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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in...

MathJax comes to Wikipedia

Richard Jensen

2 May 2012 2 May '12

12:27 a.m.

I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on historical topics (in the English Wikipedia) I find that most of the important writing was done in 2006-8. Typically, the article reached maturity about 2008 and since then the rate of editing has plunged. In most cases I see only minor or maintenance editing since then. The new material since 2008 is mostly cosmetic: illustrations still get added, lots of links are made, new categories added, new lists are appended, vandalism is removed. The citations are increasingly out of date. The articles are long in tooth. Wiki is now resembling the old paper encyclopedias--they would get old fast and need constant updating either through yearbooks or new editions. Richard Jensen

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Laura Hale

2 May 2 May

12:30 a.m.

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:

...

I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)

WereSpielChequers

8:16 a.m.

Yet since Dec 2008 the total number of articles on the English Wikipedia has risen by 50% - 2.6m to 3.9m http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm (and quite a few of those that existed in 2008 have since gone). Word count per article was also increasing from Dec 2008 to Jan 2010 (we don't seem to have word counts for the last couple of years). I rather suspect that editing on Olympics related stuff is on a four year cycle, and that former Olympians may not be updated much till they die. - We pick up large numbers of sportspeople in the Death anomaly project. Otherwise the picture is more complex. Intrawiki links will account for some of the increase in average word count, it would be interesting to know whether articles in general tend to get longer and the proportion of new stubs that get expanded per year. The somewhat arbitrary criteria that actually apply at new page patrol have in my experience been getting tougher, so the de facto minimum word count needed for a new article to survive is probably rather higher now than it was in 2006. This might help explain the increase in average word count per article. There is in my view a tendency among some wikipedians to prefer to start new articles as opposed to improve existing ones, and new articles on major topics are relatively rare. There has been a major drive to up the minimum standards for certain types of articles. This has involved a large group of editors and possibly distracted them away from articles on major topics to improve less important ones ( the unreferenced BLP project involved nearly 2% of all articles). In a similar vein the attempts by a group of more deletionist editors to get borderline and sometimes not so borderline articles deleted has got rid of many relatively short articles, and distracted many other editors from the articles that most need work to the ones that are most in danger of deletion. Specifically with your examples of major wars and major generals, the focus of the Milhist project in recent years on "majestic titans" the project to get a Featured Article on every Battleship is bound to have diverted some editors away from wars and generals. It has certainly influenced my editing and I'm not a member of the project or even particularly interested in the subject. The cumulative effect of all this may well mean that once an article gets to a certain standard it can be quite stable for some years. Which might be rather reassuring to our writers. But it would be worth testing a more random group. There is also a good chance that wikiprojects effect the articles in their purview, MilHist has long been our biggest and best organised WikiProject, but generally WikiProjects have their own cycles of enthusiasm and moribundity. I suspect we also have a difference between areas where our editors are subject matter experts and areas where they are not. Medicine is supposedly a WikiProject with an unusually high proportion of editors who are subject matter experts in real life. I couldn't single out a Wikiproject where the editors had a low level of expertise, but I'm pretty sure that MilHist has more than its fair share of teenage boys among the active editors. It would be interesting to test to see if Medicine related articles were generally more up-to-date than the average. WereSpielChequers On 2 May 2012 01:30, Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com> wrote:

...

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:

I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)

Sports has this as a bit of a huge problem. I've found a number of articles where they have not been updated since 2008 for Olympians and the upcoming Olympic Games where some of these athletes will compete in again have not been updated to reflect that yet. -- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Amir E. Aharoni

7:35 a.m.

2012/5/2 Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu>du>:

...

I am looking at the edit history of a number of major articles on historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)

A random sample, or something systematic? -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

Yaroslav M. Blanter

8:08 a.m.

On Tue, 01 May 2012 18:27:07 -0600, Richard Jensen wrote:

...

