What’s happened with Wikipedia probably can be characterized better as “saturation” than “decline”. If you satisfy your entire market, you stop growing.
Interesting. However, one would also like to know the causes of why Wikipedia’s leadership started to behave in this way. One possible explanation is that they didn’t have enough monetary incentives. If they would have had stronger incentives to keep the number of revisions growing they would have implemented policies that made sure that happened. I think there could be something to that—that if Google’s Knobe had outcompeted Wikipedia, it wouldn’t have had the same problems, because it would have been more rationally governed.
If wikipedia were run on ads- that is, pageviews- then deleting a popular page because of a lack of ‘notability’ would result in a revenue loss, and so would be less likely that leaving it up. It’s harder to hijack a for-profit to optimize for status than to hijack a non-profit, but still possible for both.
However, it is not obvious to me that wikipedia would have had the contributor growth it did if it were a for-profit project.
Anothe explanation would be that they had too much monetary incentives. Jimmy makes money with Wikia and when the person who wants to write his article about his favorite Pokemon goes to Wikia because it’s not allowed on Wikipedia that’s in Jimmy’s financial interest.
Jimmy Wales has no editorial power now (if he says the sky is blue, 100 people will immediately compile a referenced list of all the times it’s green) and he didn’t then either. The people killing and merging Pokemon were pathological all by themselves. The media has a strange idea of how Wikipedia works, but it’s actually completely wrong.
I was in the thick of that one (blocking a pile of the Overstock.com sockpuppet army), and I think it wouldn’t because spammers and paid editors are much less accepted. It also has absolutely no link to your original assertion. Do you have anything that actually supports that?
It’s my understanding that Jimbo is not even allowed a corporate credit card from the Wikimedia Foundation these days. Editorial policy is created by editors, not by the Foundation, and not by Jimbo Wales.
What Jimbo does these days may bear little resemblance to what he was doing in those crucial years 2005-2009 where the die of WP editing culture was cast (in a different sense of ‘die’, if you follow).
“may bear” is literally meaningless. We have every edit of the megabytes of tedious and querulous on-wiki discussion about the content rules; if you’re trying to assert there’s evidence for Christian’s claims, then referencing to the diff is eminently possible. You were there and so was I, it’d be long-winded but shouldn’t be impossible.
I remember very well many of the discussions, yes. For example, I remember how Jimbo flagrantly lied about ever running a study on the effect of turning off anonymous page creation. I also remember the many questions about conflicts of interest dogging Wikia from the day it was created.
I do not expect true motives to be written down. If Jimbo tolerated and endorsed deletionist approaches, ramming through changes like disabling anon page creation, due to conscious or subconscious conflicts of interest—do you really think he and the other WMFers who were associated with Wikia would have written it down in public?
No, not really. This is all stuff from years ago (8 years now, I think, in the case of anon page creation). I’m sure it can all be dug up, but it can be quite a challenge to figure out where in the archive pages or revision histories an exact statement was made. And all of this was well-known to us core Wikipedians from that era, so it’s not like I ever needed cites.
I found your summary a little misleading. When I followed your link, I found this:
“Finally, there’s a little bit of monarchy – which is my role in the community,” he said. “Like the monarch in the UK, most of the role is waving and giving speeches, but I do have certain powers in the community that I almost never use, and if I did would probably lead to me losing the role.”
I spoke more about symbols than actual power. Whether or not Jimmy is “allowed” a corporate credit card from the Wikimedia Foundation is symbolic. It doesn’t tell us how much power he has to shape Wikipedia policy in the direction of his own interests.
Furthermore I think that Jimmy is not the only person on the paycheck of Wikia who has an influence on Wikipedia policy. Jimmy probably recruited some of the 200 employees of Wikia out of high level Wikipedians.
Without being an Insider it’s hard to estimate the extend of his political power inside Wikileaks, but I wouldn’t estimate it to be low.
You mean, he might have this power there’s no evidence for him wielding, therefore he does have the power?
Having power and wielding it are two separate shoes. In the article he writes that he does have certain powers that he’s seldomly using.
Secondly I have not argued that I’m certain that he has the power. I’m not a person who thinks in of binary categories of 0% and 100%. Don’t project that into my writing.
In English Wikipedia this is called “deletionism”. Although I’m not a huge fan of it, deletionism has had its successes, when seen in a wider context — namely the creation of many, many more wikis on the Web than existed when Wikipedia was new.
For instance, there were once Wikipedia articles for each creature in the Pokémon games. This was a source of some mockery. Today, those articles have been deleted from Wikipedia, and replaced with short summaries in list articles. instead today there is a whole dedicated Pokémon fan-wiki, “Bulbapedia”, with a lot more information relevant to game players than would ever make sense in a general encyclopedia.
What’s happened with Wikipedia probably can be characterized better as “saturation” than “decline”. If you satisfy your entire market, you stop growing.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
gwern’s argument for decline.
