed a technique to vandalize Wikipedia with impunity. You register lots of accounts, and then use each one to vandlize exactly once, log out, log back in with another accout and vandalize, etc. Mediawiki did not block your IP unless you attempted to register from a blocked account, so by editing with each one exactly once you avoided ever having your IP blocked. The only effective way to combat this was to have checkuser access (which I have, but I'm one of only about 10 people on the English Wikipedia who do) I filed a bug report, which was fixed in December 2006. I suspect that a lot of the drop-off in user account registration has to do with this bug being fixed. Registering 100 throw-away accounts was no longer effective, so people did not do it, therefore - I suspect- account registration went down.
Wikipedia's pagerank is its biggest problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Too much democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not the first time I had been frustrated with Wikipedia. Earlier, I had tried working at Citizendium, hoping to escape the endless vandalism and find some more reasonable people to deal with. At first things seemed promising, but then it was decided that all of the old Wikipedia articles would be deleted, which felt a lot like throwing out the baby with the bathwater (so much for being a fork), and then Larry Sanger turned out to be a little too much of a micro-manager for my taste. So, it was back to Wikipedia.
As I see it now, however, Wikipedia's main problem is not so much the vandalism, but that it is too much of a democracy. In such an environment, the average article can only be improved so far before it begins to degrade. It's not that too many cooks spoil the broth, but that's what happens when many (or most) of the cooks don't know what they're doing (or talking about). The problem becomes even more acute when hundreds of articles are involved that need to be organized into a coherent whole. You can see to it personally that the quality of one or more article is maintained, but as soon as you stop, then things start to slide downhill again.
If, on the other hand, Wikipedia were to become more of a meritocracy, then I have no doubt that things would improve considerably. I'm sure many Slashdotters can imagine ways to do that, but I think they would also agree that such measures would leave the project looking quite different. In fact, it would probably take all the fun out of it for most people. But then, what do we want Wikipedia to be: fun, or a place to find good articles with accurate information?
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd actually say that Wikipedia has been far more successful as an example of a collaborative Free product than Linux has. Wikipedia actually dominates the market now.
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd actually say that Wikipedia has been far more successful as an example of a collaborative Free product than Linux has. Wikipedia actually dominates the market now.
Not surprisingly, since the barrier for entry into Wikipedia is much lower. Collaboration in Linux requires some fairly specific knowledge if you are trying to do anything grander than test from an end user perspective. Wikipedia simply requires that you have something to add and a desire to comment.
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there are, many things. However, the Wikipedia editors have, in their blind rush to become a "real" encyclopedia, put up barriers of "notability". In practice this means that articles often get deleted if the editor doesn't consider them important ("notable").
Dead-tree encyclopedias have a bar of notability because they have limited size and primitive searching facilities (alphapetical order), so a non-notable article takes space which could be better used on something more important, while increasing the size makes the whole thing more expensive and harder to search. Wikipedia has in practice limitless size and advanced searching facilities (internal links and full text search), so adding an article always adds value.
There is the fundamental difference between online and dead-tree encyclopedias; it is a pity Wikipedia hasn't quite grasped this.
Multiple editors is needed for Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
I see the "notability" criteria as an effort to make it likely the articles will be cross checked.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider if Wikipedia contained a page on every sucky band ever formed by three teenagers in dad's garage. So now you have 300 articles titled some variance on "Rock Pwnage (band)". Who's every going to ever look them up? Ans
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that notability is far to often used as a wildcard to delete articles over topics the admin simply no clue about. I have seen this happening with a lot of articles on open source games, a whole bunch of them got deleted or threatened to be deleted, sometimes even with the topic locked afterwards (hint: if an article exists in many different languages and people are continually trying to recreate it, there might actually people interested in the topic). Now some month later the idiot admins seem to have been overturned and all the articles are back again. But doing uphill battles against admins just isn't fun. When a random idiot is doing vandalism that can be annoying enough, but when the admins turn out to be the bigger problem, something is fundamentally wrong.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're wrong. Notability is a very important restriction. And it will very rarely remove something that is actually important. In order to meet notability, somebody reliable needs to write something about the subject. That's an incredibly small hurdle to jump over. And it there to prevent any idiot from spreading lies. What's to stop someone from setting up a website and just randomly making up falsehoods?
Furthermore, to claim that Wikipedia is of unlimited size is incorrect. Oh, technically, a vast numbe
suggestion: tiered content (Score:4, Insightful)
Top-tier: notable, professional, encyclopedic, widely desired content
mid
mid
low
low
minutia
basically, have articles start at the bottom, and work their way up the tiers by community consent, edit history, and most importantly: internal consistentcy. This will allow a resurgence in interest in the concept. Each person on the planet can have their own minutia page on themselves, each and every party that happened, each and every minute detail of life can be cataloged - and those that become interesting, they go up the chain and eventually become Wikipedia articles.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I used to be a frequent contributor to Wikipedia, but having to justify every article I was really interested in editing to some powerhungry asshole out for an ego boost got really tiresome, so I
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Answers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Simple math gives the answer - and the answer is no.
Wikipedia can't hit a peak until the number of articles starts going down ... that's not going to happen until all contributions stop. A 50% decline in users adding stuff would still make for a growing wiki.
