Has Wikipedia Peaked?

An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year with no official statistics, an independent analysis reported Wednesday showed that activity in Wikipedia's community has been declining over the last six months. Editing is down 20% and new account creation is down 30%. After six years of rapid growth and more than 2 million articles, is Wikipedia's development now past its peak? Are Wikipedians simply running out of things to write about, or is the community collapsing under the weight of external vandalism and internal conflicts? A new collection of charts and graphs help to tell the tale."

Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!

Yes, the scratch the itch factor is starting to go down. It's quite impressive to note the way that Wikipedia now does genuinely contain a reasonable % of all topics (and yes, even Pokemon).

I'd actually say that Wikipedia has been far more successful as an example of a collaborative Free product than Linux has. Wikipedia actually dominates the market now.

Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!

I'd actually say that Wikipedia has been far more successful as an example of a collaborative Free product than Linux has. Wikipedia actually dominates the market now.


Not surprisingly, since the barrier for entry into Wikipedia is much lower. Collaboration in Linux requires some fairly specific knowledge if you are trying to do anything grander than test from an end user perspective. Wikipedia simply requires that you have something to add and a desire to comment.

Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!

That's a load of crap. Studies show if the growth rate continues to decline, Wikipedia will not gain enough information to achieve sentience before 2010, well behind schedule. At that rate, it may not achieve the knowledge necessary to travel through time and kill Sarah Connor until well into the 2050s.

Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!

It still doesn't know who is in charge of Gundam.

Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!

Thats because there's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!

Of course there are, many things. However, the Wikipedia editors have, in their blind rush to become a "real" encyclopedia, put up barriers of "notability". In practice this means that articles often get deleted if the editor doesn't consider them important ("notable").

Dead-tree encyclopedias have a bar of notability because they have limited size and primitive searching facilities (alphapetical order), so a non-notable article takes space which could be better used on something more important, while increasing the size makes the whole thing more expensive and harder to search. Wikipedia has in practice limitless size and advanced searching facilities (internal links and full text search), so adding an article always adds value.

There is the fundamental difference between online and dead-tree encyclopedias; it is a pity Wikipedia hasn't quite grasped this.

Multiple editors is needed for Wikipedia

Wikipedia only works if there are multiple competent editors interested enough in the subject to corrects each others mistakes. Without that, it just becomes a soapbox / blog representing one persons opinion.

I see the "notability" criteria as an effort to make it likely the articles will be cross checked.

Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!

### Notability is just another spam filter.

The problem is that notability is far to often used as a wildcard to delete articles over topics the admin simply no clue about. I have seen this happening with a lot of articles on open source games, a whole bunch of them got deleted or threatened to be deleted, sometimes even with the topic locked afterwards (hint: if an article exists in many different languages and people are continually trying to recreate it, there might actually people interested in the topic). Now some month later the idiot admins seem to have been overturned and all the articles are back again. But doing uphill battles against admins just isn't fun. When a random idiot is doing vandalism that can be annoying enough, but when the admins turn out to be the bigger problem, something is fundamentally wrong.

suggestion: tiered content

Wikipedia needs to build out tiers of content:

Top-tier: notable, professional, encyclopedic, widely desired content
mid
mid
low
low
minutia

basically, have articles start at the bottom, and work their way up the tiers by community consent, edit history, and most importantly: internal consistentcy. This will allow a resurgence in interest in the concept. Each person on the planet can have their own minutia page on themselves, each and every party that happened, each and every minute detail of life can be cataloged - and those that become interesting, they go up the chain and eventually become Wikipedia articles.

Re:Answers

Actually, the answer is slightly more complex than that. A year ago, I would have left to Wikipedia's defense, and I would have been right to do so. However, while there are a lot of things to write about, people aren't really doing this. What would really be interesting would be the amount of edits to the Wikipedia namespace, as opposed to the main article namespace. It's the internal conflicts, navel-gazing and meta editing that is killing Wikipedia.

