Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages

The lede paragraph:

Since a subscription is required to read the full article, I'm posting the complete text below:

[blanked]

I don't know about others, but I'm not exactly comfortable with a complete republishing here of copyrighted, subscription-based content in its entirety. I thought WR generally stood firmly against that?

All due respect to the poster and the site mgmt., etc., etc.

I thought it was ok to post it. If it isn't, I suggest it be deleted forthwith. I went ahead and blanked it pending further guidance.

If it helps, I am crossposting a version of the article that was posted elsewhere.

This version appears to be open access, probably for syndicators or media use.

(One already posted a bunch of the article text...)

Thanks, Eric!

Mr. Kohs is correct - we do try to avoid reposting articles in their entirety, but we're also fairly liberal about quoting, including quotes of large portions if they're relevant. As long as we link to the original source somewhere (or something close to it), most sites and reporters don't really mind. At least, we haven't gotten any complaints lately.

Yep, that's why I only posted part of it (a selection that Peter Damian criticized). EricBarbour has solved the problem though.

Quotable quotes from the article:


Comment: Gee, I'm glad this WSJ chose to identify BOTH James T. Kirk and Louis Pasteur for us, the WSJ readers. One suspects that in the originally-written copy, one of them might have been identified for the reader, and the other not. WHICH ONE? Anyway, they fixed the editorial problem by putting them on equal footing. It would have been less of an insult to the reader if they'd identified Kirk but left Pasteur as a generally assumed knowledge item. But no.


COMMENT: Well, that's easy to fix up. The editor of Wikipedia is Jimbo Wales. He reads all the contributions on cancer articles and critiques them personally.

Yes, WP's editors have a severe credentials problem. This should be pointed out to somebody there. It's a new problem and we hadn't thought of it.

Hey, Wikipedia!! Your editorial credentials suck! And even in cases of editors for whom they don't suck, it's impossible for you to prove they don't suck. Have you thought about this much?

This next is from Jimbo, and is my quote of the day.


It's been a correctable problem for quite a long time, Jimbo. Alas, the problem is that it hasn't been corrected.

The right number of Wikipedians is two, of course. One to add some nonsense, the other to change it into the opposite nonsense. More is not needed to keep the essence of Wikipedia alive.

Good to see Kat Walsh in the article, but no mention of the va-vavooms?

The article, sadly, is about as shallow as the typical WP article, complete with incorrect facts and sweeping generalizations. The quality of the WSJ has deteriorated rapidly since Rupert Murdoch took it over - if you subscribe to the hard copy, it is quite visible to see the change for the worst in pure Murdoch non-style (oversized headlines, cutesy photos, constant insults of Obama and the Democrats, etc.).

Don't start me about Murdoch. He's just a classic scumbag conservative media tycoon.
Not a new invention--he's just been far more successful than his predecessors.

Even so, the article will serve its purpose--to piss off the faithful, and neutralize some Wiki-Luv. This does not happen often enough.

The thing is, the "Fading Enthusiasm" graph is actually an easily-distortable picture of what's really been happening, and I can see why WP'ers would be upset about it. I mean, it's obvious to us that the active userbase is in decline, both numerically and in terms of time-on-site, but let's remember that since WP's inception there have been sock puppets and AnonIP's, and over time they've added pages telling people they should register an account every time they use an AnonIP, semi-protection that prevents AnonIP's from making various kinds of edits, vast blocked ranges, blocked proxy addresses, on and on and on. WP'ers have had a lot of time to learn how to root out sock puppet accounts, and let's face it, many of the people who got their jollies by making sock puppet accounts have probably gotten tired of it by now. I mean, how long can you keep it up?

All of these are factors that decrease the number of discrete editors within any given time period, in comparison to the number within a previous time period. But as has been suggested, the WSJ and the rest of the MSM don't really want to get beneath the surface and figure this stuff out, and in fact, there may be no way to properly quantify this stuff at all.

So, what I predict is that WP'ers will begin encouraging people to use as many different accounts as possible, so as to boost that "Monthly Change in Editors" figure so that it's back up into positive numbers. Then, of course, they'll point to this as an indication that WP is in a "resurgence."

