There are a number of valid reasons for this, and a number of not-so-valid ones:
The valid reasons mostly center on the fact that 'mining history' at some point comes to a halt, there are only so many relevant subjects from the past that warrant inclusion.
At some point it gets harder to find stuff that you can include on pages about historical events, objects and people.
This will lead to a reduction of work and like any company that would work on a job that has 'an end' (the documentation of history would be that job) that when the job is done the people end up without work.
The other reasons are less nice and do not stem from accomplishment but from the power that a relatively small group of experienced users wields.
Wikipedia is full of politics and infighting. The atmosphere, especially for new people joining up is full of venom. New editors have their content (their work!) deleted, often without cause, get bombarded with messages with lots of wikipedia specific jargon and feel in general seriously intimidated.
Of course this nicely serves the purpose of those that have hijacked wikipedia from being a public project to one that they use as their personal fiefdom.
There are 'factions' amongst the editors that seem to be aware of this problem and there are those that seem to be it's main creators. I hope that in the long run the first group will get the upper hand but judging by the various wars on 'talk' pages it might be that it is the former group that is now giving up and leaving.
I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum.
I've had my wikipedia account purged and renamed so I can't provide the exact talk page link. However I did happen to talk to another editor who actually had the exact same thing said to him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Grimjaw
Apparently he has since quit Wikipedia too. My guess is we were both arguing with the same mod. And the cat being an animal argument was a metaphorical argument we were having while discussing an edit.
It's hard to believe this actually happened, and if it did, you should be able to provide a link to the conversation. I'm guessing "Special:Contributions/chaosprophet" is you (after looking at the "chaosprophet" on Twitter and the associated blog), and I don't see any argument about cats being fungi.
"I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum."
That won't matter much. Google loves the wikipedia.org domain so much, that any new site will need seriously hard work to get it even moving. In short, it won't have the traffic necessary to compete.
You're placing the horse behind the cart. Google indexes websites, websites do not exist to be indexed by google.
If another website will take wikipedias place in terms of quality and wikipedia will degrade then wikipedia will find that people will start linking to that other site. In time this will lead google to increase the ranking for these pages.
Remember that google indexes PAGES not DOMAINS.
So for every page that the new wikipedia contains that the old one does not the forked one gets right of way. It's not like wikipedia started off with millions of pages and lots of backlinks. The new project would be a fork in the open source sense, a new name with a fresh start and a chance to show how it can be done better. Its ability to lure people away from the 'old' wikipedia is what makes it go, the editors will determine its success, not google.
And the chances of that success are simply a factor of how much time they put in collectively to make it different and better than the original.
There is, however, a network effect. I know I often link to Wikipedia because it's the first relevant link found in a search that contains a concise description of a concept that I don't want to define inline in my blog post / comment / etc. This would perpetuate Wikipedia even if it were completely unmanned and read-only.
Absolutely, they have a head-start. But given the fact that the future is literally infinite and wikipedia has only been around for a relatively short portion of that I think it is inevitable that at some point they'll be replaced by something better.
If half the editors decide tomorrow to reboot then I don't doubt that given enough time they'll out-perform the infighters and the politicians. They'll have to be on guard against repeating the same mistakes from day 1 though to make it work.
Unless google has tweaked their algorithm to give domains with a lot of high page ranked pages and automatic boost (and this may be the case but it has never ever been conclusively demonstrated) google is still indexing pages.
There is a 'ban hammer' that has been applied to domains wholesale in the past, to give all the pages in a domain a PR of 0, but a PR boost across a domain has not been seen 'in the wild' as far as I know.
A good test would be to find out-of-order wikipedia pages that have content that is clearly of lesser value than pages that are ranked lower. That would be fairly conclusive proof that such a boost indeed exists. I haven't seen it though, but I'm open to change my mind if someone has some real proof of that.
Really? I seem to have to weed through 15-20 Wikipedia ripoff sites just to find what I'm searching for these days. Occasionally they place higher than Wikipedia itself, somehow.
> At some point it gets harder to find stuff that you can include on pages about historical events, objects and people.
