Has Wikipedia Peaked? 484
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."
It's accuracy, on the other hand (Score:5, Interesting)
--- PARAGRAPH FOR DEMOCRATS ---
Fox news started to edit it
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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:Natural? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Interesting)
One new article with comments from a long-timer and you'll be off to the races.
My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
People go around touting "Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia" in one discussion, and then in the next want to get rid or some article because "it's not encyclopedic." I guess I see my ideal Wikipedia as a complete collection. If someone writes a decent, complete article on something somewhat obscure, and it's deleted because it's not notable enough, that just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm just bitter and my view of Wikipedia doesn't agree with the majority? Don't know.
I am annoyed about how they're trying to rid of trivia sections. Those are some of the most interesting parts of an article if you ask me.
if it is peaking (Score:4, Interesting)
that's because wikipedia benefits from the network effect far more than say google or yahoo. it is no small effort, but it is doable, to spider the web and compete with google or yahoo, and make a bid at becoming the defacto search standard instead of them. you need a platoon of programmers and a supply depot of big iron servers. but all that is required to do that is have a lot of cash
meanwhile, consider a hypothetical wikipedia competitor. you have to, somehow, remobilize millions of freelance editors and article contributors. cash can't do that, only passion can
all i'm saying is is that it is easier to bomb germany than it is to herd cats, because bombing germany just takes a lot of bombs and planes, but herding cats requires some sort of superhuman level of finesse no amount of money can buy
so if wikipedia is peaking, i think it is because wikipedia is maxing out on not its potential, but maxing out on the entire potential of its market segment. if wikipedia is peaking, it is not because interest is waning or a competitor is in sight, but simply because there is nowhere more to grow to. which is pretty impressive. wikipedia owns its space in the internet, and its not some subtle niche. its a huge and important market space. wikipedia is a massive success, by any measure
Re:Answers (Score:0, Interesting)
Assertions, with no evidence to back them up, only give insignt into the agenda of the commentor. Knowing that that the commentor is biased, our level of confidence drops further, rendering the comment not just pointless but possibly counter-productive to the commentors aims in posting it.
Kind of like most Wrongipedia articles in fact.
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! (Score:4, Interesting)
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:It's accuracy, on the other hand (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I partly blame the "validators" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Answers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
It's more than this. Wikipedia seems to have shifted from a content creation phase, to a content editing phase.
I've noticed a lot over the past few weeks that more and more articles are being edited to remove things like trivia section, add citations, and trim things quite a bit. There's also been a big move to remove many images from the site that are deemed "unsafe", i.e. copyrighted, for whatever reason.
I've spoken with people who became disgruntled with Wikipedia. They had the usual concerns, which I personally deemed trivial. However, one thing that did catch my ear was their dislike of the Wikipedia admins, or super editors, or whatever they are called. The stories matched up and went something like this:
Administrators are less concerned about content than they are about the "quality" of that content. Quality usually means, spell checks, structure, copyrights, citations and general "encyclopedic worthiness" of the underlying material. One gets to be an administrator by doing things like, spell checking, minor editing, rearranging and moving articles, deleting "unworthy" articles, etc. There's also a great desire for articles to conform to the rules and polices of the site.
The complaints usually revolved around pedantic and often autocratic admins deleting entire articles or a series of articles on "unworthy" topics; say an anime series or a fairly geeky debate on memes. Often very interesting content, like trivia sections** are removed wholesale. It's usually the case that the admins have grouped together and implemented a new "policy" which justifies their actions, despite how every many editors might object.
I'm not overly familiar with the politics Wikipedia, so I can't personally attest to much of this. However, the tale has come to me in a pretty consistent fashion from a variety of sources; namely that Wikipedia is slowly but surely being taken over by a very anal retentive clique of "Wikicrats", and that the tone of the place is changing accordingly. It sounded a little hyperbolic at the time, but slowly I'm beginning to see changes in the tone of articles.
I think it's a shift that Wikipedia was probably always going to make. But it seems a pity that the place is to become burdened by rules, policies and general bureaucracy. Death by a thousand kilometers of red tape seems an ill fitting fate for a site that blossomed by a billion altruistic edits.
