Personally, I attribute this more to Wikipedia's non-commercial nature. It's goal has a clear end state because it isn't chacing endless growth that for-profit/vc-backed companies do.

I believe also it's possible to have a social media network that is non-commercial and is successful because it has no need to pump engagement to chase endless growth.

I'm not sure that's the case. It has an ever expanding budget and picks up new political causes often.

How does either of those things make it like a business or chasing profit?

The specific attribute mentioned is the pressure to continue to grow, instead of executing a simple mission. Wikipedia doesn't do that at all, and clearly feels pressure to grow power and expand into new domains.

The last time wikimedia really did that was wikidata and that was a decade ago.

Although i suppose the ongoing abstract wikipedia stuff is an example of that.

By and large i dont think there has been much in way of expansion attempts. Most of them are from long ago.

What does that have to do with expanding into new domains? Its just a restructuring of how some of the funding works.

* * *

I believe any social site will inevitably devolve into spam and trolling, and arguments about why my poor behavior doesn't quite cross the line. It has to constantly solicit new content, even if it were completely devoid of financial goal, because it's fundamentally read-write.

Wikipedia aims for a read only state and will happily throw out any contribution even slightly out of line since that's not its mission. It's anti-social.

There have been other social information sites that failed not so much because of an explicit commercial angle but because any such site can easily be overrun by the grifter and scammers.

That is the irony to me. Good things seem to require a strong vision and discipline. This often comes from an individual forceful enough to maintain focus for the group.

It can also come from rules that are enforced by a group of individuals

Yes it can, I think that it is rarer form. I can't think of any but I'm sure they exist.

This belief is founded on a falsehood, specifically it rests upon some version of the popularised economic theory of the “tragedy of the commons”.

Short version. The original Tradgedy of the Commons paper that much modern economic theory rests upon and that is a key pillar that justifies the value of privatisation has found to have been made up.

Elinor Ostrom spent over 20 years debunking that there’s nothing you can do, and distilled a set of principals that any community can enact to protect and preserve a commons.

By example, here’s Mozilla led research on ‘A Practical Framework for Applying Ostrom’s Principles to Data Commons Governance’

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/a-practical-framework...

How exactly does "here's a set of rules that people can follow to share resources with minimal problems, it took two decades to figure out" count as a debunking of "sharing resources without an authority to impose rules tends to go badly"?

Your skepticism reflects your naivety. You might want to do your own research into Ostroms Nobel Prize in economics.

> The original Tradgedy of the Commons paper that much modern economic theory rests upon

None of modern economic theory rests upon that paper. Literally the only thing that rests on it is the name of a scenario in game theory, and... it’s not even the dominant name, just an alternate for Prisoner’s Dilemma.

(A lot of social science, and not just economics, applies that scenario, but that doesn’t rest on the paper, but on rational choice theory, or some variation thereon.)

Privatisation is founded upon this (false) conception. In short due to the (false) “unavoidable tragedy of the commons”, our only choice is to have assets either privately owned or owned by the state.

This was what was espoused by the (debunked) paper and remains a pillar of contemporary neo-liberal ideology.

> Privatisation is founded upon this (false) conception

“Privatization” is a government policy, not “modern economic theory”, and to the extent that policy is based on that broad concept of a general effect of which the essay purported to document an example (rather than specific analysis of the domain being privatized), that essay is not the basis (it neither introduced the concept—which was much older—nor was is it the sole purported example).

> This was what was espoused by the (debunked) paper and remains a pillar of contemporary neo-liberal ideology.

It was a pillar of liberal ideology long before the essay was written, it never rested on the essay and, in any case, ideology isn’t the same as economic theory (Austrian school aside.)

Pretty confident that a ‘Nobel Prize in Economics’ fits within ‘Modern economic theory’.

I think we’re at semantics.

> Pretty confident that a ‘Nobel Prize in Economics’ fits within ‘Modern economic theory’.

If you mean the 2009 one for work that included one of the many dismantlings of both the underlying essay you are you are talking about and the broader principal it addresses, sure, but that further rebuts, rather than supports, your argument that modern economic theory is based on that essay.

That's trivially proven false by the numerous examples of social sites that subsist for decades with a healthy community.

>> It enforces ego-less-ness by not showing you names; it doesn't want your contributions, especially not on general topics that people enjoy "debating".

Every time I have tried to edit anything in Wikipedia I have run into a very ego-driven community of long-term editors who don't much care for outsiders playing in their sandbox. The levels of "proof" and "citation" demanded to make even the smallest correction, often far beyond anything backing the preexisting copy, means only those with ego-driven determination are likely to have their edits stick. I do care a little that a wikipedia article is incorrect about a topic related to my profession. But I don't care enough to engage some armchair lawyer/soldier in an epic back-and-forth debate over a period of days/weeks. So I back off and just let the errors sit there.

