What is the life expectancy of Wikipedia?

1) It has a scandal-prone structure, from the Board of Trustees right down to "anyone can edit" — which includes an anon editing an article on Seigenthaler that sat there for four months.

2) The person most closely associated with Wikipedia loves his celebrity status but prefers to spin away over Wikipedia's problems rather than deal with them.

3) The social networking model, from Wikipedia, to Orkut in Brazil, to Napster, Grokster, and YouTube and copyright, is headed for a more restrictive legal environment.

4) To the extent that any sort of wiki-type "encyclopedia" survives, it will probably have to go with non-anonymous editing. Examples are Citizendium, and Google's Knol.

5) The funds from donations will not be sufficient to sustain the needs of the Wikimedia Foundation. If Google is serious about Knol, it may even be too late to start showing ads on Wikipedia. Google is not likely to rank Wikipedia well if it competes with Knol.

6) The mainstream media is losing its infatuation with Wikipedia.

I give it three more years.

Running out of funds to support the server farm is probably what will kill Wikipedia. They can dispense with all paid staff with the possible exception of the guy who tends the server farm and keeps the operating system running.

I hate to disappoint you, but the GFDL (almost)
ensures WP's immortality. Even supposing the WMF
were to crash and burn, the someone would copy
the whole thing elsewhere and continue on, albeit
quite likely with a different management, at least.

Daniel, I don't think it will be a "life" versus "death" sort of situation. I honestly believe (barring an enormous court- or government-ordered shut-down), that Wikipedia.org will exist as an encyclopedia for a long, long time. However, what we can hope for is that it begins to resemble the recent history of Dmoz.org.

That is, it will likely end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Greg

Two and a half, tops.

I believe you are spot on with your bullet points, Daniel, however, greatly optimistic/conservative with your timeline. I look at it from a legal initiative and thesis; ergo, the speed at which the model must change is probably closer to 12 months. Having said that, a sea change will take place within 18 months; most likely in the form of a merger and / or takeover of the existing portfolio of articles.

I fully expect KNOL to be the most likely candidate for the beneficial ownership of the project. Google has the best math and the capital to do things right; I believe they will step up with either Apple or Microsoft, or both, and make it a whole package for all lifestyles: a social and educational platform. They will staff up professionals to take over certain accounts / articles and set them up as projects.

The beginning is the end is the beginning, again.

That's kinda the point (nevermind the fact that the GFDL is probably not enforceable). Any sane new management wouldn't emulate the status quo. They probably wouldn't copy the many shit articles, and they certainly wouldn't harass expertise while putting valuable content into the hands of anyone with a browser and a POV.

Why isn't GDFL enforceable??? It's not like someone can revoke their GDFL status.


Also, which will survive longer: Wikipedia or Conservapedia?

No one can revoke, but the things that the GFDL purports to do (require disclosure of authorship, including the same GFDL license in derivative works) are probably unenforceable. This is a problem with open source licenses generally--they haven't been definitively tested under US law. It's especially an issue for Wikipedia because of the GFDL's wacky terms and frankly poor disclosure of the agreement (compared to the clickwrap that usually accompanies GPL programs).

Insofar that the license works, they work through contract law (not copyright infringement), and so damages would have to be proved for recovery, but because the numerous authors retain their copyright, Wikipedia doesn't seem to have standing to sue. Contributers would have to sue.

Not a big deal, perhaps, but if one wanted to modify a Wikipedia article, but refuse to release it under the GFDL, there's a good chance no one could do anything about it.


I wouldn't be too surprised if Conservapedia outlives the Wikipedia Foundation, and I would bet money that fancruft wikis will survive.

Welcome to Wikipedia Review, One. I don't know who you are, but after reading four short posts by you, I'm wishing we could clone you about 20 times and spread you all over this Board under various screen names.

I don't see how this could happen, because under WP's terms, by clicking on submit, you are effectively releasing everything under GFDL. It's on every edit page for everything.

So, my question is this: is there any way that you can contribute to WP without de facto releasing your contributions under whatever flavour of the month license they've decided to use?

Yes.

On any Wikipedia page, whether it's a talk page or in article space, "You agree to license your contributions under the GFDL*." But you can edit Wikipedia without ever seeing the normal edit page which displays the message. I did it 50 times last night.

I don't know if such a technicality would ever hold up in a court of law, of course. It's rather academic, I suppose, since the license itself hasn't really been tested.