**Though personally, I do think a few trivia sections could do with trimming.
Linda Mack and the Cabal (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not surprise to me that people are fed up with the likes of these and the duplicitous "Jimbo" Wales who claims to have an open encyclopedia. The problem is it only is only open to a few political extremists that have managed to get a foothold in the highest levels of adminstration and change phrases like "extrajudicial killing" or "assasination" to "targeted killing" or sex-trafficking to "human trafficking" to completely removed.
The "Human Rights in Israel" Article actually devotes a good part of its space to talking about why Amnesty International is actually anti-semitic for documenting violations Israel has made, and uses the lawyer that got OJ Simpson off a murder charge as the source!! I can't imagine why people would be fleeing this burning building in droves
Perhaps Citizendium is an answer (Score:2, Interesting)
Too Many Trolls and Fanboys (Score:1, Interesting)
Peaking is only natural. (Score:3, Interesting)
So, Radiohead's new album was announced about 10 days ago, and the In Rainbows article [wikipedia.org] makes Wikipedia look pretty "alive," if you ask me!
Re:Natural? (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree that the most enthusiastic hobby-ists have probably done what they will do, but I see another aspect: that Wikipedia has gotten so large that it has reached a level of chaos, rather than organization. People cannot visualize the location of their page in the whole, so it doesn't seem worth adding it. I would expect the next few years to concentrate on creating narrow topic WP's where the contributors can see the value that they are adding.
I think of this as the "all the x in the world" phenomenon. People are always starting off to create a site or system that has a goal of capturing the whole, but the whole turns out not to have boundaries, and in the end we can't relate to it. Most of us don't want everything, we want something, and we want the right something.
Wiki-entropy (Score:4, Interesting)
Wiki's great strength and great weakness has been its model. Anyone can contribute, but that then requires cops to police the anyones. Then who watches the watchers?
I read Wikipedia for articles regarding computer technologies and video games. On any other subject, it's often an inferior resource. Even further, I've found that most articles (which take the #1 Google spot) are plagiarized from the articles at Google spots 3-7.
For many topics, there are better specialized sources written by actual experts in the field, and not bitter grad students, and these are overshadowed by Wikipedia's prominence. This "decline" was long in the making.
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Interesting)
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:My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia (Score:1, Interesting)
Not good enough. It was considered self sourced because 'anyone could release a press release' and have an article. So, apparently, in 1994, a company released a press release so they could get a wikipedia article in 2006. Then a review in 2000 was considered not notable, because there were already several dozen similar programs. A statement by the company was not good enough either.
Article deleted.
Since then, I've started an attack on deletionists. I've gotten some to quit. It's a fun pastime, all you need to do is spend a little time with google and get lots of sources for what they want to delete, then the tide turns against them.
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:2, Interesting)
Explanations from a hardcore Wikipedian (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of Dragonfly's (the person who created those graphs) observations are fairly easy to explain, others require some knowledge of the site. Since I've been at Wikipedia (starting back in mid 2003) new article production has gone through 3 phases: (1) First it was super-linear. That is, each month, we produced slightly more new article than the previous month. Many people predicted that this would ultimately become exponential, and (2) eventually exponential growth is what we got. However, since last August, (3) that has mostly flattened out, to a relatively constant 40k-60k new article per month. I think the answer why is pretty obvious - all of the low-hanging fruit is long gone. When I started editing, there were lots of red links (links to articles that don't exist) that any non-expert might be able to churn out in 2 minutes. Many of the new articles I create nowadays [wikipedia.org] are highly esoteric, some of which I created after seeing them mentioned in journal papers I was peer reviewing. (Examples: Gustafson's law [wikipedia.org], Antigenic escape [wikipedia.org]).
