5 ms·

The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia

56 points by polm23 5y ago

wly_cdgr 5y ago
This study sounds like it's part of a strategy to establish corporate control of Wikipedia
- diskzero 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
        > 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revenue depends on the product being good Yes, and what happens when the content of Wikipedia, through neglect, gets out of date or (negligently or maliciously) wrong?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"
spoonjim 5y ago
The bigger Wikipedia gets, the less contribution is required, since the “static” content gets more and more covered.
- bshipp 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Historically underrepresented groups have entered the chat.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Well true, that's often not low hanging fruit, especially if its about historical figures from historically underrepresented groups, as you have to dig deeper to find information on them
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        > as you have to dig deeper to find information on them Not if you're a member of the historically underrepresented group. That's the point.
        bawolff 5y ago
        Being a member of the underrepresented group doesn't neccesarily imply you know where to find records non members don't or that the same type of records even exist. As they say, history is written by the victors, typically underrepresented groups weren't the victors.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
poxycat 5y ago
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 5y ago
  History is written by the most pompous. Ignore history. Buy guns.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    >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.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I would definitely take wikipedia politics over american politics. Wikipedia has its problems, but nobody there is violently storming the whitehouse.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 5y ago
cratermoon 5y ago
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".
- bawolff 5y ago
  Why not? That's how the rest of the world works. Almost every human endeavour forms a small world graph.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    How's that working out?
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Decently well? Society has its problems, but its had some pretty cool accomplishments along the way. More to the point, i think your argument would be more compelling if you had some examples of non-"small world graph" endeavours that worked out well. I'd love for some experiments, but i think we need some succesful experiments before saying that its a better model.
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        > Decently well? There are millions of oppressed, desperately poor, and disadvantage people who would scoff at that assessment.
m0llusk 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.
AdrianB1 5y ago
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.
pphysch 5y ago
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.
- bawolff 5y ago
  What's the alternative? Acknowledge that there is no Truth, and sit down and cry? That may be technically more correct, but i fail to see how one can build an encyclopedia under that view.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    An alternative is to admit that knowledge is social, and include a lot more data on who claims and interpretations are coming from. It should be a first class feature of such an encyclopedia that I can hover over any sentence/paragraph and immediately learn who is behind it, rather than herding cats with diffs and reference links. "Wrong" interpretations are perfectly useful data as long as I know who is making it.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      I don't think i have ever had a problem figuring out which citation corresponds to which sentence. Unless you mean which user added it? I fail to see what a potentially ephemeral pseudonom really tells me. Its not like you need to present a drivers license to edit wikipedia. Anyone can be anybody. But even ignoring that, i suppose i just don't agree. Seems like one big exercise in the genetic fallacy. I want people to show their work, and have their encyclopedic writing work be evaluated on its merits. I'm mistrustful of systems that put stock in people's reputations over what they actually do.
      - pphysch 5y ago
        Yes, it requires contributors to have more skin in the game. Zero-cost contribution is the main reason why some topics on Wikipedia are outright disinformation "contributed" by special interest groups. And don't get me started on the "regulatory capture" of power users...
theknocker 5y ago
"Loss"
bob229 5y ago
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
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
I don't know, but I wonder if the loss of these contributors is also why wikipedia became so biased.

56 points by polm23 5y ago

wly_cdgr 5y ago

This study sounds like it's part of a strategy to establish corporate control of Wikipedia

diskzero 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      > 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"

spoonjim 5y ago

The bigger Wikipedia gets, the less contribution is required, since the “static” content gets more and more covered.

bshipp 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Historically underrepresented groups have entered the chat.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Well true, that's often not low hanging fruit, especially if its about historical figures from historically underrepresented groups, as you have to dig deeper to find information on them
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      > as you have to dig deeper to find information on them Not if you're a member of the historically underrepresented group. That's the point.
      - bawolff 5y ago
        Being a member of the underrepresented group doesn't neccesarily imply you know where to find records non members don't or that the same type of records even exist. As they say, history is written by the victors, typically underrepresented groups weren't the victors.
jonnycomputer 5y ago

poxycat 5y ago

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 5y ago
History is written by the most pompous. Ignore history. Buy guns.
inglor_cz 5y ago
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 5y ago
  >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.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I would definitely take wikipedia politics over american politics. Wikipedia has its problems, but nobody there is violently storming the whitehouse.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago

cratermoon 5y ago

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".

bawolff 5y ago
Why not? That's how the rest of the world works. Almost every human endeavour forms a small world graph.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  How's that working out?
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Decently well? Society has its problems, but its had some pretty cool accomplishments along the way. More to the point, i think your argument would be more compelling if you had some examples of non-"small world graph" endeavours that worked out well. I'd love for some experiments, but i think we need some succesful experiments before saying that its a better model.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      > Decently well? There are millions of oppressed, desperately poor, and disadvantage people who would scoff at that assessment.

m0llusk 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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.

AdrianB1 5y ago

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.

pphysch 5y ago

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.

bawolff 5y ago
What's the alternative? Acknowledge that there is no Truth, and sit down and cry? That may be technically more correct, but i fail to see how one can build an encyclopedia under that view.
- pphysch 5y ago
  An alternative is to admit that knowledge is social, and include a lot more data on who claims and interpretations are coming from. It should be a first class feature of such an encyclopedia that I can hover over any sentence/paragraph and immediately learn who is behind it, rather than herding cats with diffs and reference links. "Wrong" interpretations are perfectly useful data as long as I know who is making it.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I don't think i have ever had a problem figuring out which citation corresponds to which sentence. Unless you mean which user added it? I fail to see what a potentially ephemeral pseudonom really tells me. Its not like you need to present a drivers license to edit wikipedia. Anyone can be anybody. But even ignoring that, i suppose i just don't agree. Seems like one big exercise in the genetic fallacy. I want people to show their work, and have their encyclopedic writing work be evaluated on its merits. I'm mistrustful of systems that put stock in people's reputations over what they actually do.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      Yes, it requires contributors to have more skin in the game. Zero-cost contribution is the main reason why some topics on Wikipedia are outright disinformation "contributed" by special interest groups. And don't get me started on the "regulatory capture" of power users...

theknocker 5y ago

"Loss"

bob229 5y ago

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

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

I don't know, but I wonder if the loss of these contributors is also why wikipedia became so biased.