That, and the standards have risen. It used to be that there were plenty of unwritten articles, so throwing together articles from common knowledge and anecdote was "good enough". Nowadays, there's a lot more focus on high-quality referenced work -- and, while that's a lot more useful in the long run, it's also a lot harder to write. And the majority new users simply aren't up to the task. High-quality writing is hard, and crowdsourcing doesn't make it any easier.
I simply can't take any Wikipedia criticism seriously.
The mainstream media isn't going to publish anything about Wikipedia unless it's got a hook. "Online Encyclopedia Still Surprisingly Useful" just isn't catchy enough.
For non-mainstream criticism, it generally seems to be, well lets say, "kooks". I actually seek out new criticism in the hope that it may be enlightening. Most recently I saw a blog comment from someone who wrote a column in the Guardian newspaper about Wikipedia's problems and how it is a cult. I literally just remembered this, and Google'd for it and found this:
"I'm on Wikipedia, get me out of here" : an article complaining about his own Wikipedia article.
You really couldn't make it up. I'd love to read some actual thoughful criticisms but just can't seem to find them. Links are appreciated if you're aware of any.
No surprise here. I tried editing 3 or 4 articles, and every single time my additions were reverted, even if they were valid. There are too many power-tripping people on wikipedia.
The nice thing about WP is that there's no place to hide on it. Give us an example of an article where this happened, and the rough time it occurred, and let's find it and talk about it. Maybe there's a good reason you got RV'd, or maybe there's a great example of something pathological about WP editing that we can add to the discussion.
While it is probably true that a more hostile environment is to blame for a big portion of the decline, the maturity of the articles might also be a factor.
Maybe the articles people care most about are sufficiently well written. Many people can't add much valuable information to a lot of the topics and so they don't feel the need to participate. Without this first quick win, there is little incentive to keep editing.
Yes, "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" is a much better headline than "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Improves" (when "better" is defined to be "attention grabbing").
Even the HN headline does this: "Number of Wikipedia editors steadily declining". Maybe it should be "Quality of Wikipedia articles steadily improving". Which is the cause? Which is the effect?
The article says "Indeed, Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix." This would indicate Wikipedia itself is gaining in popularity even as the WSJ headline implies it is going downhill (precipitously, I might add).
FWIIW, I've tossed in my 2c occasionally, but only as an anonymous contributor. I don't contribute enough to qualify as an editor, but sometimes a fact is wrong, needs clarification, or some English is rough. So, is there any metrics of anonymous contributions? Are they up? Are they down?
Beyond that, the article is full of anecdotes of Things That Went Wrong (but were corrected). How is that not a success story? If nothing went wrong, it would be because nothing was contributed. For the risk adverse, the "optimal" trade-off of risk vs. change suppresses all change (this is endemic in large corporations).
Then the rest of the article rolls out the same old criticisms of lack of credentials among Wikipedia editors.
Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it
-- Chinese Proverb
In my experience, it is more likely to be the immaturity of the articles that is putting people off.
I have contributed a few edits to Wikipedia over the years. Why not, if I can usefully fill in a blank and it costs me mere seconds to help?
More recently, though, I've been finding subjects where the entire article was so hopelessly wrong that I wouldn't know where to begin fixing it, other than deleting it completely and starting over. I looked for an appropriate marker in one case that would at least suggest that the article as a whole did not represent a neutral point of view or was completely unsupported by any factual evidence, but after a few minutes trying to navigate Wikipedia's absurdly overcomplicated self-documentation and finding nothing but reasons I wasn't allowed to fix anything or contribute, I gave up and found something else to do with my time.
I wonder whether the neutral point of view principle isn't a significant part of the problem. Many of the pages I find most misleading are deadlocked, because no-one can agree on what a neutral point of view is.
Under those circumstances, perhaps it would be more helpful to do what civilised discussion has done since forever: present two articles (or sections in an article) that, by construction and intent, take opposing viewpoints. Let the reader see both sides of the debate, making the best case they can and with the best sources they can find to support their point of view, and let the reader decide. As long as it is very clear when there is a single article trying to present a subject neutrally and when the adversarial system is in use, I don't see why this would cause a problem, and it would break a lot of the deadlocks I've seen and get constructive editing going again.
The goal of Wikipedia isn't truth, it's verifiability. Whether it's possible to be truly neutral or not is besides the point. NPOV isn't a policy designed to converge on truth. It's a policy designed to converge on a set of verifiable statements.