Like I keep saying, the only way to properly understand these trends is anecdotally, and that's what we do. Statisticians are practically useless when nearly everything can be skewed by massive cheating, system gaming, and general manipulation.

The article's assertion that a lot of people still like to look at Wikipedia but not edit it confirms anecdotal evidence that I've found in recent conversations with my coworkers. My coworkers tell me that when they look up a topic in Wikipedia, they'll read the article intro and then skip directly to the references section. If that is true of most Wikipedia visitors, then I can understand why few would have any motivation to improve article content, since most of them aren't really using the content.

One way to correct the problem that the community is hostile to newbies, is to stop allowing so many newbies. Contributions by new contributors are often dismissed summarily, with nothing but a canned template on their talk page to guide them in the right direction. This is necessary, of course, because such a large portion of "newbies" are actually "sockpuppets".

In my relatively brief time as an admin, I found myself reverting more than a few indef blocks aimed at newbies who either made completely benign mistakes or were actually doing the correct thing (adding references that met WP:RS). Granted, the admins making these blocks aren't particularly famous for their brains -- Sandstein, Cirt, Gwen Gale, PhilKnight, Jonny Delanoy (I was going to revert a Tan block, but someone got their first). But their eagerness to chomp (not just bite, but literally tear off bones and flesh) ruined the experiences for the newbies -- I don't believe any of them stuck around after getting unblocked.

There you go again, confusing the horse with the rider.

Ja Ja

And thus Wikipedia is being slowly reduced to its conceptual predecessor, the ODP, which ultimately failed due to the failure to manage its community effectively.

The fact that the website's popularity is steadily increasing even as the number of editors diminishes really says it all: the environment is so hostile that people increasingly don't want to deal with it. People love the content, but they don't want to go swimming in that sea of sharks. Wikipedia must outgrow the notion that editors are expendable cogs, that you can mistreat and exclude them and still expect new people to continually arrive to replace them. I've been saying it for years: you have to treat volunteers as treasured assets, not pests, or pretty soon you won't have any left.

Beyond fixing the toxic admin culture, I'd recommend that the project pursue a course that incorporates more of a social networking style, in the sense of identifying the project as a place where people can not only read about their interests, but become more deeply involved in them through personal expression and interaction. If Wikipedia could harness more of the enormous popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter, establishing a specialized niche centered around individual interests and encyclopedia content, then I think it could not only reverse the trend, but reach the next stage of its development and become something even more massive and revolutionary. The ultimate destiny for Wikipedia should be the achievement of mass participation all across the population.

To achieve what EK envisions above, a project needs organizing principles that promote peaceable cooperation and collaboration.

Over the years, Wikipedia has increasingly degenerated into scrappy venue where power players and drama mongers drive out those with more serious and sober notions of scholarly construction of an authentic encyclopedia.

When Jimmy Wales dismissed the notion of scholarly ethics as "beyond the scope of the project," it signaled to me the death knell for Wikipedia as serious scholarly enterprise operating within the paradigm of cooperation and collaboration found in successful and sustainable volunteer projects.

Wikipedia's key advantage is that that it has monopolized an extremely good idea. Its key disadvantage is its lack of good management, internal organization, and coordination. It's difficult to imagine that the transformation I proposed could be achieved without doing something to remedy that disadvantage. As it stands now, the community doesn't even have a method or structure to deal with many comparatively minor issues, so solving a systemic problem or effecting a transformation in the way the site is conceived by the public seems well beyond its means.

Yes, it's a systemic structural problem that Wikipedia will not be able to solve at this late stage of the game. Far too many would-be good faith contributors have been alienated, disappointed, disillusioned, and driven away by the conflict-ridden dramaturgy and rampant administrative corruption that has plagued the site for the better part of the decade.

Thanks guys for a good thread. Moulton and Everyking, I have borrowed some of your ideas and posted them as Encyc:Volunteers, because I agree with them so strongly.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125893981183759969.html




http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20091125/ttc-w...ng-e1d36ba.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/...editors-decline
(Article has comments allowed)

edit: merged myself, should have checked in this subforum first

edit2:
That is definitely a very good point, it's so twisted in on itself it really using it yourself for a while is really the only way to understand it, I bet if I hadn't and given up on it I'd be as alienated as everyone else, it's an absolute maze of anally-retentive nerd boys who make rules to justify other rules they made in an endless loop... I think it must be some kind of learning centre for the annoying little people who end up running local governments.

