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598 points leotravis10 | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.651s | source
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bawolff ◴[] No.45129304[source]
There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.

And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.

But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.

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1. lucideer ◴[] No.45136339[source]
I used to contribute semi-regularly to Wikipedia in the past, but tried contributing recently & found the experience to be off-putting (to put it mildly).

I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).

I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.

BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.

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2. lucideer ◴[] No.45136493[source]
To add a thought on tackling the listed faults:

1. I suspect the NPV problem may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem (or at least one that would literally take a global paradigm shift in how all societies are structured to do so). This seems outside of Wikipedia's control. Attempting any draconian measures to tackle it might have negative knock-on effects on many of the other assets that give Wikipedia it's value.

2. The spending problem, as I said, is subjective & might simply be a case of efficiency being incompatible with an organisational culture that produces such a miraculous thing. I honestly suspect the opposite is true: I personally think the overspends are indicative of organisational disfunction that could seriously hurt the project in the longer term, but that's pure gut feeling on my part, based on nothing of substance. Who knows.

3. The increasing difficulty in contributing (80% of edits coming from 1% of editors) on the other hand is - imo - a potentially terminal problem & one that needs to be addressed urgently if we want to keep this resource alive.

In the past, Wikipedia vandalism was a rite-of-passage of school & college kids. This obviously needs counter-measures but it really feels like today's Wikipedia has gone so far in the opposite direction as to entirely dissuade new contributors. Old Wikipedia used to be filled with User: namespaced subpages with long form essays on the ever running debate between deletionism & inclusionism. In today's Wikipedia, the inclusionists have emigrated, tired of battle, & the remaining deletionists bravely prevent any budding new contributor from having a positive welcoming community experience by quickly auto-deleting their WIP stubs or moving them into esoteric red-taped namespaced processes nobody knows how to navigate. It's a deeply unwelcoming environment for new users, especially young people. I'd love to see an age profile of the population of frequent editors.

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3. Pikamander2 ◴[] No.45137402[source]
It's staggering how many articles get deleted despite having a dozen citations and at least some level of notability.

Even more concerning is that the deletion "consensus" is often formed by just half a dozen people who almost always cast a deletion vote.

I pop into AFD discussions occasionally and try to put my thumb on the scale but always end up disappointed with the results.

Someone should make a "Deleted From Wikipedia" website composed of nothing but Wikipedia articles that were deleted due to supposedly insufficient coverage/notability.

4. mdnahas ◴[] No.45157073[source]
I’ve had a similar experience. I’ve edited Wikipedia pages for ages. I was able to create Wikipedia pages a while ago. Recently, I tried to create a page (“quantity controls”, a less well known relative of price controls in economics) and it got deleted for bullshit reasons.