I believe that One was suggesting that somebody could modify a Wikipedia article, then copy it to their own website or print it in their own publication, expressly refusing to release it under the GFDL, and just wait for the lawsuit that never materializes.

That's just my interpretation of what One was saying, but I'm biased, since I run a website (Wikipedia Review.com) that has occasionally copied older content from Wikipedia and re-released it (under terms of the GFDL, but I've considered doing otherwise as a test case).

Greg

If someone then copied your non-GFDL derivative adaptation, it would be up to you to obtain and enforce an injunction against them. Good luck.

Welcome to WR ,One. Be careful with confusing licenses with contracts. It is a whole different body of law and people will who don't know much about it know that they can whack your knuckles with a big stick for saying it is about contract. You are never the less close to the mark. GFDL might be enforceable. The problem is the usual reasons for enforcement, the possibility of recovering damages sufficient to justify the considerable expense and effort of bringing an action is seriously eroded. You may be right about WP not having standing to sue, as it is probably best understood as chain of licensee contributors with WP as a mere ISP. Of course maybe WP is "copying" and extending it's own license every time an article is refreshed in someone's browser. This is a very confused area.

Yes, too, I believe many minor projects will out live WP proper.

For random typo fixing and the like, it's unlikely anyone will sue. A few edits here and there, spread over hours and hours of one's time, is probably a bad idea if protecting one's property is important. To that extent, WP:OWN probably extends off-wiki as well.

However, more involved contributions -- probably the top of the list would be photographs and graphics/animations -- we are in the range of small software development in terms of time investment. More importantly, ownership is unambiguous. It's likely that if the GFDL was transgressed, and a suit could follow, and I would expect the plaintiff to prevail easily.

The real issue is that most of the people contributing to WP, or write GPL software, can't really afford the cost of a lawsuit. But I wouldn't bet much on this, as the FSF is supposedly always on the lookout for a test case.

Hear, hear. Yes, you could use Two, Three, Four ...

Wikipedia's probably going to live at least for another 2 or 3 decades, courtesy of GFDL and Answers.com and similar sites. Wikimedia Foundation and the website itself wont.

Yeah, that's what I mean. There's no chance someone could revoke their contributions, but there is a chance someone could take an articles and say "GFDL, ef that, this is my article now [making some substantial revisions]." There's a huge body of literature related to the GPL, but it's believed that it would be enforceable because of the clear notice in the source code, clickwrap, ect. There is a distinction between licenses and contract, but no court of law has resolved it, and some legal scholarship suggests that if GPL fails as a license, it may still be enforced through contractual promissory estoppal. Lawrence Rosen reaches this conclusion in this book. See Sapna Kumar, "Enforcing the GNU GPL," 2006 U. Ill. J.L. Tech. & Pol'y 1.

What makes Wikipedia less likely to be protected is the enormous number of "copyright owners"--many having trivial non-copyrightable contributions--for every article and the fact that only these owners would have standing to sue. This is different from software, where the contributions of certain individuals are usually more significant.

That, and the wacky terms of the GFDL, which Wikipedia itself arguably doesn't obey, as when bots merge categories and list the top six numerical contributors. GFDL says you can do this cases where there are many contributers, but numerical edits seem wrong: the authors should be determined by the amount of content contributed, not the number of vandalism reverts. Some of the articles I wrote years ago are hardly changed, even though I've only edited them a couple of times since--I wouldn't be one of the top editors of those. In fact, the project treats vandalism like non-contributions and thinks nothing of deleting them from history. Consider also cut-and-paste moves, which are apparent GFDL violations by being derivative of other authors, but not listing their contributions. Wikipedia has never taken a clear position about whether history even counts as the GFDL-required "history." Finally, the copyright ownership of IP addresses seems at least a little dubious.

But yeah, this is not legal advice, and I certainly didn't join to engage in shaky legal speculation.

Thanks for the welcome. I'm just sick of how Wikipedia's going. The idiotic COO mess suggests that anyone who gives money the Essjayesque WMF is a damn fool. I don't understand why I should contribute any more effort to this trainwreck.

EDIT: Although it's a flattering suggestion, I am not Giano.

If not, you should have played coy, and ALLOWED everyone here hoist you on their virtual shoulders and parade you around the web.

Who keeps donating to the place?

Given the history of elitism, I'd say new people are going to stop coming to wikipedia. So three years is as good a guess as any.

No, that won't work. There are plenty of people already there who will stay, and there's always a new generation of teenagers who won't know better.