To put it into a typical slashdot perspective - if the number of new internet sites registered each day were to drop by 90%, the internet would STILL be growing ... just not as fast.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? If 50 articles are added and 500 are removed in some Wikiadmin's delitionist binge, the number of articles goes down by 450.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Answers (Score:5, Insightful)
Like an large organization, wikipedians who used to contribute have been replaced by web-bureaucrats. Like bureaucrats everywhere, efficiency and style is replaced by pointless efforts at standardization and supporting documents. Certainly, these are important, but they have reached the point where they are stifling ideas.
It's fine for me to say all this, but what's the solution? It's easy to condemn but hard to fix.
If Wikipedia wishes to fix all this, it must slash the number of those with administrator power. It should remove the focus on formulas and documentation. Let Wikipedia revert back to the "wild west" anything goes culture that first made it special. Wikipedia is not a reference, it's a starting point. Treating it like a genuine reference kills what makes it special.
And if it contains more pages about Simpsons episodes than social sciences, so what? It'll eventually work itself out like any open market. Jimbo and crew should just take their hands off, lean back, and see what happens.
It's held back by useless metaphors. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think Wikipedia suffers from being too limited in scope. Yeah, creating a free encyclopedia is great and all, but I'm not entirely convinced that's what the world really needs. It's good in that it provided some competition to Britannica, and forced them to open up some of their content, but where Wikipedia is most useful is where it goes well beyond any traditional "encyclopedia." Sadly, these tend to be the areas where Wikipedia bureaucrats and administrators are most likely to delete content.
Wikipedia has the potential to blow away the entire concept of an 'encyclopedia,' but it's held back by narrow-minded ideas of what 'encyclopedic' content is.
You see this "emulation complex" in a lot of projects. Bottom line: you can never be better than a thing you are trying to imitate. If you want to be better than it, you have to stop trying to be it. This goes for some parts of Linux desktops trying to emulate Windows, it goes for OpenOffice trying to be Microsoft Office, and it goes for Wikipedia trying to be a traditional encyclopedia.
Re:It's held back by useless metaphors. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is certainly one of the problems. For one thing, I suspect that instead of forbidding "original research", they should be providing an outlet for it... some place to work on figuring things out, where the "encylopedia" is used as a summary of findings.
A related problem: they're parasitic on print media publications, but over time those are guaranteed to become less important. What do you do if you want to talk about a subject that doesn't exist in the print media world yet?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it's greatest problem is that it is too useful and people are becoming to fussy and pedantic, and critical and anal and etc. Wikipedia is what it is, enjoy it and have fun.
Wikipe
Re:Answers (Score:5, Insightful)
When people read a wiki article and find that it's gone out of date or need new additions that person can potentially be the one to rectify the situation. If they read it and find that it knows as much or more than them, they of course won't have anything to add and won't contribute.
If people get tired of background politics and excess bureaucracy in wikipedia, they'll leave...which frees up the landscape, correcting the situation and so on and so forth.
There's a potential equilibrium here and a decline in contributions does not necessarily represent a fundamental change to the forces that maintain it, it's probably just normal fluctuation. I don't see anything replacing wikipedia or eliminating the benefit that is gained from its existence. I don't believe wikipedia has run out of money yet.
It's the Administrators! (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words - the abusive administrators and longstanding POV groups are finally driving so many people off of the project that they get to make it what they want to make it, nothing but a propaganda disaster.
Then again, they've shown how it goes [livejournal.com] time and again. I even had an experience in a Wiki administrator on Slashdot claiming he'd "look into" any reasonable issues - instead, he did exactly jack crap, kept whining about how the issues I brought were "old" or "nobody else would look at them." He eventually bailed from wikipedia completely [wikipedia.org] because of all the stupid bullshit [wikipedia.org] that's involved in wikipedia.
If you look at the history of railroaded users who tried to fix wikipedia from within the system, and instead were tarred as "trolls" and worse by the established assholes and POV pushers of the admin "community", you get an idea of what wikipedia really is.
Best quote ever:
Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.
Re:It's the Administrators! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a librarian and professional writer who has contributed to Wikipedia over the years, but have gotten tired of the bullshit created by other users. At this point I'm contributing more to other online open wiki projects. Wikipedia has lots of excellent content, but some pages just can't be changed because some people have staked them out as their turf and refuse to allow any edits. I know of pages that are clearly POV and inaccurate, but if I or anybody else tries to revise them and significantly change them, we'll be baited into violating the "three revert rule" or otherwise be harassed by the resident zealots.
Wikipedia itself has implemented some stupid policies and some unintentionally hilarious policies. The decision this year to start removing images from thousands of pages because of copyright concerns is just insanity to the nth degree. Whoever made this decision doesn't understand current copyright law, because their policy about images is even more draconian than the current draconian copyright law. Many images have been removed from pages that aren't violating any copyrights. But if Wikipedia admins want to piss on their product with stupid decisions like this, then they'll only drive more people away.
My favorite hilarious example of current Wikipedia stupidity is the warning tag attached to many pages that says "Trivia sections are discouraged by Wikipedia." Uh, guys, Wikipedia is primarily an encyclopedia about popular culture. Putting these warnings over trivia sections that won't be removed is just silly. The trivia sections are why people use Wikipedia. Another funny development is the proliferation of tagging of pages for being "stubs" and poorly sourced. Hello? After years of criticism, Wikipedia is just now getting self-conscious about its veracity? Funny!
Re:Answers (Score:5, Interesting)