On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Maryana Pinchuk <mpinchuk(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 7:28 AM, David Golumbia
<dgolumbia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As a longstanding research interest of mine, I have a thesis about this
topic, one which I expect to be controversial, and I would be very
interested to hear whether other Wiki researchers have considered; it's not
one I see in the NPOV work or other critical studies of Wikipedia, at least
so far, and it does bear on core features of Wikipedia itself.
a) "but for the shouting," many major Wikipedia areas, especially in core
areas of human knowledge, are becoming effectively finished. there is
nothing major left to do. that doesn't mean they will never change, or be
expanded, etc., but as a general observation I think it has some strong
prima facie evidence in its favor.
"Finished" only very superficially. For example, take a look at the article
on Simon BolivarĀ (not exactly a trivial figure in world history). It's quite
long, illustrated with lots of images, and has a big list of notes, cited
sources, and further reading. But if you take a minute to inspect the body
of the article -- to read it closely -- you'll see that much of it is
unreferenced, contradictory, confusingly structured, inconsistent in tone,
missing core concepts, and strangely weighted in favor of some things and
not others. To a casual reader who'll only look at the lead and maybe glance
through the references, it does indeed look like there's nothing left to do.
To an expert on Latin American history (or really anyone who takes the time
to start looking up the primary and secondary sources), it's an exasperating
mess that needs to get a complete overhaul from top to bottom.
I'm not saying this to criticize the contributors to the article, of whom I
am one. I'm saying this because I think many readers are fooled by the great
efforts that Wikipedians have gone through to make articles look very
polished and professional on the surface, even when their content
desperately needs more copyeditors, reference adders, peer reviewers, etc.
Maryana
Indeed. A few more thoughts:
* The big Wikipedias -- perhaps the top ten -- are impressively big.
But this only scrapes the surface of world languages, and by extension
global cultures and knowledge. The English Wikipedia is *22 times* the
size of the Arabic Wikipedia by article count alone, even though the
number of native speakers of each language is roughly comparable.
* The idea that kicked off this thread is correct: maintenance is an
issue we really haven't solved. And so is improvement -- how many of
our articles are simply mediocre? Most of them, for sure. Sometimes,
as a long-time observer, I look at the English Wikipedia and think:
"OK, it took us a decade to get the first draft done -- now the real
work begins."
* What about the rest of human knowledge? A globally-relevant
encyclopedia is a fairly narrow slice of the world's information. The
Wikimedia sister projects -- Wikibooks et al -- are just barely
finding their feet; there is a huge, and exciting, amount of potential
there for new contributors. Not to mention the rest of the free
knowledge ecosystem -- projects like localwiki that aim to record
highly-local knowledge for a specific place, etc. etc. I don't think
we should confuse the excitement that can come from contributing to a
collaborative project with something that is specific to Wikipedia.
> i wonder about how Wikipedians consider and
imagine the future as
> something more than a site for the "ultimate Wikipedia"--do they, do we,
> really think carefully about the needs of future people to have substantial
> gaps in knowledge that it becomes their job to fill in? Have we, to some
> extent at least, taken from our children (and their children, etc.)
> something they would be better off having? and if so, what can we do to
> return to them the curiosity and wonder and feeling that "human knowledge is
> not finished" that are absolutely necessary to the development of knowing
> individuals?
Yes! I like this framing a lot. The idea that knowledge isn't finished
-- that there is always more to be done -- is one of the core
important ideas we can reinforce.
There is a long-standing idea in old-school wiki culture to "always
leave something undone" -- to leave something for the next person. I
think this is what you are getting at -- it's actually a fundamental
part of the way the system works. And while I think that there are
lifetimes worth of things still to do on Wikipedia, perhaps the key
missing part of this is making it explicit: making hooks into the
system for better, easier, more obvious ways to help out. A blank page
is a pretty obvious invitation to start writing. A messy, complicated
article that already exists is not quite so obvious....
(see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_in_progress
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_omissions_explicit).
There are arguments to be made here about the overuse of bots
(superficially polishing poor articles and unintentionally making them
seem more finished than they are) and UI and process considerations
for new editors. But I agree that it's a good, and important,
principle to keep in mind.
-- phoebe