True. What I would give to young and ignorant again! Wait a second... I'm still young. Well either way I'd love to be ignorant; no worries, no understanding of how the hierarchy works. Good memories.

I would say it requires some sort of foundation-level scandal, probably finance-related, that gets widely reported on by the media. By many accounts there's at least some improprieties there so it's not so unlikely that there is some ineptitude and/or corruption going on, it's just kind of random what the media happens to run with and what it ignores.

The other alternative is someone buidling a better Wikipedia. Like it or not, people do want a Wikipedia on the internet. They want a site where all the pages are designed the same way and thus easily navigable, where the text is factual and useful and gives information about things they care about. People want information and Wikipedia gives it to them in a useful form. Sort of. The deletionists are working hard to make sure Wikipedia gives less and less information that vast numbers of readers want (fictional characters, websites, memes, slang, sex, etc.) so Wikipedia might make itself useless to the masses on it's own. Or someone could build a better Wikipedia... which only matters if people actually start going there... which can happen rather randomly.

So Wikipedia's survival seems to depend on certain things not happening. They might happen tomorrow, they might never happen. If they never happen, Wikipedia will probably last until "Web 3.0", whatever that is, comes along... unless Wikipedia adapts to it. But very few of the Web 1.0 sites are still relevant, so it stands to reason that we'll have a whole new crop of major sites in 5-10 years.

Why are people deletionists?

Well... I could write a book on the subject if I really felt like it. In most cases they just have the good-faith but misguided idea that we need to be very careful about what we provide articles on, and that deletion of bad articles is as noble a task as the writing of good articles. I think to some extent most modern deletionists don't grasp that we could have 50 million articles without using up the capacity we already have, and they seem to be motivated on some level by a desire to save disk space.

But they also genuinely see articles on fictional characters, schools, memes and other unpopular topics as being unworthy of Wikipedia. To some extent I think they see themselves as writing a free-software-philosophy version of Britannica, and little more. If deleting all of our articles on fiction and other topics drives away 50% of readers, some deletionists wouldn't care at all, since they see extensive articles on Pokemon characters and so on as embarassing signs that Wikipedia is actually written by the average people of the internet.

A lot of modern deletionism can be traced to Uncle G's "on notability" essay, which crystallized the famous requirement for "multiple non-trivial sources about the subject of the article" and is really the ultimate weapon in any current deletion debate except "biographies of living people" ones. In a narrow definition, this "multiple sources" concept rules out articles on most fiction-related topics, since the book/movie/anime/whatever is the source, few people seem to write news articles about fiction.

I hope that was helpful.

I think it's simply because they realize that time and effort are potentially scarce resources.

It might also be a backlash against vanity articles, trivia, and fandom.

So they waste it all spending hours of their lives every day reverting people and trying to get things deleted?

Why not, if they've already written everything they feel they can, and gotten the articles they're interested in well into shape, to last with minimal editorial maintenance over time? I'd imagine it's a lot more fun than participating in "policy discussions."

You mustn't oversimplify this issue, Lamont - these are not people just showing up out of nowhere and wanting to delete things just for the sake of deleting them, or because they're offended by "cruft" proliferation. For the most part, they're established users who have seen the problems of maintaining a 2-million page database first-hand. Every one of those 2 million articles is a potential problem that would, and often does, have to be solved by human intervention - in many cases, LOTS of human intervention.

Obviously in an ideal world, you could build a database of a zillion articles, and all of them would be consistently improved over time until they couldn't be improved any further, at which point nobody would touch them. But realistically that just doesn't happen, mostly because the perception of content-quality is always relative, and perfection is always unachievable. (And, of course, there are people who just like to "vandalize.")

WP has been firmly into its maintenance phase for well over a year now - in fact, I would say two years. As the ability of new users to stake out territory by writing new articles is diminished, WP will be left with a relatively small, and (due to burnout, etc.) shrinking, hard core of committed maintainers, fighting an ever-growing army of spammers and POV pushers. Over time, the database will have to be increasingly locked down to deal with it - there's almost no way to avoid that. Deletionism actually postpones the lockdown phase by making maintenance less of a drain on human resources.

This is also why it's so important that people like JzG, Durova, and other corrosive "black hat" personalities are "shown the door" - in the long term, the "white hat" Wikipedians can't allow anything that causes their core group of maintainers to shrink. On the contrary, they should actually reach out to people in business, government, and academia to help ensure that standards are maintained as long as possible, even if it means making a few concessions, such as opt-out for biographies, noindexing of specific pages or categories, and so on.

