![]() ![]() Where are all the young programmers? They can easily learn the markup and handle the other barriers-if those barriers were the only barriers, Wikipedia should be having no problems. Barriers to entry are a problem for non-technical new users, yes, but it does not explain why technical new users are also not appearing. WMF seems to think that a little more lipstick on the pig will fix everything. They are problems, certainly, but not the core problem-if they were resolved, Wikipedia’s decline would continue. The “barriers to entry” like the complex markup are not the true issue. Their ‘solutions’ were band-aids which didn’t get at what I or others were diagnosing as the underlying problems. I read their plans and projections, and I predicted well in advance that they would totally fail, as they have. ![]() The WikiMedia Foundation (WMF) seems unable to address this issue. For the amateurs and also experts who wrote wikipedia, why would they want to contribute to some place that doesn’t want them? I am not excited or interested in such a parochial project which excludes so many of my interests, which does not want me to go into great depth about even the interests it deems meritorious-and a great many other people are not excited either, especially as they begin to realize that even if you navigate the culture correctly and get your material into Wikipedia, there is far from any guarantee that your contributions will be respected, not deleted, and improved. If you try to write niche articles on certain topics, people will tell you to save it for Wikia. These days, that ideal is completely gone. Instead of punching in a keyword to a search engine and getting 100 pages dealing with tiny fragments of the topic (in however much detail), you would get a coherent overview summarizing everything worth knowing about the topic, for almost all topics.īut now Wikipedia’s narrowing focus means, only some of what is worth knowing, about some topics. The potential was that Wikipedia would be the summary of the Internet and books/media. ![]() “would you expect to see a Bulbasaur article in a Pokemon encyclopedia? yes? then let’s have a Bulbasaur article”. Even if you personally did not like Objectivism or Pokemon, you knew that you could go into just as much detail about the topics you liked best-Wikipedia was not paper! We talked idealistically about how Wikipedia could become an encyclopedia of specialist encyclopedias, the superset of encyclopedias. You can see this stark difference between old Wikipedia and modern Wikipedia: in the early days you could have things like articles on each chapter of Atlas Shrugged or each Pokemon. Before I wound down my editing activity, dismayed by the cultural changes, I had done scores of articles & scores of thousands of edits. I happened to be a contributor to Everything2 at the time, and when one of my more encyclopedic articles was rejected, I decided it might as well go on Wikipedia, so I registered an account in 2005 and slowly got more serious about editing as I became more comfortable with WP and excited about its potential. I started as an anon, making occasional small edits after I learned of WP from Slashdot in 2004. The inclusionists founded Wikipedia, but the deletionists froze it. One bad editor can destroy in seconds what took many years to create. This discourages contributors-the prerequisite for any content whatsoever-and cuts off growth perversely, the lack of contributors becomes its own excuse for discouraging more contribution (since who will maintain it?), a self-fulfilling norm (we focus on quality over quantity here!) and drives away those with dissenting views, since unsurprisingly those who advocate more content tend to also contribute content and be driven away when their content is. Wikipedia is declining, fundamentally, because of its increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and to what depth those topics can be explored, combined with a narrowed attitude as to what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors. Here, I discuss UI principles, changes in Wikipedian culture, the large-scale statistical evidence of decline, run small-scale experiments demonstrating the harm, and conclude with parting thoughts. As a long-time editor & former admin, I was deeply dismayed by the process. ![]()
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