Sometimes I despair at the state of democratic politics, but looking at the edit wars of Wikipedia, it could have been worse. So much pettiness for nothing.
well as the saying goes, 'the fights are so fierce because the stakes are so low', or slightly more technically 'In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake'. Wikipedia is like a breeding ground for Girardian terror with people who tend to be very homogenous all competing for very similar things which often are only relevant because someone else wants to exercise control over them. Only place worse might be reddit moderation.
1. There is not a lot to contribute as a lot of matters are already covered. This is not a bad thing at all.
2. Moderators do a very bad job. Last year I created an entire article about a popular vehicle, it took 6 months to be published and it was just about a page long with solid references. At one time it was rejected because it had "not enough external links", so I added half a dozen links to the dealers selling that vehicle, on top of the original manufacturer page. This discourages contributors and it is a serios problem.
It's pretty great that Wikipedia is a centralized source of information, but I do sort of lament the decline of personal web sites on GeoCities or university web hosts or whatever.
The problem with "deletionism" is not lack of sources and citations. It's the fact some moderators don't want certain material there. Creating sources is not a guarantee you'll be able to add them back, quite the opposite.
In the past I've seen purges of all kinds of well-sourced material: law, electric engineering, literature, important CS/engineering figures. It's never because of lack of sources, it's always some subjective rule.
Actually, I've seen "the content is already available in another website, why do we need it here?" being be used as an argument against reinstating some very uncontroversial articles.
Deletionism vs inclusionism is a balance, and i don't know if wikipedia has the right balance, but i'm glad its not everything2. If "everything goes" content-wise, then you lose consistency and quality, which is a big part of what makes wikipedia great.
Not surprising given the ~Objectivist philosophies of its creators.
"Wrong" interpretations are perfectly useful data as long as I know who is making it.
Unless you mean which user added it? I fail to see what a potentially ephemeral pseudonom really tells me. Its not like you need to present a drivers license to edit wikipedia. Anyone can be anybody.
But even ignoring that, i suppose i just don't agree. Seems like one big exercise in the genetic fallacy. I want people to show their work, and have their encyclopedic writing work be evaluated on its merits. I'm mistrustful of systems that put stock in people's reputations over what they actually do.
Maybe the Wikimedia Foundation should focus more on attracting and keeping a broader range and number of contributors instead of curating few it considered "good".
More to the point, i think your argument would be more compelling if you had some examples of non-"small world graph" endeavours that worked out well. I'd love for some experiments, but i think we need some succesful experiments before saying that its a better model.
Here is their stated purpose:
The primary objective of this work has been to bring forth the issue of the growing depletion of editors, especially the experienced editors in Wikipedia.
One may be able to take their data and then determine if certain editors are near the quitting threshold. The data may also reveal operational and environmental conditions that could be changed to limit the loss of experienced editor.
> a major concern for not only the future of this platform but also for several industry-scale information retrieval systems such as Siri, Alexa which depend on Wikipedia as knowledge store.
That doesn't imply that the paper is advocating for it, but given that Apple and Amazon now have built products on top Wikipedia, their bottom line depends on it. It's entirely reasonable to wonder if they would prefer to have more influence and control over it. Whether or not it was ever a good idea for Alexa and Siri to have a dependency on Wikipedia is a moot point. They do now, and it wouldn't surprise me to see them wanting to take an active part in keeping Wikipedia fresh.
Of course, because their revenue depends on it, they probably would want more control. In the same way the Amazon is working to exercise more control over the Rust language, Apple or Amazon could decide that taking over Wikipedia is the right move to protect profits.
I don't think this follows. They could have all the control they wanted if they set up their own product, but their revenue doesn't depend on control, their revenue depends on the product being good. It would take a lot of work to make your own Wikipedia-alike; it would take a lot of work to even start with the current Wikipedia (which they legally can, since its license permits commercial use) and keep it up to date.
