15 years ago is almost exactly the date I have in my head for when Wikipedia stopped being interesting or exciting. Remember when it felt like something new and exciting, something that would tell you everything about the whole world? And then somehow it got captured by a bunch of bureaucrats who decided they wanted it to be a free copy of Britannica, and it achieved that, and has since just sat there begging for money and throwing it into the endless pit of irrelevant projects that is the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation?
More concretely, the new user experience got worse and worse: powertripping mods squatting their pet pages grew out of control, and all the notability/sourcing rules haven't really done anything to improve the quality of the content, they've just made it more tedious to contribute. And all this felt predictable at the time. The whole site took a massive wrong turn, and yet there never felt like any way to stop it.
How could you possibly call the largest encyclopedia in human history, freely accessible to all, and correct nearly all of the time irrelevant?
There are imperfections to Wikipedia and the Foundation of course, but, what more can you reasonably expect? If you want old internet fun, we have neocities.org for that. Wikipedia serves a functional purpose and does is exceedingly well in most cases.
> How could you possibly call the largest encyclopedia in human history, freely accessible to all, and correct nearly all of the time irrelevant?
I didn't - I called the other stuff the Wikimedia Foundation does, the stuff that it spends the vast majority of its immense donation income on, irrelevant.
> There are imperfections to Wikipedia and the Foundation of course, but, what more can you reasonably expect?
I expected policies that better reflected what most users and contributors wanted, or that helped make something better. Almost everyone was against the notability rules (and, while it's a minor thing really, almost everyone was in favour of spoiler warnings; they may have had theoretical problems but they worked well in practice). All the measures to make it harder for new users to edit were based on a false assumption - actually new users are no more likely to be vandals or politically biased than anyone else.
There's a major difference that makes Wikipedia fundamentally different than encyclopedias. Britannica was written primarily by experts ranging from Albert Einstein to Isaac Asimov, and everybody in between. And these writers would offer their own perspectives, insights, and expertise. It was a rich primary source.
Wikipedia, by contrast, is not a primary source, and writers are supposed to do little more than paraphrase reliable sources. This is a good idea in theory to solve the issue of going from having articles written by Einstein to having them written by random people, but it doesn't seem to work so well in practice. The problem is that topics whose framing is seen as relevant by some group or another (which is an absurdly large amount) drags in partisans, corporations, politicians, intelligence agencies and the rest of the dreg. And it leaves Wiki really hurting for quality on these pages.
I think it ceased to be a wiki a long time ago. The whole point of a wiki is to have the lowest barrier to entry possible for editing so any non-expert can jump in and change something quickly. The word “wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick”.
But these days, a huge amount of bureaucracy has sprung up around editing things on Wikipedia. There’s an immense number of rules; there are people with seemingly infinite time gatekeeping their favourite topics; there are protected pages; there are notability requirements; there are vast IP bans; and so on. Wikipedia has a bureaucracy fetish and an army of rules lawyers. You might argue that for the scale of Wikipedia this is required, and I’m sure there’s at least some truth to that, but that is incompatible with the idea of a wiki.
I know that new user experience is awful now. Can’t even correct misinformation because my whole range of available dynamically assigned IP addresses from my ISP (the largest in the country) are blocked and I can’t find any way to sign up for an account that’s navigable compared to the benefit of a huge body of errata on a wide range of topics. That’s my example.
Beyond that, a bureaucracy has arisen and much like the nomenklatura they exhibit many of the problems of the system they sought to replace.
Wikipedia is still great.
But the new stuff is not as fun. The user added photographs from 20 years ago pleasantly surprise me a lot more than the new stuff. But I don’t keep a file on hand.
More concretely, the new user experience got worse and worse: powertripping mods squatting their pet pages grew out of control, and all the notability/sourcing rules haven't really done anything to improve the quality of the content, they've just made it more tedious to contribute. And all this felt predictable at the time. The whole site took a massive wrong turn, and yet there never felt like any way to stop it.