When did you get this impression? I’m only asking because I’m given to believe that the situation on wikipedia with regards to experts and specialized subjects has improved substantially starting in about 2008 or so(?), at least in the humanities but possibly in other fields.
This was in fact prior to 2008 (my advisor asked me to change something in the Bayesian network article, and I got into a slight edit war with the resident bridge troll who knew a lot less than me, but had more time and whose first reflex was to just blindly undo any edits. These sorts of issues with Wikipedia are very well documented).
The horrible article on confounders is another good example. I brought it up before here, and got the “that’s like, your opinion” kind of reply. At least they cite Tyler’s paper with me now! Of course, this particular case might be more widespread than just Wikipedia, and might be a general confusion in statistics as a field. I went to a talk last week where someone just got this wrong in their talk (and presumably in their research).
I don’t doubt that there are isolated communities within Wikipedia that generate good content. For example, I know there are Wikipedia articles for some areas of mathematics of shockingly high quality. My point is, when this happens it is a sort of happy cultural accident that is happening in spite of, not because of, the Wikipedia editing model.
There has been quite a bit of experimentation online to incentivize experts to talk and non-experts to shut up, recently. I think that’s great!
Wikipedia is more comprehensive now than in 2008, but I speculate that its average article quality might be lower, because of (1) competent editors being spread more thinly, and (2) the gradual entrenchment of a hierarchy of Wikipedia bureaucrats who compensate for a lack of expertise with pedantry and rules lawyering.
(I may be being unfair here? I’m going by faint memories of articles I’ve read, and my mental stereotype of Wikipedia, which I haven’t edited regularly in years.)
Average article quality is almost certainly going down, but the main driving force is probably mass-creation of stub articles about villages in Eastern Europe, plant genera, etc. Of course, editors are probably spread mpre thinly even among important topics as well. A lot of people seem to place the blame for any and all of Wikipedia’s problems on bureaucracy, but as a regular editor such criticisms often seem foreign, like they’re talking about a totally different website. True, there’s a lot of formalities, but they’re mostly invisible, and a reasonably intelligent person can probably pick up the important customs quite quickly. In the past 6 months of relatively regular editing, I can’t say I remember ever interacting involuntarily with any kind of bureaucratic process or individual (I occasionally putter around the deletion nominations for fun, but that’s just to satisfy my need for conflict). Writing an article (for example), especially if it’s any good, is virtually never going to get you ensnared in some kind of Kafkaesque editorial process. Such things seem to operate mainly for the benefit of people who enjoy inflicting such things on each other (e.g., descending hierarchies of committees for dealing with mod drama).
It’s late, so hopefully the above makes some modicum of sense.
When did you get this impression? I’m only asking because I’m given to believe that the situation on wikipedia with regards to experts and specialized subjects has improved substantially starting in about 2008 or so(?), at least in the humanities but possibly in other fields.
This was in fact prior to 2008 (my advisor asked me to change something in the Bayesian network article, and I got into a slight edit war with the resident bridge troll who knew a lot less than me, but had more time and whose first reflex was to just blindly undo any edits. These sorts of issues with Wikipedia are very well documented).
The horrible article on confounders is another good example. I brought it up before here, and got the “that’s like, your opinion” kind of reply. At least they cite Tyler’s paper with me now! Of course, this particular case might be more widespread than just Wikipedia, and might be a general confusion in statistics as a field. I went to a talk last week where someone just got this wrong in their talk (and presumably in their research).
I don’t doubt that there are isolated communities within Wikipedia that generate good content. For example, I know there are Wikipedia articles for some areas of mathematics of shockingly high quality. My point is, when this happens it is a sort of happy cultural accident that is happening in spite of, not because of, the Wikipedia editing model.
There has been quite a bit of experimentation online to incentivize experts to talk and non-experts to shut up, recently. I think that’s great!
[deleted duplicate comment]
Wikipedia is more comprehensive now than in 2008, but I speculate that its average article quality might be lower, because of (1) competent editors being spread more thinly, and (2) the gradual entrenchment of a hierarchy of Wikipedia bureaucrats who compensate for a lack of expertise with pedantry and rules lawyering.
(I may be being unfair here? I’m going by faint memories of articles I’ve read, and my mental stereotype of Wikipedia, which I haven’t edited regularly in years.)
Average article quality is almost certainly going down, but the main driving force is probably mass-creation of stub articles about villages in Eastern Europe, plant genera, etc. Of course, editors are probably spread mpre thinly even among important topics as well. A lot of people seem to place the blame for any and all of Wikipedia’s problems on bureaucracy, but as a regular editor such criticisms often seem foreign, like they’re talking about a totally different website. True, there’s a lot of formalities, but they’re mostly invisible, and a reasonably intelligent person can probably pick up the important customs quite quickly. In the past 6 months of relatively regular editing, I can’t say I remember ever interacting involuntarily with any kind of bureaucratic process or individual (I occasionally putter around the deletion nominations for fun, but that’s just to satisfy my need for conflict). Writing an article (for example), especially if it’s any good, is virtually never going to get you ensnared in some kind of Kafkaesque editorial process. Such things seem to operate mainly for the benefit of people who enjoy inflicting such things on each other (e.g., descending hierarchies of committees for dealing with mod drama).
It’s late, so hopefully the above makes some modicum of sense.