[HN Gopher] The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
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The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia
Author : polm23
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-09-26 11:16 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.semanticscholar.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.semanticscholar.org)
| spoonjim wrote:
| The bigger Wikipedia gets, the less contribution is required,
| since the "static" content gets more and more covered.
| bshipp wrote:
| that's been my impression as well. when I look at articles
| focused toward my field I struggle to figure out how I can
| contribute without needlessly adding complexity or excessive
| detail to--what amounts to--an encyclopedia entry. Wikipedia
| isn't done but a lot of the low hanging fruit has been plucked.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Historically underrepresented groups have entered the chat.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I think there is plenty room for more content, but a lot of it
| requires more than average level of expertise, or contributions
| from demographics that historically haven't contributed to
| Wikipedia.
| cratermoon wrote:
| It was never and can never be sustainable to depend on a small
| number of super-contributors for a "crowd-sourced" knowledge
| store.
|
| Maybe the Wikimedia Foundation should focus more on attracting
| and keeping a broader range and number of contributors instead of
| curating few it considered "good".
| bob229 wrote:
| Wikipedia is absolute garbage. If you ever read an article about
| something you were actually involved in you will realise how much
| of it and the media is just total made up tripe
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| This study sounds like it's part of a strategy to establish
| corporate control of Wikipedia
| diskzero wrote:
| I read the paper and I didn't come to that conclusion. Can you
| explain why you think that?
|
| Here is their stated purpose:
|
| _The primary objective of this work has been to bring forth
| the issue of the growing depletion of editors, especially the
| experienced editors in Wikipedia._
|
| One may be able to take their data and then determine if
| certain editors are near the quitting threshold. The data may
| also reveal operational and environmental conditions that could
| be changed to limit the loss of experienced editor.
| cratermoon wrote:
| From the abstract:
|
| > a major concern for not only the future of this platform
| but also for several industry-scale information retrieval
| systems such as Siri, Alexa which depend on Wikipedia as
| knowledge store.
|
| That doesn't imply that the paper is advocating for it, but
| given that Apple and Amazon now have built products on top
| Wikipedia, their bottom line depends on it. It's entirely
| reasonable to wonder if they would prefer to have more
| influence and control over it. Whether or not it was ever a
| good idea for Alexa and Siri to have a dependency on
| Wikipedia is a moot point. They do now, and it wouldn't
| surprise me to see them wanting to take an active part in
| keeping Wikipedia fresh.
|
| Of course, because their revenue depends on it, they probably
| would want more control. In the same way the Amazon is
| working to exercise more control over the Rust language,
| Apple or Amazon could decide that taking over Wikipedia is
| the right move to protect profits.
| geofft wrote:
| > _Of course, because their revenue depends on it, they
| probably would want more control._
|
| I don't think this follows. They could have all the control
| they wanted if they set up their own product, but their
| revenue doesn't depend on control, their revenue depends on
| the product being good. It would take a lot of work to make
| your own Wikipedia-alike; it would take a lot of work to
| even start with the current Wikipedia (which they legally
| can, since its license permits commercial use) and keep it
| up to date.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > their revenue depends on the product being good
|
| Yes, and what happens when the content of Wikipedia,
| through neglect, gets out of date or (negligently or
| maliciously) wrong? Imagine the following:
|
| User: "Siri, who is the president of North Macedonia?"
|
| Siri: "Macedonia is a geographic and administrative
| region of Greece, in the southern Balkans"
| m0llusk wrote:
| There is plenty of room for more content but deletion focused
| contributors remove whole classes of articles and tend to turn
| off whole groups of contributors in the process. The biggest
| challenge for Wikipedia now is to find some way to tame the rise
| of deletion as a form of contribution.
| crmrc114 wrote:
| Yep, had plenty of bespoke technical pages that explained some
| pretty involved network infrastructure from the 90s and various
| hardware families outside Cisco. The delete party would come in
| like locust and nuke all your work citing all forms of wikilaw.
| I just can't be bothered. Internet archive and EFF get my money
| each month. Not the wiki foundation.
| geofft wrote:
| Not to defend Wikipedia at all (and they certainly should not
| get your money), but, the solution that Wikipedia themselves
| would advocate is that you should publish those explanations
| on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it.
| That also means that the publications are under your control
| and yours alone and nobody can come in and delete them.
|
| It's pretty great that Wikipedia is a centralized source of
| information, but I do sort of lament the decline of personal
| web sites on GeoCities or university web hosts or whatever.
| ratww wrote:
| _> the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is
| that you should publish those explanations on some site of
| your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it_
|
| The problem with "deletionism" is not lack of sources and
| citations. It's the fact some moderators don't want certain
| material there. Creating sources is not a guarantee you'll
| be able to add them back, quite the opposite.
|
| In the past I've seen purges of all kinds of well-sourced
| material: law, electric engineering, literature, important
| CS/engineering figures. It's never because of lack of
| sources, it's always some subjective rule.
|
| Actually, I've seen "the content is already available in
| another website, why do we need it here?" being be used as
| an argument against reinstating some very uncontroversial
| articles.
| pphysch wrote:
| Part of the problem is that philosophically, Wikipedia wants to
| pretend that contributors are "thin" interfaces for pure
| knowledge. That there is a well-defined set of "reliable sources"
| and all contributors have to do is summarize and create
| hyperlinks to them.
|
| Not surprising given the ~Objectivist philosophies of its
| creators.
| theknocker wrote:
| "Loss"
| poxycat wrote:
| Having contributed to the Danish Wikipedia, I was astounded by
| the arrogance and the accusations by the other contributors/mods.
| That was what made me not contribute anymore.
| darig wrote:
| History is written by the most pompous.
|
| Ignore history. Buy guns.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is nothing short of astounding how small amounts of power
| corrupt otherwise intelligent people.
|
| Sometimes I despair at the state of democratic politics, but
| looking at the edit wars of Wikipedia, it could have been
| worse. So much pettiness for nothing.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >So much pettiness for nothing.
|
| well as the saying goes, 'the fights are so fierce because
| the stakes are so low', or slightly more technically 'In any
| dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to
| the value of the issues at stake'. Wikipedia is like a
| breeding ground for Girardian terror with people who tend to
| be very homogenous all competing for very similar things
| which often are only relevant because someone else wants to
| exercise control over them. Only place worse might be reddit
| moderation.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| As a long time, low volume contributor, I see 2 explanations for
| what happens:
|
| 1. There is not a lot to contribute as a lot of matters are
| already covered. This is not a bad thing at all.
|
| 2. Moderators do a very bad job. Last year I created an entire
| article about a popular vehicle, it took 6 months to be published
| and it was just about a page long with solid references. At one
| time it was rejected because it had "not enough external links",
| so I added half a dozen links to the dealers selling that
| vehicle, on top of the original manufacturer page. This
| discourages contributors and it is a serios problem.
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(page generated 2021-09-26 23:01 UTC)