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Re:Wikipedia's in Trouble (2019) by bawolff on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:22PM (#25307298)
I disagree with most of this (for context im a mediawiki developer. I used to work for WMF but dont anymore. My opinions are my own):

-wikitext unparsable - wikitext is a bit insane but there exists a parser called parsoid. If we couldn't parse it it would be impossible to make a visual editor

- most pages are redirects: not sure what the problem is.

-boilerplate text - there is a template system to have repeated text in only one place. Not sure what the issue is.

- he goes on a rant about no search without giving much context. There is a search feature based on elastic search (older versions were based on lucene directly). In my opinion its a pretty decent search engine (especially compared to most sites that make their own search). I'm not sure what the actual complaint is.

-complaints about wikidata - this is more political than technical, however "If wikidata was a company, it would not exist anymore, and you wouldn't have heard of it." seems patently false. Wikidata is pretty popular even outside of academia, and is used quite extensively.

- category tree being a graph not a tree - that's kind of unfortunate but what exactly is the problem here. Its a problem on commons, but i've never really seen how its an issue in practise on wikipedia. Complex categorization is being taken over by wikidata anyways.

Template ecosystem is complex - it could certainly be better, but the complexity here is a trade-off allowing more flexibility and allowing the system to evolve.

Inclusionist vs deletionist: no comment

UI design: perhaps a fair point here, although i do kind of like the stability of the current design. Most of the modern web sucks imho.

Moral failure: i dont want wikipedia to fix the world. That's not its role. Its job is to document, not to partake.

Viz editor not being enabled by default: i agree, although i think it was pushed too hard in early days when there was still kinks, but its long past time now.

To be clear, i definitely dont think wikipedia is perfect, i just disagree with some of these specific criticisms.

Re:Wikipedia's in Trouble (2019) by entropicdrifter on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:48PM (#25307707)
- most pages are redirects: not sure what the problem is.

With respect to this point, I think the author is saying that it's a dated system that introduces a ton of potentially unnecessary link rot. Basically, there's a ton of unnecessary technical debt because there isn't a more automatic way to set up/maintain redirects and instead often multiple manual entries are added for e.g. common misspellings of article names.

Re:Wikipedia's in Trouble (2019) by bawolff on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:53PM (#25307787)
I guess, but i think it would be a hard problem to determine when a misspelling is close enough we should auto redirect without telling the user, and when its unclear enough that auto redirecting is too much and we should only have a little "did you mean x" prompt like we currently do.
Re:Wikipedia's in Trouble (2019) by spencermountain on Saturday December 05, 2020 @10:29AM (#25315219)
hi Brian, thank you for your work and your response. You've chosen to work on the world's most important and difficult project, and for that you should be thanked every day. Apologies if my tone was off, or criticisms too harsh. cheers
Re:Wikipedia's in Trouble (2019) by bawolff on Saturday December 05, 2020 @11:08AM (#25315535)
Not at all, criticism is important; it is how we learn. I have at times experienced harsh criticism from members of the Wiki[pm]edia community, and rest assured that you're criticism is by no means harsh, but is constructive in tone, even if I might disagree with some of it.

I probably bias myself by being too used to the status quo, and thinking its better than it really is. As a computer programmer, i probably underestimate the problems with the complexity of wikitext - since after all, a user facing markup language should not be anywhere near as complex as a programming language but there are times where it does feels like wikitext is basically spaghetti code.

Anyways, cheers.