I've been an casual editor for over a decade, and I've never run into this issue.

I've made substantive changes to either little known but contentious or moderately well known pages - and my changes largely persisted.

Sometimes edits are easier on the contentious pages. There are more people looking at those pages and so democracy can prevail over time. But edit an almost unknown page and someone may jump out of the woodwork. There are editors of small pages, especially original page creators, who jealously guard their tiny mountains.

Some communities have a latest substantial author owns the page policy, along with a major edits only policy, which tends to work better for math and CS where there’s a lot of people who want to make micro corrections.

Technical communities also value professional credentials and prestige as a blockbuster, so it may be helpful to reveal your professional achievements.

> Technical communities also value professional credentials and prestige as a blockbuster, so it may be helpful to reveal your professional achievements.

Wikipedia generally does not (if anything it would probably count against you as most people who bring that sort of thing up are lying about them anyways).

Sometimes people are unfairly reverted, but often people are reverted for good reason and have problems accepting that their edit simply was not a positive change to the page.

I'll second this (over a decade of low to moderate activity). I've seen contention of course, discussions do occasionally get heated, but territorialism doesn't appear anywhere near as frequently as I've seen in similar projects, like OSM.

I love Wikipedia. I agree all the good things people are saying about it here and all the people supporting Wikipedia.

That being said.

Wikipedia isn't the truth. I know this for a fact, because there are historical articles that I was there to witness that are not even close to being documented correctly by Wikipedia.

Wikipedia simply collates narratives that can be drawn from citable evidence. Still, their definition of citable evidence is about as workable as I can imagine.

If one doesn't like it, one is invited to get your side of the story published in a reputable source, and then cited. It outsources the process of fact-checking to the free press, such as it exists on the internet.

There is a clip from Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom that humorously illustrates[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/3wla-vK4Buw

I still think Wikipedia is better than we probably deserve and I'm glad we are training training AI on it. I also hope that they are trained on the edit discussions, because that is the AI that's going to really understand humanity.

> Every time I have tried to edit anything in Wikipedia I have run into a very ego-driven community of long-term editors who don't much care for outsiders playing in their sandbox.

This is likely similar to the force that keeps StackOverflow from growing and staying useful. StackOverflow is basically "Answers to programming questions as if it were still 2009" because any new content gets quickly removed as "duplicate" of content that existed a decade ago.

I've seen the same thing happen on OpenStreetMap. You make an edit, and some old-timer comes in and just reverts it. I even once got an angry message there where someone "claimed" an area in a city for himself.

I'm not a Redditor, but I understand Reddit has similar problems with mods.

Not sure the solution. It's hard to develop a community of passionate volunteers, but every time a platform does build this community up, the content calcifies under an inflexible cabal of power-mad volunteers.

> I've seen the same thing happen on OpenStreetMap. You make an edit, and some old-timer comes in and just reverts it. I even once got an angry message there where someone "claimed" an area in a city for himself.

I'm sorry this happened to you. Usually, edits are only reverted if the are 'bad', e.g. the one edit I reverted this morning, where a user added some buildings in India and some buildings in the ocean close to Greenland; https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/136040657

If you've copied data from another map into OpenStreetMap this might also be a cause for a revert, otherwise `some old-timer` should absolutely not revert your edit. Do you care to link us to the edit that was reverted and to the user that sent you an angry message, because such things should not happen in our community! (If desired, you can also message me thought the internal OSM messaging system, same username).

OSM was probably not a great example on second thought. This all happened over a decade ago and sounds like it’s uncharacteristic of the community. Edits I’ve done recently are fine. I’m probably projecting an ancient anecdote onto an entire community which is not fair.

Thank you for being fair and self reflective enough to admit fault

There are people in the OSM community that are difficult to interact with. It's good to hear there are no recent issues you've encountered, so it seems that at least there is a good development.

I believe the solution will lie with AI mods at some point.

My main personal project is a golf wiki using this model, because I really admire it.

I talk to people about how the site is growing, and it is slowly, but I let them know that I doubt it will "catch on" for probably a decade, because any type of fast growth involves purchasing data (with costs/limitations) instead of getting it for free from everyday golfers.

>>But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains.

Yup. Much of golf business seems to be pretty extractive to me, and the game is already too fucking expensive, I can currently run it very cheaply, and it's a fun hobby that's been rewarding seeing people use it more and more.

If anyone is interested: https://golfcourse.wiki