BBC News:



1. Tell that to "teh community".

2. Tell that to the National Gallery whose art works were pillaged by Wiki"we see no stinkin' copyright"pedians .

I guess you still fail to understand the difference between volunteers and mere content providers...unless you intend that Encyc be responsible as a publisher for all the material provided in your articles?

Everyking is no more of a "volunteer" at WP than some random shopper is a "volunteer" at Walmart.

As I keep saying, we have no idea how many lawsuits are currently pending against WMF, copyright or otherwise, because of their amazing lack of transparency in this area.

The number of copyright lawsuits against WMF is undoubtedly small. They respond to takedown notices quite well; there's no reason to take such an entity to court. National Gallery is a highly unusual case because its rights are disputed. Flat prose and photographic pirating gets taken down regularly upon request.

Once again, outside observers are deceived by superficial appearances.

The superficial appearance of "rule-obsession" in Wikiputia is due to the fact that rules in Wikiputia are the logical and moral equivalent of lies.

What appears to be an excessive concern with rules is really just the fact that every lie demands more lies to cover it, sparking a chain-reaction that begets a viral explosion of lies in its train.

Jon Awbrey

I spoke to Joseph Seddon (another Wikimedia UK board member) a while back, where he mentioned this. I replied that while it was great that Wikimedia was going round and contacting academic institutions and cultural repositories, it doesn't help solve some of the core problems the site suffers from, such as a lack of in-depth external user experience studies where the findings are acted upon. Ed Chi over at Parc has got a great analysis of editor decline, but apart from a cursory "that's interesting" it's been met with a resoundly Gallic shrug.

I asked him when Wikimedia UK were planning to call for volunteers from outside Wikipedia and perform studies on how newcomers use the site, interact with it and form opinions of it. Standard focus group testing, usability testing and so on. I didn't get a response.

The thing that I feel is beginning to emerge is this feel of a tipping point. If you read the comments on the Guardian or WSJ articles, they are full of people who don't trust WP or have had bad experiences with it. There is a wealth of data that WP could collect to improve things, but the WMF are deadlocked in that they can only tinker with the software - the bits around the edges. The rest of any user experience is controlled by the community itself and is unlikely to ever change as a result. I guess that's why all this museum a work is taking place - it's much easier to introduce something new than it is to change something that already exists. All of this creates an opportunity for someone else to come along and do what's happened in another huge open source project: Linux.

Fork

It looks like Airman Long has decided to use the original WSJ article comments forum to lay into both me and Daniel Brandt. I'm honored.

Also, according to Long, on Wikipedia:

• We don't allow anyone to add whatever they want to, it has to be properly sourced, and it can't just be any source to their own website or blog, it has to fit into our policies
• We don't allow people to either post about themselves or about the company they work for
• We definitely don't allow people to create articles to "get themselves or their companies more recognition" or "google hits"
• We have to be neutral
• If it's a Biography on a living person, we have much, much more strict policies on dealing with those articles, as we could be sued, and it could be totally incorrect information. So we have to make sure those articles are gotten "right", and are perfectly sourced, otherwise they get deleted.

He's fully brainwashed. Poor sap.

My experience is that the so-call rules are used as weapons. To clobber an opponent, dig up some obscure "rule" that they have violated and then apply the maximum sanction for violation. This is what makes WP operate like an MMPORG.

The assertion that the number fo contributors is going down because there's simply less to contribute is probably a false one. While it's probably true that most of the low-hanging fruit has been reached, there's still plenty of work to do.

Besides, if it were true, how come the same decline is being seen in other language wikipedias? Is the sum of all knowledge in French or German somehow smaller than that in English?

Plenty of maintenance work. Wikipedia lives and dies on red links, and the number of red links has been declining. And if you take away the low-hanging fruit, you'll find that about 99.6 percent of people aren't willing to jump for the higher stuff, at least not if you don't pay them...