Will they actually do any of that, though? Of course not - these are not long-term thinkers we're dealing with here.

Because they are in favor of Wikipedia having standards. Face it: strict inclusionism is basically "Wikipedia should have no standards on what gets included, and just allow everything". Obviously, there are some people who try to delete the wrong things, but that doesn't mean that the idea of deleting articles is wrong.

But isn't the fact you mention in the first quoted sentence above exactly what is driving some people into acting like JzG and Durova do? Yes, their own personality types figure heavily in it, but also the fact that they are fighting an "ever-growing army of spammers and PVO pushers" drives a perceived necessity for the sort of siege mentality those people exhibit.

Yes, that's exactly correct. Nobody said this would be easy, least of all me!

Any definable group of people who are voluntarily working within a limited environment will eventually form some sort of social structure. If that social structure is allowed to become a dominance hierarchy, then only people who are comfortable with dominance hierarchies will stick around - but as we've seen, they often do so only because they're ambitious and/or self-confident enough to believe that they can rise within that hierarchy and achieve dominance themselves. That, inevitably, leads to conflict...

The solution is to somehow prevent the dominance hierarchy from forming, but how does such a group do that, particularly within an "open" system like WP that seems completely geared towards pretending that such hierarchies don't, or even can't exist? I'm not sure it's even possible - in fact, I'm not even sure the idea of effectively preventing it isn't completely absurd.

A lot of this may seem paradoxical or even self-contradictory - I'm not disputing that... The way I see it, the only hope for WP is to remove the human element as much as possible from maintenance tasks - i.e., impose intelligent software-based controls on what can and can't be done, and what can and can't happen. There are people working on that, I know, but they're starting from a weak and flawed foundation (i.e., MediaWiki, WP policies, and the WP social network).

The successful free online reference of the future is more likely to be one that starts out using a completely different software model, has a sense of real social responsibility, and somehow jettisons most of the political "Mimbo-Jimbo" that's built up over time in response to isolated incidents and squeaky wheels. The sad thing is that WP's size and popularity will probably prevent that from being developed for many, many years.

I just wanted to say that these are some of the most perceptive comments I've ever read on the subject. More than anything else, Wikipedia's high profile and Google ranking makes further restrictions necessary.

Dominance hierarchies tend to form by default, unless the organizers prevent it by establishing a collegial system at the outset. The classical way to do that is for the members of the community to negotiate an explicit (i.e. written) mutually agreeable social contract setting forth the terms of engagement and the agreed-upon conflict resolution procedures.

True. The lack of such provision is one of Wikipedia's grand flaws.



Dan, that's the problem with Wikipedia. That people like these show up in a power structure is NORMAL. Letting them get away with what "they have been doing" indefinitely is NOT normal.

Such abuses take place routinely in governments and various power spots. But they are quickly recognized and repudiated (even if not in time to deal effectively with them) in most open government systems.

Which is why Wikipedia was rightly defined by Jimbo Wales as a "dictatorship" in 2001. He had no real idea what a real dictatorship is, other than the casual American joking about it. Well, gosh, here we are 6 years later, and it is surely no joke, Jimbo.

Technically, WP is an oligarchy, which is not a particularly viable organizational architecture for the original intended purpose of the site.

However, it seems to be OK for an MMPORG.

Also, WP is a little like The Truman Show for the naive participant. Except that it doesn't take very long to figure out who Christo is.

I am not to sure about that, the german Version of Wikipedia does not allow articles on television episodes, single pokemon characters and is quite strict on describing fiction in a stand alone article. For example Harry Potter as a fictional character is only mentioned in the 233 kb big article "chacaters of the harry potter universe". Still the german version is quite successful. I think in germany it the 6th or 7th most popular web site.
The german deletion system favours deletion as it does not work with consensus, but the administrator is free to weigh the arguements brought by the people. So in some cases, even if 80% of the people taking part in the deletion debate want to keep the article it can be deleted, if the admin thinks the other side has the better arguments.

Depends on what you'd qualify as the death of Wikipedia..., I think it will have a slow death, it is its expention which will kill it, not different than the one the Universe will die of a cold death.

Eh, the stuff deletionists go after most aren't exactly problem articles. Have you ever seen an ethnic dispute or a fringe scientific theory being pushed on an article about some middle school in Iowa? No... the real problems occur on articles no one wants to delete anyway, like ones about the Armenian Holocaust or Global Warming. School articles just get simple vandalism... that's mostly dealt with by bots anyway... school articles literally never go to arbitration, it's rare that there isn't an open arbcom case about some ethnic dispute. So it's not that realistic Wikipedia will just suddenly become unmanageable when we get our 3 millionth article (people used to say 1 millionth)... some articles are literally thousands of times more likely to get problem editors than others.

