Thoughtful piece from MIT Technology Review on the troubling growing pains of the world’s sixth most widely visited website.
The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.
I didn’t know Wikipedia covered porn stars. Sounds interesting, going over now to build up my knowledge.
Jimbo personally banned me for adding a sourced, published quote. My takeaway lesson? Threaten to sue Jimbo in Florida and he’ll cave simply to avoid the aggravation of a meritless lawsuit.
I’d point to the innocuous article so you wouldn’t have to take my word for it, but it was disappeared.
Building a business on volunteers is fickle. Eventually the volunteers get “bored” with their work, which has a decreasing return on value. Especially one so open to fraud and manipulation that requires constant attention.
I suspect, at some point, Wikipedia will become a corporate entity, either through purchase or moving to a revenue model.
I commend all the volunteers commitment to remaining independent and any future model that helps maintain and strengthen the financial feasibility of Wikipedia must also maintain that independence of “reporting.”
Otherwise, the volunteers will decrease and much like downtown Detroit, Wikipedia will become stale and riddled with graffiti.
“Wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick.” So it’s left to the reader to evaluate its content. I think Wikipedia is valuable to a degree, but the world’s not going to end if it somehow whithers and dies.
I think one of the key issues is that many groups branched off. They use the tech for local topical sites they control, rather than contributing to the bigger site.
It might be the better move if the master site became more of an index to these various others than try to copy the topics. But that would also reduce ad potential etc.
I got to watch one obscure topic (how changing Romanization standards would affect presentation of a famous Japanese mathematician’s name and a result named after him). Really quite impressive in all.
And I see all too often BS changes by political or personal advocates/opponents, trying to score points or vandalize an entry. Those volunteers have to battle against armies of astroturfers, bloviators and outright sociopaths.
So I think the Wikipedia people deserve a fair amount of credit. Mostly, they’re undertaking heroic work for a semi-thankless cause; these types of criticisms primarily serve to reduce the psychic rewards that are all unpaid volunteers get.
Of course, there’s that old standby quote from a SF broadcaster, “remember, if you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” I sure would be happy to see these critical notes accompanied with, “for instance, I collated info on X for Wikipedia.”
MySpace. Died, was replaced and them re birthed to join the fray
Friendster, died and many folks have never heard of it.
And so on.
The tech behind it is more important to me than the content
wikipedia is the first place i go on a near daily basis
you cite volunteers getting tired and getting. why dont you likewise cite new volunteers coming online?
Good point, but one of the main issues that the article raises is the shrinking volunteer pool, which means new ones aren’t 1:1 replacing those who have stopped volunteering. As any property matures, there’s lesser payoff for volunteers. In the beginning, it’s thrilling to contribute to the growth and development, years on, it becomes mostly maintenance. Like standing in left field.