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.
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.