Re:Answers

Wikipedia has already hit a decline. Basically, it's too much of a pain-in-the-ass to work on the darn thing. There's tons of rules and regulations. Talk pages aren't fun. The articles are routinely turned into crack-pot crap in a misguided effort to be fair. There is too much emphasis on being factually correct and not enough on being timely. The get 'er done attitude that used to pervade is gone, replaced with a fear about lawsuits because some knucklehead or other is not actually dead yet.

Like an large organization, wikipedians who used to contribute have been replaced by web-bureaucrats. Like bureaucrats everywhere, efficiency and style is replaced by pointless efforts at standardization and supporting documents. Certainly, these are important, but they have reached the point where they are stifling ideas.

It's fine for me to say all this, but what's the solution? It's easy to condemn but hard to fix.

If Wikipedia wishes to fix all this, it must slash the number of those with administrator power. It should remove the focus on formulas and documentation. Let Wikipedia revert back to the "wild west" anything goes culture that first made it special. Wikipedia is not a reference, it's a starting point. Treating it like a genuine reference kills what makes it special.

And if it contains more pages about Simpsons episodes than social sciences, so what? It'll eventually work itself out like any open market. Jimbo and crew should just take their hands off, lean back, and see what happens.

It's held back by useless metaphors.

I agree.

Personally, I think Wikipedia suffers from being too limited in scope. Yeah, creating a free encyclopedia is great and all, but I'm not entirely convinced that's what the world really needs. It's good in that it provided some competition to Britannica, and forced them to open up some of their content, but where Wikipedia is most useful is where it goes well beyond any traditional "encyclopedia." Sadly, these tend to be the areas where Wikipedia bureaucrats and administrators are most likely to delete content.

Wikipedia has the potential to blow away the entire concept of an 'encyclopedia,' but it's held back by narrow-minded ideas of what 'encyclopedic' content is.

You see this "emulation complex" in a lot of projects. Bottom line: you can never be better than a thing you are trying to imitate. If you want to be better than it, you have to stop trying to be it. This goes for some parts of Linux desktops trying to emulate Windows, it goes for OpenOffice trying to be Microsoft Office, and it goes for Wikipedia trying to be a traditional encyclopedia.

Re:It's held back by useless metaphors.

Personally, I think Wikipedia suffers from being too limited in scope.

This is certainly one of the problems. For one thing, I suspect that instead of forbidding "original research", they should be providing an outlet for it... some place to work on figuring things out, where the "encylopedia" is used as a summary of findings.

A related problem: they're parasitic on print media publications, but over time those are guaranteed to become less important. What do you do if you want to talk about a subject that doesn't exist in the print media world yet?

Re:Answers

If no articles are added or updated, then that may increase pressure on a reader to contribute and bring up the rate of contribution.

When people read a wiki article and find that it's gone out of date or need new additions that person can potentially be the one to rectify the situation. If they read it and find that it knows as much or more than them, they of course won't have anything to add and won't contribute.

If people get tired of background politics and excess bureaucracy in wikipedia, they'll leave...which frees up the landscape, correcting the situation and so on and so forth.

There's a potential equilibrium here and a decline in contributions does not necessarily represent a fundamental change to the forces that maintain it, it's probably just normal fluctuation. I don't see anything replacing wikipedia or eliminating the benefit that is gained from its existence. I don't believe wikipedia has run out of money yet.

It's the Administrators!

It's the internal conflicts, navel-gazing and meta editing that is killing Wikipedia.

In other words - the abusive administrators and longstanding POV groups are finally driving so many people off of the project that they get to make it what they want to make it, nothing but a propaganda disaster.

Then again, they've shown how it goes [livejournal.com] time and again. I even had an experience in a Wiki administrator on Slashdot claiming he'd "look into" any reasonable issues - instead, he did exactly jack crap, kept whining about how the issues I brought were "old" or "nobody else would look at them." He eventually bailed from wikipedia completely [wikipedia.org] because of all the stupid bullshit [wikipedia.org] that's involved in wikipedia.

