Back when you joined Wikipedia, in 2004, many articles on relatively basic subjects were quite deficient and easily improved by people with modest skills and knowledge. This enabled the cohort that joined then to learn a lot and gradually grow into better editors. This seems much more difficult today. Is this a problem and is there any way to fix it? Has something similar happened with LessWrong, where the whole thing was exciting and easy for beginners some years ago but is “boring and opaque” to beginners now?
Re: Wikipedia—This is pretty well-trodden ground, in terms of (a) people coming up with explanations (b) having little evidence as to which of them hold. There’s all manner of obvious systemic problems with Wikipedia (maybe the easy stuff’s been written, the community is frequently toxic, the community is particularly harsh to newbies, etc) but the odd thing is that the decline in editing observed since 2007 has also held for wikis that are much younger than English Wikipedia—which suggests an outside effect. We’re hoping the Visual Editor helps, once it works well enough (at present it’s at about the stage of quality I’d have expected; I can assure you that everyone involved fully understands that the Google+-like attempt to push everyone into using it was an utter disaster on almost every level). The Wikimedia Foundation is seriously interested in getting people involved, insofar as it can make that happen.
As for LessWrong … it’s interesting reading through every post on the site (not just the Sequences) from the beginning in chronological order—because then you get the comments. You can see some of the effect you describe. Basically, no-one had read the whole thing yet, ’cos it was just being written.
I’m not sure it was easier for beginners at all. Remember there was only “main” for the longest time—and it was very scary to write for (and still is). Right now you can write stuff in discussion, or in various open threads in discussion.
Back when you joined Wikipedia, in 2004, many articles on relatively basic subjects were quite deficient and easily improved by people with modest skills and knowledge. This enabled the cohort that joined then to learn a lot and gradually grow into better editors. This seems much more difficult today. Is this a problem and is there any way to fix it? Has something similar happened with LessWrong, where the whole thing was exciting and easy for beginners some years ago but is “boring and opaque” to beginners now?
My answer may be a bit generic :-)
Re: Wikipedia—This is pretty well-trodden ground, in terms of (a) people coming up with explanations (b) having little evidence as to which of them hold. There’s all manner of obvious systemic problems with Wikipedia (maybe the easy stuff’s been written, the community is frequently toxic, the community is particularly harsh to newbies, etc) but the odd thing is that the decline in editing observed since 2007 has also held for wikis that are much younger than English Wikipedia—which suggests an outside effect. We’re hoping the Visual Editor helps, once it works well enough (at present it’s at about the stage of quality I’d have expected; I can assure you that everyone involved fully understands that the Google+-like attempt to push everyone into using it was an utter disaster on almost every level). The Wikimedia Foundation is seriously interested in getting people involved, insofar as it can make that happen.
As for LessWrong … it’s interesting reading through every post on the site (not just the Sequences) from the beginning in chronological order—because then you get the comments. You can see some of the effect you describe. Basically, no-one had read the whole thing yet, ’cos it was just being written.
I’m not sure it was easier for beginners at all. Remember there was only “main” for the longest time—and it was very scary to write for (and still is). Right now you can write stuff in discussion, or in various open threads in discussion.
Thank you. You brought up considerations I hadn’t considered.