Out of curiosity, how many HNers write on Wikipedia? I do it every so once in awhile, but only only on a few topics I'm intimately familiar with, or to fix obvious vandalism.
I do fairly regularly. I stumbled across it earlyish, so I was pretty involved in meta-Wikipedia stuff (mailing lists, Arbitration Committee, etc.) circa 2003-06, when the barrier to entry and formality was low.
Now, researching & writing articles on moderately-important-to-obscure historical subjects is something I do as an odd form of relaxation. I occasionally edit articles in my actual area of expertise, but that feels more like "work". Collecting a few sources to write a decent first cut at an article on a historical figure or event feels like recreation. Plus, I learn some things.
I started doing so, until I realized the only way you could really contribute an article was to enlist for a lifetime of janitorial duty. Otherwise, whatever work you did quickly degenerates into run-on sentences and trivia.
The article's point resonated with me, because it seems that the whole process is based on the assumption that you're a no-lifer who spends all day patrolling Wikipedia.
They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases".
They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases".
Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal.
Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git repos, which may or may not be a suitable base to build upon: https://github.com/scy/levitation
I'm suggesting a much simpler concept. Article changes shouldn't "go live" until there is consensus that they've passed basic proofreading and quality checks. This would give editors time to review changes in batch rather than feeling like they must monitor everyone else's edits in real time.
(It's interesting to think about, but Wikipedia could never conceptualize distributed branching when they are currently doing the equivalent of developing right on the production server.)
This idea has been discussed many times over the years, but never adopted for whatever reason. My suspicion is the active Wikipedians have this system of scoring Wikipoints for quickly reverting vandalism and bad edits, and don't want a system which encourages actual editing.
how would they distribute the thing, if not through the dumps? I mean, using an scm to distribute it (I asked the freebase guys the same thing) would save time/bandwidth but it's not a conceptual improvement.
Also, how would forking be useful in any way? It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right? Could you explain the advantages ?
Forking would be the key to eliminate the gatekeeper problem, so that for certain topics people could publish their own articles or make changes to existing ones without needing the approval of some opinionated moderator or admin. On the German Wikipedia this problem is so bad that earlier this year we had a really big discussion that even extended from the blogosphere to the major news outlets.
What I mean is that Wikipedia could learn from GitHub how a lot of forks plus easy pull requests can exponentially increase participation and generation of new content while still being able to retain quality.
It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right?
Why not? You could extend an article or contribute some new articles for a topic, publish the content yourself, and try to get it into the main project. Then on the main site there could be a list of forks, and even a network graph exactly like on GitHub.
sorry I do not understand: who is in charge of importing the data anyway, if not the gatekeeper?
Also, i mean that the difference with forking source code is that you can work on something that will not get accepted into the mailine, but is useful to you, or your organization.
It does not seem to me that you can have a private wikipedia to which you refer people, it would be useless. Same with forks, if an officially blessed fork does not exist, you get anarchy and all of them become unreliable, cfr the rails foreign key plugins for reference: when strong active and clear leadership miss, projects fade into failure.
OTOH if you just want "easy merge" that does not seem to replace the gatekeeper, you just made him more visibile.
But if I am missing soemthing, I'd be happy to understand :)
About two years ago I went through about a six month period where I spent pretty much every day in a revert war with various people who definitely didn't know anything about the field/area I was trying to provide some information on.
I happen to have a fair amount of expertise and experience in a certain area (Music Trackers) and at the time thought I would lend a hand to flesh out the still woefully inadequate content to that part of Wikipedia and started or fleshed out dozens of pages of content. I probably spent north of 100 hours on content creation even going so far as to setup emulated environments in other OSs so I could get screen captures of some of the software. I spent dozens more cleaning up missing or outright incorrect information.
Every time I did something, the change was reverted. To this day, not a single edit I did ever stayed on Wikipedia longer than a week. Eventually, tired of endless arguing with editors who just wholesale reverted entire sections of material rather than edit or augment what I put in there, I just gave up.
Particularly egregious were the endless arguments over notoriety of this or that. Responses to the editors demonstrating conformance to Wikipedia's notoriety guidelines were met with silence and further reverts. One in particular, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sega, actually has a page now anyways -- but it's not mine. Fascinatingly, I think that two of the editors causing most of the problems didn't even know what the demoscene was! In a bizarre argument from one of the editors, I was called unqualified to write about the demoscene since I myself was a 'scener!
I think I'd still be contributing if the editors had...I don't know..."edited", instead of reverted. I would have happily participated in ensuring things like objectivity and article organization were well followed, but wholesale deleting information? Nah, I'm done with participating in Wikipedia as a contributor.
As an 30 year-old underground-ish art movement rooted deeply if not almost entirely online, the demoscene is not exactly one with much printed source material or reporting (I've managed to be interviewed on TV once though at an event in Quebec)
nearly every soft-mp3 player supports scene music formats (.mod, .s3m, .mtm, .669, .xm, .it, etc.) or have extensions to support them
The recent resurgence in pixel art I find amusing since the demoscene has been carrying that torch for decades:
http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/frames.html
I've been part of the scene for over 20 years myself and my sources are pretty much all primary, personal contacts, etc. Influence-wise, tons of tech industry folks got their start hacking away on 'scene projects and bring a particular style and set of associated concepts with them.
