A recent article in the Guardian, reacting to the news that the English Wikipedia is about to hit 3 million articles, and the news that Wikipedia's growth appears to have fallen out of the logistic phase, made the mistake of, for all intents and purposes, listening to Aaron Swartz. The first part of their piece, covering the statistical findings from PARC regarding Wikipedia's growth dropoff and increasingly hostile environment for casual editors, is all spot on, but the second part, in which they blather on about inclusionism and deletionism being a "significant battle" in Wikipedia, is significantly misinformed. I suppose that's what they get for talking to Aaron, who has never been a significant player in Wikipedia's community. I suppose they picked him as their "random Wikipedian" because he's something of a internet celebrity for reasons entirely unrelated to Wikipedia, and because he's got an ego larger than Montana.
The "struggle" between "inclusionists" and "deletionists" pales to irrelevance in comparison to the more serious struggles among all the pitched camps of ideologues in Wikipedia. Both "inclusionist" and "deletionist" are reasonable philosophical attitudes that one can take toward the activity of editing an encyclopedia. However, the ideologues do not fall reliably into either category, because they each individually favor including only that content that furthers their respective personal agendas, and favor deleting content that opposes those agendas. The friction in Wikipedia's community comes largely from these ideological battles (which can be on nearly any topic, although perennial ones are the Middle East, animal rights, and Northern Ireland), not from any dispute over philosophical attitudes related to encyclopedic worth. Wikipedia has never developed any meaningful way to resolve content disputes, so these matters usually end up being settled with one side goading the other into breaking enough of Wikipedia's polymorphic conduct rules badly enough to get themselves banned.
Unfortunately, there's no good statistics on how biased Wikipedia content is. It's not easy to measure bias. It's not even easy to define bias in any objective way. At least the inclusionist/deletionist axis is simple to define and one can identify individual Wikipedians on that axis by examining their deletion votes (which, while tedious to do, presents no serious evaluatory challenge). Given that, I suppose it's excusable that the Guardian fell for it when Aaron told them that this was actually an important division within Wikipedia and that the current factionalism of its community (which is very real) is somehow derived from that. To be honest, Wikipedia would be a much better place if the inclusion question represented the most serious division within its community.
The "struggle" between "inclusionists" and "deletionists" pales to irrelevance in comparison to the more serious struggles among all the pitched camps of ideologues in Wikipedia. Both "inclusionist" and "deletionist" are reasonable philosophical attitudes that one can take toward the activity of editing an encyclopedia. However, the ideologues do not fall reliably into either category, because they each individually favor including only that content that furthers their respective personal agendas, and favor deleting content that opposes those agendas. The friction in Wikipedia's community comes largely from these ideological battles (which can be on nearly any topic, although perennial ones are the Middle East, animal rights, and Northern Ireland), not from any dispute over philosophical attitudes related to encyclopedic worth. Wikipedia has never developed any meaningful way to resolve content disputes, so these matters usually end up being settled with one side goading the other into breaking enough of Wikipedia's polymorphic conduct rules badly enough to get themselves banned.
Unfortunately, there's no good statistics on how biased Wikipedia content is. It's not easy to measure bias. It's not even easy to define bias in any objective way. At least the inclusionist/deletionist axis is simple to define and one can identify individual Wikipedians on that axis by examining their deletion votes (which, while tedious to do, presents no serious evaluatory challenge). Given that, I suppose it's excusable that the Guardian fell for it when Aaron told them that this was actually an important division within Wikipedia and that the current factionalism of its community (which is very real) is somehow derived from that. To be honest, Wikipedia would be a much better place if the inclusion question represented the most serious division within its community.
I agree with you. Power struggles seem to be the "real" reason behind disputes, especially the power to advance their point of view. One particularly egregious example is the tendency of Wikipedians to fight tooth and nail against anything that would make it easy to force them to give up power. Metaphorically speaking, the only way some Wikipedians would give up power is if you pry it out of their dead fingers.
ReplyDeleteThe real reason Wikipedia's growth is slowing is the newbies being driven off. Why are they driven off? Because they're not told, clearly in large bold letters, that contributions without a reference will be reverted. So when they are reverted, they get discouraged and leave. The #1 thing that should be done is making it easier to add and manage references, something I can't believe they ignored in the new interface.
ReplyDelete+1 James. While I can't agree that it's #1 (because I have no data at all to support it!) I would be really surprised if it were not a significant factor.
ReplyDeleteBut— lets assume for a moment the interface was perfect and that adding references was as easy as possible: we'd still see a decline in new contributors because adding references takes more work, often a lot more work even with a perfect interface. I can tell you off the top of my head that Force=Mass×Acceleration but it would take me at least a minute to find the most apropriate citation for that something like 100x the effort required to just assert it, and I can't imagine much else being easier.
On the flipside the increased demand for citations is good and it makes recommendations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia meaningful. I think to say anything useful at all about the rate of change without breaking it down by cause. Only the non-productive components of the change (Citation UI) are worth worrying about, but they are quite possibly swamped by the effects of good and productive changes (Requiring Citations) which are worth their weight in lost contributions.
The other point that media keeps missing is that rate Wikipedia's growth doesn't appear to have slowed much (it's noisy to it's hard to speak in absolutes; but the all time peak rate appears to be inside the current seasonal variation) but rather the growth of the growth has stopped. "Wikipedia is not actually going to convert all matter on earth into Wiki" isn't really a news story: the exponential growth had to stop eventually.
Hi Kelly, are you still looking for a solar powered repeater station? Check this out for low powered computing; http://fieldlines.com/story/2009/7/3/171658/3984 . The rest of the site (fieldlines) as good info on off the grid powere too; wind, solar, batteries, inverters ...
ReplyDelete