Actually, yes. The key here is pop culture, which is Wikipedia's main strong point. Quite simply, there's vastly more pop culture going on in the English-speaking world than there is in Germany or France - more TV, movies, books, video games, talking plastic action figures, ad infinitum. There are also more people, more companies, more products, more everything. It's one of the reasons why it can't be seen as the "sum of all knowledge" - it's actually the sum of what people are exposed to in their daily lives. Much of that is knowledge, admittedly, but quite a lot of it is just entertainment, if not pure drivel.

Theoretically any knowledge can be translated into any language. In many cases this will require borrowing/coining new words. Germans do that all the time, but the French have more of a problem with that.

See also: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=21316

I think the problem is more that it's difficult to find Francophones willing to sully their language with articles about random bits of (to them) uninteresting aspects of American culture. It's not as if they're being paid to translate them.

Chet says of Durova:



Hoo boy.

And that photo of him is terrible!

I don't believe he's doing them any favors, really - he's coming off as almost stereotypically officious and arrogant. Mr. Coffee, if you're reading this, you've got to loosen up a little bit! The way to argue in opposition to folks like Nicole "C Shell!" Hamilton is NOT to come off as a power-tripper when this is precisely the point she's making. Don't call their points "ridiculous"; simply address them realistically. Remember, it's not your website, it belongs to a bunch of people who don't actually care about you. Use that to your advantage! Show that you have an independent mind! Avoid casual putdowns and cliches, too... Ms. Hamilton seems a little more high-class than that. (My kinda gal, actually! I wonder if she's single... )

bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/11/wikipedia_on_the_wane.html

The so-called "rules" were not crafted with the overarching view to construct an efficient regulatory policy. Rather they are used as weapons to block and punish editors from opposing cliques. The most disadvantaged editors are the lone scholars who do not join one of the rivalrous marauding gangs that have come to dominate the WP MMPORG.

I added a comment —


Not that it's news to anyone here …

Good. Someone will take the database, and make an Ubuntu or Linux Mint equivalent.
Something real people can use.

The crazy nerds will take it and make a Slackware. And polish their nerd-turds forever.

Are you sure it was Airman Long and not Steve Crossin taking over his Wall Street Journal account?

You may feel honored, but I feel defamed. It's curious how children scream "Ageism!" whenever we suggest that encyclopedias should be edited by adults, but when they complain that I have repeated name, age, and city on hivemind, from information found on the web, it's suddenly a "child" that I'm stalking, despite Airman Long's best efforts to protect this "child."

In three days Airman Long will be 18 years old and officially an adult. If he repeats bullshit like this again in a major outlet like the Wall Street Journal, the commanding officer of Barksdale Air Force Base will get a polite complaint letter from me on PIR letterhead.

We should get him something for his birthday, no?

That's quite a discussion you guys have at WSJ. Personally, I prefer Investors Business Daily or the Financial Times.

Editors leaving - what's new? I've seen burn out slowly but steadily fall behind burn out for five years on WP:POLAND... I can name more former editors than active ones (and I am talking only about editors who were at one point substantial quality content creators).

Do they burn out or just leave in frustration or anger?

Well, what's new is that people are now trying to quantify it, and their attempts are getting mainstream-media attention, for better or worse. As you say, general observation suggests that this trend has been going on since early 2008...

Also, as Mr. Gazimoff pointed out (as quoted in Mr. Barbour's post above), we're seeing much more negative commentary about WP on blogs and news sites than we have in the past... It was never universally favorable of course, but these days the defenders are clearly in the minority, and to some extent the negative comments might create a nice "snowball effect." (Leading to what, I don't know, but you know how snowballs are.)


Silly question - there are all sorts of reasons for quitting WP. I suppose, though, that you could generalize by saying the established users burn out, whereas the new users get frustrated and angry. Most people though, I would expect, just get bored with it.

In fact, my observations indicate that the burn out is due to frustration with uncivil atmosphere, rather than getting bored with the project. A lot of people who left tell me they still admire the initial idea, but cannot stand the harassment they encounter.

Right - I think we're actually talking about two different things here. You're talking about "burnout" specifically, whereas I'm talking about all the reasons people have for leaving, and presumably so is Mr. Cyclist.

Yes, people talk so glibly of "burn-out". I think that indeed very few editors really burn out and they have other reasons to leave. There may be a communication problem; to me, burning out means that people get so mentally exhausted that they couldn't continue even if you offered them a large sum of money to do so. It's part way to a nervous breakdown.