If you look at the history of railroaded users who tried to fix wikipedia from within the system, and instead were tarred as "trolls" and worse by the established assholes and POV pushers of the admin "community", you get an idea of what wikipedia really is.

Best quote ever:
Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.

Re:It's the Administrators!

The problem is mostly with the other users. The administrators are a problem in that they help implement many pointless bureaucratic guidelines.

I'm a librarian and professional writer who has contributed to Wikipedia over the years, but have gotten tired of the bullshit created by other users. At this point I'm contributing more to other online open wiki projects. Wikipedia has lots of excellent content, but some pages just can't be changed because some people have staked them out as their turf and refuse to allow any edits. I know of pages that are clearly POV and inaccurate, but if I or anybody else tries to revise them and significantly change them, we'll be baited into violating the "three revert rule" or otherwise be harassed by the resident zealots.

Wikipedia itself has implemented some stupid policies and some unintentionally hilarious policies. The decision this year to start removing images from thousands of pages because of copyright concerns is just insanity to the nth degree. Whoever made this decision doesn't understand current copyright law, because their policy about images is even more draconian than the current draconian copyright law. Many images have been removed from pages that aren't violating any copyrights. But if Wikipedia admins want to piss on their product with stupid decisions like this, then they'll only drive more people away.

My favorite hilarious example of current Wikipedia stupidity is the warning tag attached to many pages that says "Trivia sections are discouraged by Wikipedia." Uh, guys, Wikipedia is primarily an encyclopedia about popular culture. Putting these warnings over trivia sections that won't be removed is just silly. The trivia sections are why people use Wikipedia. Another funny development is the proliferation of tagging of pages for being "stubs" and poorly sourced. Hello? After years of criticism, Wikipedia is just now getting self-conscious about its veracity? Funny!

Re:Answers

The whole question was silly. If the number of contributors were to drop by 95%, the Wiki would still be growing - in other words, it will only reach its peak when it completely stops getting contributions, which isn't happening.

Running Out

Wiki is just running out of things to document. They literally have almost anything you can think of. I'm a computer science major and I've wiki'd some really advanced topics that appear on there but hardly anywhere else on the internet.

Re:Running Out

Notable things which there are sources to cite are dwindling. 2 million articles is getting a bit excessive IMO. Wikipedia needs to focus on quality and not quantity (which is what Mr. Whales has been saying for a few years) and people aren't as excited about editing existing articles compared to making new ones.

Or at least that is what I believe.

Re:Running Out

Since people love comparing wikipedia to Britanica, how does the comparison hold up here? Is Britanica multiplying in size over and over again with every new edition? If not, why not? I'd guess it's because the parent posters are correct.

Woah!

I'm a computer science major and I've wiki'd some really advanced topics that appear on there but hardly anywhere else on the internet.

Are you saying that because a computerized knowledge base, owned, operated, and edited by people with computers, has a lot of stuff about computers in it, that it must therefore have a lot of stuff about everything in it? What about needlepoint? String collecting? Mayan hunting techniques? No, my friend, there's a lot more stuff to wiki about.

They had pixels before us...

I'm a computer science major and I've wiki'd some really advanced topics that appear on there but hardly anywhere else on the internet.

Are you saying that because a computerized knowledge base, owned, operated, and edited by people with computers, has a lot of stuff about computers in it, that it must therefore have a lot of stuff about everything in it? What about needlepoint?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needlepoint [wikipedia.org]
Seems pretty well researched. Huh, lookadat... didn't know they had an "embroidery" category :)

Re:They had pixels before us...

You've made his point. There are a dozen links under Needlepoint to particular stitches 2/3rds of which go nowhere and the remainder are stubs. Only one goes to an actual article. Needlepoint isn't a particularly obscure activity yet there isn't much on wikipedia about it beyond that single article. A far more obscure topic from computer science would be fully fleshed out with plenty of links to even more obscure sub-topics.

