wow. it's a pretty bold statement to call the largest and most accessible repository of knowledge ever collected to be a "failure". the author of this article needs to get his ego in check, just because your reports of vandalism weren't dealt with in the way you wanted doesn't mean you need to throw a hissy fit.
the worst thing about wikipedia is the mess of egos and politics that happens behind the scenes. i'd love to see some stats about the quality of edits that these so-called editors with their tens of thousands of positive edits make, versus what the average user edits in. i'm willing to bet that the majority of the actual content and information comes from the one-time contributors.
Here's the problem imo: most of Wikipedia's content is currently unmaintained (as far as I can tell).
If there's any political or nationalistic controversy to the content, there's 50 wikilawyers obsessively monitoring it. But if the article is 'boring', anyone can go in there and write whatever they want and (unless a bot thinks it's vandalism), nobody will care.
This is natural - it's fun to write an article and collaborate on edits. Then you move on, because no normal person wants to be the content janitor. And what happens to the article 5 years later? How about 10 or 20 years? I think if Wikipedia doesn't get a handle on this, on the structural level, the site is going to be mostly random agrammatical garbage sooner-or-later.
Wikipedia is already at the point where it seems like every article has content warning banner on top of it. Most of them have been there for years, and nobody cares.
>most of Wikipedia's content is currently unmaintained
"Most" by what measure? By bits? By number of articles? Possibly. By pageviews or importance, no way.
I cannot remember googling something, checking out its wikipedia entry, and finding it unhelpful. It's been at least 5 years since that has happened.
Sure, there's a bunch of low-quality articles with no maintainers, but to claim that that makes wikipedia bad is to claim github's bad for the same reason.
I'm certainly not saying the articles are unhelpful, I'm noticing most of them are slowly getting worse.
Next time you try your google experiment, read the article closely. I can almost guarantee you'll find dubious claims inserted in odd places, atrocious writing, and all sorts of wikiwarts indicating untrustworthy content. Now check back in six months. Chances are the article will not have improved, it will include more of the above. In the long-term that doesn't bode well for the content.
>"Most" by what measure? By bits? By number of articles? Possibly. By pageviews or importance, no way.
Are you positive not by pageviews? Sure, the articles that get a lot of pageviews are maintained, but I imagine there's a pretty big long tail of articles that get small number pageviews each, and not all of those are maintained. I don't think they're necessarily going to fall into disrepair, though.
> But if the article is 'boring', anyone can go in there and write whatever they want
Well, in general what you can do is go in there and write whatever you want - perhaps a well-researched article about a subject which you know well - and then have it deleted within a few seconds.
Conversely, if you try to edit down the nonsensical word salads wikipedians tend to create, your edit will likely be reverted with 'Valuable content which could be improved'. The whole thing is becoming impenetrable.
Let's not get hung up on how literally he intends his rhetoric. He's expressing his opinion of its doom given current dynamics (including many that are not evident to most readers).
He may be right, he may be wrong, but it's more honest and interesting for him to give this sort of bottom-line judgement starkly. As generous readers, we can fill in all the implied qualifiers ("from my experience", "in ways that aren't obvious", "if current trends continue", "unless my recommendations are followed", etc.).
As generous readers, we can fill in all the implied qualifiers ("from my experience", "in ways that aren't obvious", "if current trends continue", "unless my recommendations are followed", etc.).
Wikipedia editors are probably unconsciously conditioned against weasel words... but in counterpoint, when you are presenting an opinion piece, they can be appropriate.
I think this is why I'm such a recluse, I just don't understand human social behavior. Had ->I<- written what he wrote I would have gotten my ass handed to me. When I make statements like that on HN I either get downvoted or my ass handed to me in a reply. This is why I have a psudonym HN account. When I do it, it turns into an arguement, when others do it, people are understanding. sigh I just don't understand you humans...
from the small amount of time i've spent browsing wikipedia edit histories it appears that most of the useful cleanup (of vandalism and the like) is done by bots, not by users. the users who delete stuff delete it not because it's bad, but because it's 'not notable' or some other opinionated metric like that.
the worst thing about wikipedia is the mess of egos and politics that happens behind the scenes. i'd love to see some stats about the quality of edits that these so-called editors with their tens of thousands of positive edits make, versus what the average user edits in. i'm willing to bet that the majority of the actual content and information comes from the one-time contributors.