As far as new account registration, that's a bit more complex to explain. First and most obviously, Wikipedia is not new anymore. We're not going to see the kind of new-user account registrations that we used to. But there's another, more complicated factor at work. For about 9 months (March to December 2006), there existed a technique to vandalize Wikipedia with impunity. You register lots of accounts, and then use each one to vandlize exactly once, log out, log back in with another accout and vandalize, etc. Mediawiki did not block your IP unless you attempted to register from a blocked account, so by editing with each one exactly once you avoided ever having your IP blocked. The only effective way to combat this was to have checkuser access (which I have, but I'm one of only about 10 people on the English Wikipedia who do) I filed a bug report, which was fixed in December 2006. I suspect that a lot of the drop-off in user account registration has to do with this bug being fixed. Registering 100 throw-away accounts was no longer effective, so people did not do it, therefore - I suspect- account registration went down.
Wikipedia's pagerank is its biggest problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Too much democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not the first time I had been frustrated with Wikipedia. Earlier, I had tried working at Citizendium, hoping to escape the endless vandalism and find some more reasonable people to deal with. At first things seemed promising, but then it was decided that all of the old Wikipedia articles would be deleted, which felt a lot like throwing out the baby with the bathwater (so much for being a fork), and then Larry Sanger turned out to be a little too much of a micro-manager for my taste. So, it was back to Wikipedia.
As I see it now, however, Wikipedia's main problem is not so much the vandalism, but that it is too much of a democracy. In such an environment, the average article can only be improved so far before it begins to degrade. It's not that too many cooks spoil the broth, but that's what happens when many (or most) of the cooks don't know what they're doing (or talking about). The problem becomes even more acute when hundreds of articles are involved that need to be organized into a coherent whole. You can see to it personally that the quality of one or more article is maintained, but as soon as you stop, then things start to slide downhill again.
If, on the other hand, Wikipedia were to become more of a meritocracy, then I have no doubt that things would improve considerably. I'm sure many Slashdotters can imagine ways to do that, but I think they would also agree that such measures would leave the project looking quite different. In fact, it would probably take all the fun out of it for most people. But then, what do we want Wikipedia to be: fun, or a place to find good articles with accurate information?
Re:Woah! (Score:2, Interesting)
That's where I see the problem. Mayan Hunting techniques? Sure! Let me get some of those tribal mayan hunters... or some of the tribal africans who've never seen a computer.. to log in and write up an ar... wait, what?!
I think the issue at hand, is that the people who actively contribute, are running out of things to write about. There is a TON more that can go into wiki, but the "experts" or ... people who even CARE about those subjects, are not the type who care about writing up articles about it.
The problem we need to solve for is... how to get the rest of the world to open up about their knowledge so that we can share from it. If the contributers don't KNOW of a new subject... how can they research it to find out about it and to eventually write it up?
I don't know if this already exists, and after a quick look i wasn't seeing it... but is there a "request an article" section? Example... I want to know about "Kings Mail", a specific type of way of making chainmail. It would be cool to post my request into a repository of "requests" for contributes to be able to look through?
Re:Why fancruft should be deleted... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't create articles from scratch any more... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's the Administrators! (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
It is to push content and traffic to Wikia (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikia is a service that allows any niche group to create their own sort of "wikipedia" for their topic. And unlike Wikipedia, it is for-profit, and clearly belongs to Jimmy Wales.
Wales seeded the admin system on Wikipedia and continues to be influential in its direction. It is in his direct interest if Wikipedia takes the "notability" route to its logical conclusion--pushing out all sub-topics or verticals that are not popularly or widely known. The associated interest groups are then welcome to come to Wikia to set up their knowledge base. Only now it will generate profit and fame for Jimmy Wales, instead of the Wikipedia Foundation. Plus, these types of small, focused, not-widely-known areas of knowledge are ideal points of attack against Google's search results. Getting them into the Wikia fold helps feed the new "Google killer" search engine project.
Wikipedia was a fad (Score:1, Interesting)
I have nothing against wikis, nor against Jimbo Wales, and indeed, I believe there's a strong chance whatever service succeeds Wikipedia might actually come out of Wikia, but the site itself will eventually pass into obscurity the way others such as Yahoo and Geocities have.