Interesting. However, one would also like to know the causes of why Wikipedia’s leadership started to behave in this way. One possible explanation is that they didn’t have enough monetary incentives. If they would have had stronger incentives to keep the number of revisions growing they would have implemented policies that made sure that happened. I think there could be something to that—that if Google’s Knobe had outcompeted Wikipedia, it wouldn’t have had the same problems, because it would have been more rationally governed.
If wikipedia were run on ads- that is, pageviews- then deleting a popular page because of a lack of ‘notability’ would result in a revenue loss, and so would be less likely that leaving it up. It’s harder to hijack a for-profit to optimize for status than to hijack a non-profit, but still possible for both.
However, it is not obvious to me that wikipedia would have had the contributor growth it did if it were a for-profit project.
Certain people just get a kick out of bossing other people around, because humans run on corrupted hardware.
Anothe explanation would be that they had too much monetary incentives. Jimmy makes money with Wikia and when the person who wants to write his article about his favorite Pokemon goes to Wikia because it’s not allowed on Wikipedia that’s in Jimmy’s financial interest.
Jimmy Wales has no editorial power now (if he says the sky is blue, 100 people will immediately compile a referenced list of all the times it’s green) and he didn’t then either. The people killing and merging Pokemon were pathological all by themselves. The media has a strange idea of how Wikipedia works, but it’s actually completely wrong.
Do you think that something like the naked short selling fiasco wouldn’t repeat today the same way?
I was in the thick of that one (blocking a pile of the Overstock.com sockpuppet army), and I think it wouldn’t because spammers and paid editors are much less accepted. It also has absolutely no link to your original assertion. Do you have anything that actually supports that?
It’s my understanding that Jimbo is not even allowed a corporate credit card from the Wikimedia Foundation these days. Editorial policy is created by editors, not by the Foundation, and not by Jimbo Wales.
What Jimbo does these days may bear little resemblance to what he was doing in those crucial years 2005-2009 where the die of WP editing culture was cast (in a different sense of ‘die’, if you follow).
“may bear” is literally meaningless. We have every edit of the megabytes of tedious and querulous on-wiki discussion about the content rules; if you’re trying to assert there’s evidence for Christian’s claims, then referencing to the diff is eminently possible. You were there and so was I, it’d be long-winded but shouldn’t be impossible.
I remember very well many of the discussions, yes. For example, I remember how Jimbo flagrantly lied about ever running a study on the effect of turning off anonymous page creation. I also remember the many questions about conflicts of interest dogging Wikia from the day it was created.
I do not expect true motives to be written down. If Jimbo tolerated and endorsed deletionist approaches, ramming through changes like disabling anon page creation, due to conscious or subconscious conflicts of interest—do you really think he and the other WMFers who were associated with Wikia would have written it down in public?
Could you give a few links?
No, not really. This is all stuff from years ago (8 years now, I think, in the case of anon page creation). I’m sure it can all be dug up, but it can be quite a challenge to figure out where in the archive pages or revision histories an exact statement was made. And all of this was well-known to us core Wikipedians from that era, so it’s not like I ever needed cites.
Augustus also billed himself as first among equals.
But Jimmy claims more power for himself. He’s the monarch of Wikipedia as of last year.
I found your summary a little misleading. When I followed your link, I found this:
It’s not intended to be a summary.
I spoke more about symbols than actual power. Whether or not Jimmy is “allowed” a corporate credit card from the Wikimedia Foundation is symbolic. It doesn’t tell us how much power he has to shape Wikipedia policy in the direction of his own interests.
Furthermore I think that Jimmy is not the only person on the paycheck of Wikia who has an influence on Wikipedia policy. Jimmy probably recruited some of the 200 employees of Wikia out of high level Wikipedians.
Without being an Insider it’s hard to estimate the extend of his political power inside Wikileaks, but I wouldn’t estimate it to be low.
You mean, he might have this power there’s no evidence for him wielding, therefore he does have the power?
This is not a good standard of evidence.
Having power and wielding it are two separate shoes. In the article he writes that he does have certain powers that he’s seldomly using.
Secondly I have not argued that I’m certain that he has the power. I’m not a person who thinks in of binary categories of 0% and 100%. Don’t project that into my writing.
The German Wikipedia is notorius for deleting articles because of “lack of encyclopedic relevance”.
In English Wikipedia this is called “deletionism”. Although I’m not a huge fan of it, deletionism has had its successes, when seen in a wider context — namely the creation of many, many more wikis on the Web than existed when Wikipedia was new.
For instance, there were once Wikipedia articles for each creature in the Pokémon games. This was a source of some mockery. Today, those articles have been deleted from Wikipedia, and replaced with short summaries in list articles. instead today there is a whole dedicated Pokémon fan-wiki, “Bulbapedia”, with a lot more information relevant to game players than would ever make sense in a general encyclopedia.