I think the problem comes when you start to stray from objective facts, which really are inherently neutral, and get into more subjective evaluations of those facts or outright personal opinion.
On the tricky pages I encountered, often the problem was that the material was presented as a description of something, followed by advantages and disadvantages sections, and while the description may have been factual, that's where the objectivity ended. Perhaps from Wikipedia's point of view that means the pros and cons simply shouldn't be featured.
Realistically, however, someone researching a new field will probably be interested in such information, and many pages on Wikipedia do have this structure. Rather than trying to push water uphill, it might be a smarter move to adapt to the reality and do it properly.
There is a process of nearly mechanical editing you can do to fix subjective "Criticisms" or "Controversy" sections in WP articles: you replace naked opinions with overt citations, like, "In 2007, David Broder remarked in the New York Times that...".
There is also a fairly straightforward process of assessing the weight that a "Controversies" section gives to a POV by repeatedly citing similar or related sources, and a set of editing tactics that can be used to collapse them into a summary graf.
That is part of the Rupert Murdoch controversy: many (all?) of the News Corp. properties are behind a paywall, but the paywall has a hole in it the size of Google. ;-) Google pays them (but not enough to stop them from complaining) and indexes their sites. They intentionally allow users coming from a Google search to enter their fiefdom, but throw up a paywall for direct links.
They have a serious conundrum: they want to be indexed by Google so that they can attract visitors, but they want to be paid by subscriptions (paywall), which is more lucrative than advertisements (assuming they can convert visitors into subscribers).
Even if they closed the "referred by Google" hole, they would still have to allow the googlebot unfettered access in order to index their site. This would make the hole slightly more obscure, but it would not close it.
"The foundation also invested $890,000 in a new design for the site ..." Yow! I'm sure that's wrong/misleading in some way, but what does this figure actually include?
EDIT: Just noticed you can actually turn on their improvements by clicking the "Try Beta" link in the upper-right corner of the page. Seems really nice, actually.
Well, that page says "The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is realized by a grant from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation." So I'm not entirely sure if this explains it. (Nearly a million dollars seems a lot of money for a redesign + usability study, as well.)
What will editors do after they leave? There is an enormous amount of available time and attention span that could be spent on other valuable projects for mankind.
Thought about that too. I think http://www.openstreetmap.org/ is similar enough in at least one respect: You describe the part of the world that you understand and know best. But maybe contributors concentrate their effords on their own pet project or spend their time on twitter.
I wonder if history will repeat itself and lesser geographic locations (like narrow alleys or something) will get deleted from openstreetmap because they're not deemed important enough by the ruling elite.
Hopefully they'll help clean up Wiktionary. I downloaded the English dataset the other day and it's a mess. IIRC, less than 1/3 of the words are properly tagged as English words, and a significant fraction of the words aren't even rendered in the English character set.
The good news is that the editorial standards are extremely consistent, so it's easy to extract information. They also allow batch updates, so if I find an easy way to correct vast swaths of this data, I could send a batch update file once
The valid reasons mostly center on the fact that 'mining history' at some point comes to a halt, there are only so many relevant subjects from the past that warrant inclusion.
At some point it gets harder to find stuff that you can include on pages about historical events, objects and people.
This will lead to a reduction of work and like any company that would work on a job that has 'an end' (the documentation of history would be that job) that when the job is done the people end up without work.
The other reasons are less nice and do not stem from accomplishment but from the power that a relatively small group of experienced users wields.
Wikipedia is full of politics and infighting. The atmosphere, especially for new people joining up is full of venom. New editors have their content (their work!) deleted, often without cause, get bombarded with messages with lots of wikipedia specific jargon and feel in general seriously intimidated.
Of course this nicely serves the purpose of those that have hijacked wikipedia from being a public project to one that they use as their personal fiefdom.
There are 'factions' amongst the editors that seem to be aware of this problem and there are those that seem to be it's main creators. I hope that in the long run the first group will get the upper hand but judging by the various wars on 'talk' pages it might be that it is the former group that is now giving up and leaving.
I predict that wikipedia will sooner or later be 'forked' by a group of the former, with stricter guidelines in place for moderators and that the 'old' wikipedia will be abandoned to the inmates that want to run the asylum.