Comments on: Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Wikipedia Anymore

By: Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

This is the problem with having an entrenched (ahem) moderation community whose keenest area of expertise is not knowledge but janitorship. The only thing I can think to compare it to in the context of software development is the barriers in place between creating a new free software project and getting it into the Debian archive (where the second step involves far more work on procedure than on obvious improvement to the software itself).

- Chris

By: Raul Carrillo Garrido aka metsuke

Raul Carrillo Garrido aka metsuke — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Because of this problems, the comunity is thinking about alternative netpedia format: http://contextopedia.metsuke.com/?page_id=3

Some of us are making it’s own pedia working in a similar way of blog-nets does, so everibody has the chance to express themselves. Only the “user” decides what is interesting o what wasn’t.

)S(

By: Nico Dietrich

Nico Dietrich — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Adam,
I experienced the same thing inside the german wikipedia (twice in two contributions), which made me quite sad. My motivation to contribute is definitely not rising by feeling like that...

Nico

By: Jama Poulsen

Jama Poulsen — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I've had some of the same experiences. My Wikipedia editing work has dropped significantly partly because of that.

One of the other serious problems with a lot of Wikipedia people is their (IMO) bias against alternative history views. Look eg. at the Jesuit / Opus Dei / Vatican articles, the CIA / ISI / Al Qaeda relations, or any other sensitive political matter for which there is significant evidence which is not considered politically correct at this time. NPOV (whatever that really means in each topic context) is sometimes used as a form of censorship to neutralize any harsh tones.

By: Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Getting a software package in Debian takes only finding a Debian developer who is interested. They will do all the work for you.

Now, becoming a Debian developer, that takes time, effort and competence, but IMO that's warranted. Not at all the same thing as the Wikipedia experience described above.

(Disclaimer: I am a Debian developer.)

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The only editting I succeeded with on Wikipedia recently, was reverting other peoples spam, and I couldn't figure out how to report that fully, so I suspect the vandals just reinstated it later.

However I think, like Debian, it has a need of procedures and policies, but Wikipedia itself needs to create an environment where "newbies" can readily know what they can effectively do, and how to do it.

Perhaps Debian is a poor comparison, because hopefully by the time someone gets to the point of discovering that they need a package that isn't included, they are familiar enough to know how to post a "request to package", where as Wikipedia lives and dies by how easy it is for people who know stuff, but don't know Wikipedia, can start to contribute. Where as people who don't "get Debian", can still build code from source, or other evil hacks, and get a useful system.

Of course it is highly likely a lot of Wikipedia editors don't know, what they don't know, or how important things they don't know about are. They capture the "Lloyds of London" as a coffeeshop, but 17th century London coffeeshops were important meeting places for the great and the good of British science during the same period.

The demand for references is fine, but they need a newbie "pending a reference" or similar, at least then people won't feel rejected.

I also find that Wikipedia has too much flux. One of the articles I follow was reasonably good and informative (hey I filled in the gaps, why wouldn't it be!), then someone who clearly had world class specialist medical knowledge of the topic** redid it and it became something quite exceptionally special, and last time I looked it was still better than I'd left it, but no where near its peak. Sure some of that is "subjective", but it looks to me like one of the world experts on the topic clearly found keeping it clean and tidy was too much work.

Simon

** I think I could probably narrow it down to two people, as there are probably only a dozen people with that much knowledge of the topic on the planet, and most of them aren't that Internet literate.