Not all articles are created equal, when it comes to problems and disputes. You can't really delete your way out of having the kinds of articles people want to POV push on... because they sure aren't POV pushing on the Seinfeld episode list articles. If people think we can just delete a few thousand "cruft" articles and the POV pushers, who weren't editting cruft articles anyway, will go away... I don't think they're really thinking it through.

You'd be surprised to learn that there has been three attempt to request the deletion of the Armenian genocide article, including with votes.

POV pushing, I'd start deleting forks, like the various FORKs on Nagorno-Karabakh

Administrative divisions of Nagorno-Karabakh 1
Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast 2
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic 3
Nagorno-Karabakh 4
Azerbaijani administrative divisions of Nagorno-Karabakh 5

And try to get one deleted, and see if you succeed. Good luck

So wonder nationalist cases go to arbitration, and never anything get fixed, since the real problem will be called ''content dispute.''

Well, remember the question was why do people become deletionists, not whether or not they're actually going about it an effective or efficient manner. I should think it goes without saying that "cruft" articles are vastly less likely to be warred over, even if the potential is always there.

The task of reorganizing the controversial and warred-over material on WP to allow for minimal maintenance would probably require abandoning NPOV for something more like "MPOV," "M" meaning "Multiple," and of course there are plenty of folks on WP who insist that NPOV is "non-negotiable." What that means in the long term is uncertain - if WP splinters into multiple sites, each with different administrative and content-related policies, then you might see some of those splinter sites swap NPOV for something more realistic. Another possibility is that POV competition (such as Conservapedia) will draw off people now opposing the current dominating stakeholders, leaving them to do whatever they want, which will almost certainly be to WP's detriment. (All of this assumes a post-lockdown environment, of course.)

But as for the cruft, you're correct in that deleting that stuff isn't going to reduce conflict in the short term. However, each deletion sends a message to someone who might consider adding a new article, cruft-ish or otherwise: "We won't take just anything, you have to make it worth our time." That attitude should appeal more to the committed maintainers, even if it discourages a few n00bs - though IMO, most of the ones being discouraged will be "drive-by" users and SPA's, not potential admins and talented writer/researcher types... What's more, new and poorly-written cruft makes quality-conscious writers feel like their efforts are cheapened, because they assume (if not know from experience) that nobody outside of the "FA crew" is going to look critically at the actual cruft articles when judging the worthiness of other editors, at least for things like RfA's. So why bother doing a good job of it, if that's your objective?

Long story short, I understand that it's a conceptual stretch to link deletionism with editor retention - in fact, it probably seems counter-intuitive. But if there's any truth to the theory at all, then WP is clearly at a point where retention of "good editors" is worth the loss of some new articles, and has been for a long time now. Remember, the encyclopedia "doesn't have to be finished tomorrow," but it will never get finished at all if tomorrow, everyone quits.

Wikinfo has SPOV (sympathetic point of view). What that means is that the main articles should contain nothing negative about the subject. Such material must go in a linked "Criticisms of ..." article. How that would relate to global warming I've no idea.

I have noticed that people editing on IPs will go and act like somewhere they have a watchlist when IPs don't and then they'll stalk out their favorite articles and using IPs, they'll just go any remove any new changes they don't like. Any idea what's up with that sort of thing since the IPs can't have watchlists?




I've seen that people on wikipedia even if they can't add their own POV content, they'll make sure to remove content until the article is skewed to their POV.

If you load enough weight on both sides of an otherwise balanced teeter-totter, you'll break it.

There are various possibilities. They may have an account with a watchlist but log out before they edit (It takes all sorts), or they may check the history of each article manually.

Can you expand on that?



Can you expand on that?

My understanding of NPOV is the application of MPOV - the arguments are generally around Undue Weight and the disallowance of WP:Fringe. To take some differing POV's and to formulate a middle ground and call it Neutral violates WP:SYN, in my mind.

Not that my interpretation of this and many other policies enjoys the approbation of all of the WP community, you understand?

I could, but it would be more instructive to conduct an experiment in the kitchen, with a toothpick or wooden skewer.


There are several kinds of sorts: Bubble Sort, Post Office Sort, Quick Sort, and so on.