> I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts.
While you're entitled to your opinion, this is a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side".
I'm not a fan of the Wikipedia internal politics, but as a user, Wikipedia is one of the best showcases of the Internet and in my opinion the greatest collaboration project in human history.
For the first time we have knowledge available to all, for (almost) free. You want to pay because you're privileged, but that's not the way of improving humanity as a whole, rich and poor, privileged and stuck in a mud hut with a crappy phone.
Of course we can do better, but I find it incredibly dismissive not to recognise the incredible achievement Wikipedia is.
Blame the fact that as a species we're quite tribalistic and selfish, not the collective effort we're making while trying the hardest limit our biases and shortcomings as much as (humanly) possible.
After being on the maintainer side, working my ** off and not getting anything but more work without recognition or even a "thank you", I can't say I'm happy or positive towards OSS or services that can't sustain themselves. The human cost can't be ignored.
At the same time, working for free is rarely conducive of high quality, even when good engineers are behind it. Even when the quality is good, you can't expect maintenance.
Most of the OSS I use is either unmaintaned, of questionable quality or fake OSS maintained by business to attract/retain developers. There are famous exceptions in OSS (eg. Linux) driven by a few exceptional (and well off) individuals, but that's not the majority of the community. Students doing CV building are another segment of people doing OSS and hoping to get paid in recognition.
If it wasn't for the low level OSS got us used to, it would be easier to have a market of small independent developers selling software and maintaining it.
The same goes for wiki.
Right now I do believe that free wrong info is actually more damaging than paid correct info. But I am open to and wish for a third option or a solution which is more inclusive and less "for the privileged".
That would give more credence to your arguments.
Maybe also link to your rejected contributions to show that you are not just disgruntled because your edits were reverted.
I do agree that there are lots of inaccuracies in articles, but having Wikipedia with at least somewhat helpful information is infinitely better than having nothing at all.
Summary: A user, Britishfinance (believed to be Paddy Cosgrave, disgruntled founder of the web summit, a major EU tech event that moved from Ireland to Lisbon as the Irish government wouldn't give him what he wanted) spent about a year primarily editing articles related to Ireland to make a link of claims about the country being a tax haven the most prominent feature of them. Case in point, look at the overview for the article on Ireland after the user edited it [2]. It's since been rolled back somewhat by other wikipedia editors who felt that was a disproportionate amount of space given to that discussion.
But Wikipedia isn't so well equipped to handle this kind of dispute.
1. Ireland certainly has benefited from its tax policies, including both competitive but undisputed to be the right of the country, like having a lower corporate headline tax rate than its neighbours, and
2. Ireland has been involved in tax loopholes, such as the now defunct double irish/dutch sandwich stuff
3. You can find sourced articles for all of this.
So at what point does putting this information as the most prominent information in a wide variety of Ireland related articles cross from being just adding facts to encyclopedia articles to being politically motivated? When one side is an active wikipedia admin and the other side is a bunch of casual editors or users who don't edit, who gets the benefit of the doubt?
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/bgyfet/til_theres_...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Republic_of_Irela...
I think it’s so rare these days to find people who can remain objective and leave their opinions at the door. Everyone seems fueled by rage, it’s like their political views are their purpose in life.
Maybe, at least as long as we still have a good ratio between reliable and unreliable info (whatever that ratio may be). But as long as someone can piggy-back on this reputation, and most people simply take all that info for granted, the effect of a disingenuous Wiki article is far higher than your average FB "fake news". It's that implicit trust that makes a Trojan horse more dangerous.
There is no action being taken to make this process of correcting information more open and transparent, and out of the hands of a few people. Especially since it's been shown in the past that this kind of power was sold for money in PR campaigns, or used for revenge edits.
Wikipedia doesn't profit by weaponizing misinformation. That's FB's business model.
All those people who stormed the capital. You think they were FB users or Wiki users? The thought of them diligently reading encyclopedia entries and becoming radicalized has me cackling.
I find "an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln" to be a ridiculous introduction; it should read "an American assassin who killed President Abraham Lincoln" -- the man's profession is completely irrelevant; he is notable for this one act.
It isn't even consistently applied: Ted Kaczynski is listed as a domestic terrorist, Sirhan Sirhan is "a Palestinian Christian militant," but then Charles Guiteau is a "writer and lawyer."
Charles Guiteau had a long career prior to assassinating Garfield, as did Booth before assassinating Lincoln. While both committed assassinations, there was no point in time where you could have hired either to assassinate someone for you, it wasn't either of their professions.
One sentence fragment conveys that Lincoln was assassinated, the assassin's nationality, and the assassin's profession in 67 characters. The other conveys that Lincoln was assassinated and the assassin's nationality in 58 characters.