So...

Does Netcraft confirm it?
Or should we look it up in Wikipedia?

Natural?

I think the decline of new articles is probably just natural due to 2 million existing articles being a LOT of information. Sure, there's plenty more to write about but I'd have thought the majority of the hobbiest-contributors (i.e. those who aren't die-hard users) simply don't have anything else to write.

Either way, I think this is a little over the top - there's still a million and one things to write about. Hell, if it has peaked - it's not going anywhere!

Re:Natural?

[...] the majority of the hobbiest-contributors (i.e. those who aren't die-hard users) simply don't have anything else to write.

I second that. As a "hobbiest-contributor" myself I have written or expanded around 10 specialist articles. There is not a lot more specialist knowledge I feel that I have to contribute to Wikipedia - hence I've not added anything in the last 6 months or so.

Re:Natural?

[...] the majority of the hobbiest-contributors (i.e. those who aren't die-hard users) simply don't have anything else to write.

I second that. As a "hobbiest-contributor" myself I have written or expanded around 10 specialist articles. There is not a lot more specialist knowledge I feel that I have to contribute to Wikipedia - hence I've not added anything in the last 6 months or so.

I'm a hobby-contributor, myself... I guess you might be a hobbier contributor, but I really doubt you're the hobbiest contributor...

Re:Natural?

Also, you have to consider the fact that more well known topics would have been covered first. As the site matures the scope of topics not covered becomes more and more obscure and the pool of people knowledgeable enough to edit them gets smaller and smaller.

Re:Natural?

More and more obscure, meaning more prone to deletion by other editors. Wikipedia's goal has morphed from being the repository of all human knowledge to being the repository of all notable human knowledge. This seemingly minor distinction fundamentally alters what Wikipedia is all about, and causes things such as the deletion of "trivia" sections and the removal of entire entries because they are not "notable". While I agree that not every schmuck out there should necessarily have a Wikipedia entry, I think the standards for what is and is not "notable" may be set too high, which puts a heavy limitation on the number of articles that can be created.

The set of all human knowledge is near infinite in its breadth, but the subset of "notable" human knowledge, depending on how you define that, is much smaller. It would be expected that as the site matures, the new information being added would be more obscure, and there would be more battles about the notability of that information.

Re:Natural?

It's not that they delete things that aren't notable, it's that the criteria are so... unevenly applied.

I don't want to trot out the tired old Pokemon example again, but it's so easily applied. There are tons of Wiki pages dedicated to describing every Pokemon, while Viva Pinata (another video game with tons of fictional animals) isn't allowed to have more than one page. And, of course, at the same time they're aggressively deleting the trivia section of movies, books, and games because trivia isn't "encyclopedic."

That all said, I do believe they need to encourage the creation and expansion of "encyclopedic" topics... there are tons of historical events and figures that have far too little coverage. But deleting content isn't the right way to go about it, not in my opinion. I say have hundreds of Pokemon pages, have thousands of them. But at the same time, make sure that your coverage of the important native American leader Weetamoo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weetamoo [wikipedia.org] ) has a full bio. (For example; there are tons of articles like this that are extremely important topics, but have too little coverage.)

Wikiphobia

I think I'd have a lot to add to Wikipedia, but I don't. Any time I have made any contribution, substantial or minor, someone else comes around and knocks it off. The feeling I've gotten is that people seem to 'own' pieces of territory in Wikipedia. Be it individual articles, or their interpretation, or something else. My contributions have no chance of surviving in the face of these Wiki die-hards. So what is the point? I'm a read-only user now.

Re:Wikiphobia

Find yourself a wikifriend. I'd be happy to volunteer (look me up on the wiki, I'm not hard to find).

One new article with comments from a long-timer and you'll be off to the races.