Print e-Sources though may include some of the scene-zines, a handful of books, Wired has run a few articles from time-to-time, but most of the scene exists either as web sites or chat logs to be honest.
As a movement, the scene has a pretty cohesive culture, style, ethos, language, etc. One way to think of it is that it's the Liberal Arts alternative to the Open Source movement (if you consider the Open Source movement as the Hard Engineering/Science alternative to the Artsy Demoscene). It has its sub-cultures and there are various geographic differences -- dialects -- if you will to the scene. Not entirely unlike the difference between say, Korean Hip-Hop and North American Hip-Hop.
Thousands of people attend the events (called parties) which are loosely organized as competitions but are really just a chance to show off your creations to loads of like-minded folks.
I really really want to provide some content, but I know from past experience it's not worth the effort or time. Which is a shame since I believe I would have a lot to offer in fleshing out this quite vibrant art scene.
elblanco: Please contact me (email in profile). Fi.wikipedia (I am an Arbcom member there) would very much welcome new content related to Demoscene.
It is quite appreciated popular (not really underground here) movement in Finland. Many of our most successful game developers like Remedy (Alan Wake, Max Payne), Housemarque and Bugbear were founded by demoscene vets.
Appreciate it, I'll send an email off in a bit, not sure if I have the kind of time I need to be a solid contributor anymore, but I can always take a stab.
(btw, some of my biggest long distance bills ever came from calling Starport years ago to get the latest releases)
I just checked and my user pages don't even exist anymore. :(
I used to write, until my edits were regularly reverted by people that had no clue about the subject(s) at hand. I then realized it wasn't worth the effort - I rarely refer to Wikipedia since.
I started editing only this after I saw some other HNers mention that they are wikipedians. I plunged in gradually to make edits to articles on the subjects that I have been researching the longest for both work and recreation, including topics I've been producing bibliographies or working papers on since 1993. I got the nerve to do that, after seeing how appallingly bad the Wikipedia articles on those same topics have long been, by reading the books How Wikipedia Works and Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
I'm very turned off by the amount of poorly sourced point-of-view pushing that goes on on Wikipedia. I've tried to light a candle in the darkness by compiling source lists in my user space (which I link to from article talk pages), and by mostly adding current reliable sources to articles, but even at that a lot of my edits get reverted by POV-pushers (or their sock puppets or meat puppets) on ideological grounds. This continues to happen even after one group of articles I work on went through an Arbitration Committee case in August of this year. The sanctioned editors learned how to cheat on their sanctions, and the conscientious editors are still badly outnumbered (at least as to visible accounts actively editing the articles at any one time). The administrators are beleaguered, and aren't using their mops actively to clean up the mess.
I have severe doubts about the statement made by Jimbo Wales quoted in the submitted link here: "'I’m not a wiki person who happened to go into encyclopedias,' Wales told the crowd at Oxford. 'I’m an encyclopedia person who happened to use a wiki.'" While I give many of the high-edit-count old hands a lot of credit for trying to maintain encyclopedic standards on Wikipedia, I can't agree that their sound editorial judgment characterizes most of Wikipedia's editorial culture. On any topic that is the least bit controversial, the culture is all about ideological edit-warring, and many active wikipedians seem to be quite proud of their lack of acquaintance with libraries or the other resources used by genuine scholars. There doesn't seem to be anyone at the top of the leadership of Wikipedia backing up the wikipedians who are doing the best work for the project and adding the most reliably sourced content.
If pg has said that someone could do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica (where and when did pg say that?), I'd like to know how to join that effort. What have any of you heard about efforts to bring about a friendly competitor to Wikipedia? The best way to help Wikipedia might be to build a point of comparison that does better work, just as East Germany was best helped by the continually visible example of West Germany until the Stasi couldn't make the East Germans afraid anymore.
I make additions and contributions occasionally, often anonymously. Thus I was disappointed recently when the threshold to vote on some Wikipedia issue was 200 edits, and my signed edits fell short.
On/off contributor for the last 4 years or so. Just worked my way back in during the last four months to edit extensively on the Digital Forensics topics :)
I used to dedicate a lot of time to it and be active in the Wikipedia/Wikimedia channels on IRC. I would mostly add articles on the needed articles pages... just start a few paragraph stubs; or in some cases I would extend stubs. I´ve felt it harder to edit lately, although I have enjoyed working with Wikimedia Commons more...
Every now and then--- mostly when I look up something and it is incomplete or wrong or if I spot a typo. Used to be an editor and I can't help myself...
Now, researching & writing articles on moderately-important-to-obscure historical subjects is something I do as an odd form of relaxation. I occasionally edit articles in my actual area of expertise, but that feels more like "work". Collecting a few sources to write a decent first cut at an article on a historical figure or event feels like recreation. Plus, I learn some things.
There'a also very little controversy and conflict compared to writing about hot topics and recent events, so not much wikidrama. People will argue over all sorts of things, but strangely enough I've never had an edit war over an article like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Gradnauer or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Pasquale_Ricci. =]