You like the wrong sentence. It's stylistically kooky, too: you need to point out that an assassin killed someone? That doesn't feel a little redundant to you?
> the man's profession is completely irrelevant
Hardly. But mostly it's strange that you'd want wikipedia to make that determination for you. It's not necessary.
> "Standard wikipedia formatting" being burying the lead is not a compelling defense.
Burying the lede would involve putting the information you're burying somewhere other than the middle of the first sentence of the first paragraph.
I mention Bill Ayers specifically because I asked a friend if they had heard of the Weather Underground recently and they said "sounds familiar, remind me?" And I said "Google Bill Ayers" and they paused and then said "the elementary education theorist?" And I said "lol, yeah, that's funny." That first sentence is what shows in Google results on mobile devices - it matters.
Similarly, Donald Trump is described as an American politician and the 45th president in his opening sentence, with discussion of his past in business and as a media personality reserved for later in the article. The standard wikipedia introduction is to list common aliases, nationality, and their current/last profession.
I will also note that on my mobile device if you google Bill Ayers, the first two sentences of his wikipedia article come up. The entire second sentence is about his involvement in the Weather Underground.
I'm pretty sure the days of a general data encyclopedia are past us. The amount of data to gather to make it useful is going to insanely expensive, and will in general be available from many sources for free, thereby decreasing its value.
That’s fantastic unless that ‘knowledge’ is wrong. We can get that kind of knowledge on Facebook.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249362832_Compariso...
And I'm not talking something like using a Dirac delta without referencing it; I'm talking about pretty esoteric notation that is really only relevant to the topic of the article.
And of course plenty of the math articles are just not very coherently written (and yes, plenty are quite good).
Maybe I should try the Simple English pages instead. :-/
I have seen occasional weird writing, but this is usually either some esoteric subject or just an initial writeup on a narrow topic -- that is, an inexperienced author trying to fill a void, not someone staking out territory or looking for recognition. Just my experience.
And to be clear, I am not talking about people staking out territory or looking for recognition. I am talking about articles being so badly written they are functionally indistinguishable from being "wrong". Yes, you can decipher them with enough outside knowledge and some other references, but it's pretty tough. And this is not a majority of mathematics articles by any means. But the problem is that if you don't know enough you can't tell whether you're looking at such an article or not, unfortunately...
P.S. I just took a quick look at just my recent-ish Wikipedia edits, and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Limit_superior_an... was correcting a small but obviously wrong claim. Which is, to be clear, not the sort of issue I was referring to in my comment about badly-written articles.
But I suppose that's an epistemological question, as to whether an article is a definition or an educational method.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_installation_software#...
Just an example, in my area of expertise. Some of the rejected edits were mine.
I have no idea why they don't meet Wikipedia's "notability" criteria or why such a 10 or 20 years old tool has or hasn't its own page - and I don't care. The list left (other than InstallShield and WiX) is a joke and you can plainly see that none of those editors has any expertise in the field. The end result is that that article is useless or worse for anyone reading it. Which I thought was the whole point of Wikipedia.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/deskto...
That you don't care about core Wikipedia values means that your attempts to edit it will always be frustrating for you. I get that they can be mysterious to outsiders, but unfortunately they're necessary. In particular Wikipedia isn't a place for people with expertise to come write things. It's a place where people with no particular expertise use expert material elsewhere to create an encyclopedia. That means every item must be traceable to reliable sources (which they call verifiable) and articles must have enough sourced material that you can write a basic article from it (which is what they call notable).
If you are an expert on this, then I'd suggest you write a signed article in some publication with a reasonable editorial apparatus, or in some other way that qualifies as a Wikipedia reliable source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
Then you can mention the article on the talk page and a Wikipedia editor can look at incorporating the material. Or if you think a reliable source already exists, try mentioning that. But no, you can't just put in things you think are true on Wikipedia if you don't have sources. Because however much it might help for this specific case, allowing that generally would quickly make Wikipedia a garbage heap.
There are some younger and less entrenched projects where one could make a difference without wasting time on BS (like Wikidata or Wiktionary) and there are less popular areas which aren't controlled by wikifeudals, but changing something otherwise requires too much effort for what it's worth, IMHO.
And yes, if there's any conflict of interest (usually political or ideological), the only thing you can trust is the links, and even those should be presumed to be selected in a biased manner. Of course, this also applies to any random article in 99.999% of the press, so it goes... It's still a valuable resource for topics not consumed with public controversy.
This echoed my experience before I left a Wikipedia project (one of its language variant). I have been vocal with the direction one of its most active admin is trying to head the project to, as well as the not-so-positive treatment of inexperienced users. Many of the legitimate complaints against this admin was pretty much ignored or stalled. Ultimately, I decided that it's not worth my efforts to try to push for a more friendly environment, and I have decided to leave. I still help with some offline activities and movement-related function, but chances for me to return to being the contributors again are slim.