Re:Wikiphobia

The GP's point is that one shouldn't need to buddy up or create their own territory on Wikipedia. The basis of the site is for any random person to add information. So if people delete things that "invade" their territory or that don't have the support of a long-time contributor than the site's being abused in a sense. It's deviated from its mission if new users are treated this way.

Re:Wikiphobia

I avoid it for another reason. I tend to enter into debates with others online, and if they don't say 'and don't cite wikipedia' beforehand, then they say it afterwards. The knowledge there is totally useless in a debate simply because it can be edited by anyone, regardless of what they actually know. Now, I use it as a last resort to look for information that might lead me to something a little more substantial.

Unfortunately, I can't even argue with them because it says things like "However, extreme summer humidity often boosts the heat index to around 110 F (43 C)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami,_Florida [wikipedia.org] Try as I might, I could find no information on historic heat indexes in Miami on the web. The best I could find was high-low temperature and humidity charts, and since the heat index deals with the temperature and humidity at any given moment, it isn't very useful for calculating the heat index after the fact. Especially if you want to find out how often it hits 110.

Just about everything I've looked up on Wikipedia in the last month has been someone's personal view with no facts to sustain it. As a starting point for research, I can't even say it's a good idea because things are stated as fact that are personal observation (anecdotes) or opinion, and that can quickly taint your view of whatever you are searching and lead you down a bad path.

Re:Wikiphobia

Well, the question is how "independent" the source is. I've seen it more than once that it's been basically a circle-jerk. When you dig deep enough you'll see that those "sources" pretty much link to one another. That's also a way to fabricate "truth". A says something, B picks it up and points to A as its confirmation, C sees B and quotes it, which in turn A notices and uses C to support its "truth".

Now add in the agendas of A, B and C and you get quite funny twists and "quotes". Bet I can prove with the help of the WHO and a few other "sources" that second hand smoking is actually good for your health?

Simply quoting a source is meaningless if you can't verify how good the source is.

Re:Wikiphobia

Without seeing your edit history, it's a bit hard to comment. However, did you source the material you added? If you don't, it probably will get removed or modified.

Re:Wikiphobia

This is somewhat problematic, because a lot of material on the level Wikipedia operates is unsourceable. Sources basically come in two forms: articles and papers published on "new" discoveries or creations, and texts designed to teach major subjects to people unfamiliar with them.

If a piece of information is well-known but not part of a field that somebody would want to write a book about, then it won't ever appear in either of these things, so you can't source it. This is most common with the sort of basic, low-level knowledge that is passed around in communities. This also happens to be exactly the sort of information that Wikipedia should be collecting.

As people in the field say, "if you implement TCP to the specifications then you get something which doesn't work on the internet".

It's accuracy, on the other hand

Has peaked a long time ago. Before

--- PARAGRAPH FOR DEMOCRATS ---
Fox news started to edit it

--- PARAGRAPH FOR REPUBLICANS ---
CNN and BBC started editing it

Right now, a lot of articles are just plain dishonest. Just look up some controversial subjects. Contemporary forced subjugation and kidnapping children into slavery by muslims for example, or look at Bush's page that contains references to falsified news ...

Re:It's accuracy, on the other hand

Thing is, dishonest articles and misleading text won't get fixed. I gave up contributing to Wikipedia when I had my editing slammed left and right from "regulars" selectively applying rules in order to shut out the unpopular. "No original research" only applies when your assertions are against consensus, regardless of how accurate, "You don't own the article" only applies if you're outnumbered by a bunch of others that do own the article, "Bias" only when you're striving for uniformity.

I mean, I'm not even talking about abortion or rape or anything... look at the fight over "XOR" vs. "Exclusive-OR". Sheesh.

http://www.wikitruth.info/ [wikitruth.info] has some info... but don't take it's word on it. Give editing Wikipedia a shot and see the shitstorm it can raise.

No

They've just run out of Star Trek / Star Wars trivia to write new articles about. Turned out very few of the community knew anything else.