[jacquesm]

That's the attitude that they say murdered wikipedia. Rules are there to foster a better community, not to kill off good community initiatives. As soon as the adherence to the rules becomes more important than the quality of the product you've basically lost it. The whole trick is to know when not to apply the rules. AMAs are an exceptional item and a different ruleset for AMAs would not be all that hard to imagine. Pity.

[debacle]

Reddit hasn't been about community in about a year, and /r/IAmA is a huge part of that. It's a huge profit center for reddit and they moderate it heavily.

[jebus989]

"Murdered" Wikipedia whose fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

[jacquesm]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638

http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

And many others like it.

[jebus989]

Sure editor numbers are in decline, that doesn't support your point. Ignore All Rules is one of the fundamental principles the site was founded on.

[jacquesm]

The point is that that fundamental principle seems to be ignored by people that prefer to bicker over the rules rather than to be otherwise productive:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596682

And that this in turn is what drives editors away. So it very much supports my point.

[darkmighty]

Wikipedia at this point is one of the primary sources for everything on the internet. At the early days of wikipedia, you could pick any topic and there would be major articles unwritten. It was far best to have some article than a great article. I can't comment exactly on the editor situation of the wiki, but it's to be expected a shift to more specialized and aggressive "curation" of articles, specially of more solidified topics. Wikipedia's fantastic performance contradicts this argument.

[jacquesm]

> Wikipedia at this point is one of the primary sources for everything on the internet.

That is explicitly what it isn't, anything but that.

> I can't comment exactly on the editor situation of the wiki, but it's to be expected a shift to more specialized and aggressive "curation" of articles, specially of more solidified topics. Wikipedia's fantastic performance contradicts this argument.

Wikipedia would still be a fantastic resource if nobody contributed to it from today forward. But that does not mean it couldn't be a whole lot better without the army of lawyer wannabes that are in a tug of war over who gets to have the most power over others by citing policies until the cows come home.

Lots of long time contributors have left because of this and the exodus is far from over. I agree that there is an expected shift to curation but the fantastic performance of wikipedia is not in any way evidence for there not being a significant negative undercurrent at work.

That's just evidence of how good the concept originally was and how much momentum it has built up.

Any kind of success will attract two kinds of people: those that wish to contribute and those that see it as a means to their personal ends, to get a piece of that success. Since wikipedia is not big on credit for contributions the only place where people craving for recognition get to achieve their fix is in becoming 'editors', and unfortunately the motivations of those editors are not always pure.

See elsewhere in this thread for some of the more bizarre displays of such behavior.

[DanBC]

Your point seems limited to the inclusionist / deletionist discussion.

But you don't address the problems that some good faith editors have with making edits to improve the project.

These problems include over-zealous reverts by people making rapid automatic edits -- sometimes in a misguided attempt to show they "work hard" is a drive for adminship; page ownership and the accusations of bad faith that go with that (BDR fails hard when you have a group owning a page).

Wikipedia has strict socking policies so most experienced editors never try making a new account to edit, but I recommend that any experienced wikipedia edit tries this at least once a year. (And socking is allowed in this case because IAR)

[jebus989]

You're making leaps of logic based on the occasional HN anecdote. Numbers have been in decline since 2007, what percentage of those left over bickering about rules? Do you have any evidence for this given that IAR has been in place as a core principle throughout?

IAR can be and indeed is invoked all the time, making Wikipedia a bad example of how strict rule adherence stifles a community. It was quite a simple point that needn't warrant downvotes, italics and so many HN searches.

[jacquesm]

> Do you have any evidence for this given that IAR has been in place as a core principle throughout?

> It was quite a simple point that needn't warrant downvotes, italics and so many HN searches.

You ask for more evidence in the same comment in which you rant against 'so many HN searches', do you notice the inconsistency there?

[DanBC]

Can you provide any on-WP examples of people using IAR sucessfully?

[DanBC]

"The encyclopedia anyone can edit" is another rule the site was founded on, yet that's clearly not true. Look at the hostility that IP editors face even though most good wikipedia edits come from IP editors and IP editors are less anonymous than logged in editors.

Try using WP:IAR anywhere on WP today and you'll quickly see how far WP has moved from founding priciples.

EDIT: I mean, just look at usernames. You're supposed to be able without a login, but sometimes that causes problems. So you go to create a username. The software has a list of words that you can not use (very. Few people think allowing a username like "JewKiller666" is a good idea). But then there's a username policy. This has been reviewed to make it more friendly to new users. But the application of those rules is still pretty hostile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username

That's the policy. See the changes to the "misleading" names section. That section had to be expanded because editors using their real name in a different script (eg, Japanese users) were being told their unicode name was misleading. Or a user with a eg psuedo-random string of characters was told that their name was confusing, even thoigh there wasn't any other name or namespace to confuse "kejdhdkaksaas983" with.

The "dealing with inappropriate usernames" section required a lot of work to prevent the admin-wannabe users from making many reports.

Once you've picked a name that gets past the software's filters but which an editor -or bot- thinks is bad you face:

1) templates. {{subst:uw-username}}

2) a RFC http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RFC/N

3) an administrator notice board http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_adminis...

Notice that bot reports which the not admits may be low quality get sent to UAA, not the lower levels of discussion.

4) a holding pen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_adminis...

This convoluted conflicting mass of policy is hostile to new users, especially in the way it gets applied by editors. Just try using "WP:IAR" during this process.

[DanBC]

Wikipedia has spent many megabytes of text to argue about hyphen, minus, en-dash, and em-dash.

These arguments (different arguments among different people) spread over diffferent pages and different spaces. They happened on article talk pages; in meta space (village pump, the WP manual of style); in admin spaces (ANI); even with some ARBCOM case.

There's easily 500,000 words about hyphen, minus, en-dash and em-dash on wikipedia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600342

[grecy]

> fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

Go and make some useful edits and see how that works out for you. Rules are strictly enforced above all else.

[jebus989]

Unsure of how much editing you've done but I've made over 10,000 edits over the past 9 years and that's not been my experience (google my HN username + wikipedia).

[grecy]

I wonder if it's an experienced editor vs. newbie thing.

Everything I try to do is immediately reverted and sixteen rules are cited. Extremely frustrating, and it happens to many others in the community I'm in (Driving around the world) to the point I setup our own wiki so we don't have to deal with the BS bureaucracy of Wikipedia.