That's one of the secrets for being left alone. Improving jealously-guarded pages - or bio pages that are overseen by PR folk - is like walking on thin ice.
Stay away from politics and celebs. There are lots (millions!) of pages in hundreds of topics that have been rated as high-importance and need lots of TLC ... and don't attract turf-guarders. There are lots of pages where people have added 'citation needed' (so easy) ... when they could have just added a good citation instead. Correct a spelling. Clarify a passage. Add a high-quality external link ... might save someone some research and let them spend that time improving the article. Might be better than the article will ever be. None of those are likely to attract attention, all improve the article.
Start small, build over time. You can draft something in a sandbox, then ask for an opinion before you invest hours. Yep, there are (many, many) rules - and they change over time. There are pages where you can ask for help. If someone reverts something, calmly discuss it. A copy of your work is never gone, it's in the history. Come back in a year and try it again!
I totally understand not having the time. I research a lot, and WP's very helpful. So I like to pay back, and if it takes me an hour to discover something, I might add that. Takes a minute. Stick a cite next to a couple of sentences, 99.8% solid. (Unless they have a secretary keeping an eye on their bio. ;-)
Look, anything you have time to improve ... 5 minutes ... can be helpful. I gave several examples. Adding a bit here and there is unlikely to attract 'petty bureaucrats'. They exist, but so do bees. I might hear from someone twice a year, and one of them will be a thanks. It's not like it was 10 years ago.
Anybody who complains, easy to look at their qualifications. Logged in or anonymous? How many edits lately? Sound reason for revert? If not revert back ... and walk away. If so, then: that's collaboration for ya.
When it comes to controversy, WP can be a best bet, in the citations. MANY eyes look those pages over.
Then there are also the people with ideological axes to grind, and the community's seeming belief that it's fine to merely reform a problematic user to just the barest level of acceptability.
Unless you find some forgotten corner, being a Wikipedia editor requires an inhuman level of patience or obsessiveness, which probably ends up turning off a huge number of potential contributors.
A Wikipedia deletionist resulted in a movie going without an article for months, despite my efforts to at least give it a stub page. The film was by no means an obscure arthouse production or anything like that, the not noteworthy objection was pure nonsense. Someone other than me eventually won that battle.
A StackOverflow deletionist deleted my question, fortunately after I got a decent answer, on the grounds that it was a duplicate of an existing question. The explanations in the answers were indeed similar, but the symptoms were quite different, especially from the point of view of someone who doesn't already know the answer. (It turned out I had made a false assumption about the way parentheses are treated in regex. Unlike in many contexts in many languages, it doesn't only affect precedence.)
There are definitely pros and cons. My wife is a professional musician and teacher so at home we have a copy of the "New Grove" encyclopedia of music, which is the industry standard "proper encyclopedia" for music. Each article is written by a specific expert in that subject, This leads to them being tremendously detailed and informative. The downside is the process of compliation is slow and so even if you have a subscription to the electronic version it will be behind (sometimes years behind) the very latest research.
Looking at the edit history of the article, someone added it a year ago, and then 204.132.216.84 has decided recently that a genuinely informative section must be removed from the article, because they thought it's "self-promotion for browser extension".
Dear 204.132.216.84, you're wrong.
Btw, I'm a user of your extension ;)
I would be interested in knowing your field of expertise where you find errors.
There are also lots of situations like if you are looking for things such as statistics related to a war, if you use Wikipedia to start your research you will wind up clicking through to all kinds of trash sources that waste your time when there are compendiums of statistics through either government reports or print references that you could have just used with library access in a fraction of the time that you spent sifting through a sea of web feces.
Do you have any examples?
Just like HN comments :)
You're assuming this is not enabled and supported by the WikiMedia foundation. I believe you are wrong. That is, what you see when you try to edit values are those "entrenched editors", but those are just the front lines.
Certainly, some policy and customs are set by virtue of being an active editor; but more fundamental and site-scale issues are just as certainly discussed, decided and acted upon - infrastructurally - by the foundation.
Today I can see mistakes and inaccurate info in every niche I am familiar with. Because of that, I cannot trust it on subjects I know nothing about. I tried contributing and fixing but nothing got through.
Even worse, the level of writing makes it almost impossible to comprehend. Articles are badly organized, unclear and explanations are missing or hard to understand. Again, any attempt to fix the form was rejected. Editors are much more interested in citations and levels of notability.
I gave up. I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts, I see a tremendous value in something like that, but alas the market was killed by the free Wikipedia.