Well, obviously there are several classes of articles: - Those of primary importance were indeed completed before 2008. They are sometimes referred to in discussions as "low-hanging fruit" and the fact that they are more or less look complete (or , to reformulate it, an improvement is possible but sometimes is associated with advanced knowledge a typical editor does not have) is used as the most obvious explanation of the flattening of the number of active editors; - Those which require constant attention (BLP, sports BLP in the first instance, as Laura correctly noticed, events, prizes etc); in particular, those which need to be created on the regular basis (like new events or new BLPs). Sometimes they are taken care of properly, but more often they get neglected and indeed remain at the 2008 or whatever level; - Articles on less notable subjects (but still pretty much notable on encyclopedic standards): BLP articles of persons who did not make it to the school textbooks, geographic objects, events not exactly known for everybody etc. Most of these are in a pitiful state (for instance, many of the geographical aricles were bot created and remain stubs for years; as another example I recently discovered that an article on en.wp on Bernat Martorell, by far the most famous Catalan medieval painter, was one line, and I started to improve it). Most of the work is actually in this class of articles; I personally only work on these and see whatsoever no problems finding missing articles or stubs requiring improvement, but most of this work can not be done with only the primary school knowledge. - Articles prone to POV and edit warring. They typically remain in a pitiful state, and there is nothing which can be done about it. Cheers Yaroslav

David Golumbia

2:28 p.m.

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. i know that's controversial in and of itself, but i have an even more controversial observation that I rarely hear discussed in wiki circles: b) while the finishing of major facets of human knowledge is an explicit goal of Wikipedia, it turns out that in addition to its abundant positive consequences, "finishing" (or mostly finishing) areas of human knowledge has *very real negative consequences*. the most salient of these is:*leaving future generations with the feeling and even the factual situation that "there is nothing substantial left to do."* much of the initial excitement about Wikipedia, speaking very impressionistically, appears to me to have been due to the fact that there was *so much *to do. now, in such a short time, there is *so much less *to do. that isn't just a negative for Wikipedia--it's a negative for everyone. I am a college professor. At one time, it was fun to have students scope out areas of knowledge and either write or consider writing Wikipedia entries for areas of study. Now, I have the opposite problem. For many topics I teach (but by no means all) I must tell my students to avoid Wikipedia, because it produces the instantly demoralizing effect: "it's all been done/said already." I don't think anyone can have anticipated this consequence 10 years ago, but I believe it is very real, and I wonder almost every day about how to handle it. because for many reasons, and I hope and believe there are people on this list who will sympathize with what i'm saying, what would be wonderful is if every generation could have the fun and excitement of building Wikipedia from scratch, rather than the demoralization that occurs when one happens to actually go look at a Wikipedia page on something about which one has the excitement of discovery, only to find it completely mapped out to a level of detail unimaginable just a decade ago. 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? i am absolutely not denying that there will always be many parts of Wikipedia that can be fleshed out, many new areas of knowledge, Wikipedias in other languages, etc. I am talking primarily about historical events, major figures from every walk of life, major historical idea-based topics, and other central parts of human knowledge (esp. in the West, where Wikipedias are closest to being "finished"), because these are the areas in which the dispiriting effects I observe seem most worrisome. David On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:

...

-- David Golumbia dgolumbia(a)gmail.com

Maryana Pinchuk

6:37 p.m.

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 7:28 AM, David Golumbia <dgolumbia(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

"Finished" only very superficially. For example, take a look at the article on Simon Bolivar <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bolivar> (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

...

i know that's controversial in and of itself, but i have an even more controversial observation that I rarely hear discussed in wiki circles: b) while the finishing of major facets of human knowledge is an explicit goal of Wikipedia, it turns out that in addition to its abundant positive consequences, "finishing" (or mostly finishing) areas of human knowledge has *very real negative consequences*. the most salient of these is:*leaving future generations with the feeling and even the factual situation that "there is nothing substantial left to do."* much of the initial excitement about Wikipedia, speaking very impressionistically, appears to me to have been due to the fact that there was *so much *to do. now, in such a short time, there is *so much less *to do. that isn't just a negative for Wikipedia--it's a negative for everyone. I am a college professor. At one time, it was fun to have students scope out areas of knowledge and either write or consider writing Wikipedia entries for areas of study. Now, I have the opposite problem. For many topics I teach (but by no means all) I must tell my students to avoid Wikipedia, because it produces the instantly demoralizing effect: "it's all been done/said already."

...

I don't think anyone can have anticipated this consequence 10 years ago, but I believe it is very real, and I wonder almost every day about how to handle it. because for many reasons, and I hope and believe there are people on this list who will sympathize with what i'm saying, what would be wonderful is if every generation could have the fun and excitement of building Wikipedia from scratch, rather than the demoralization that occurs when one happens to actually go look at a Wikipedia page on something about which one has the excitement of discovery, only to find it completely mapped out to a level of detail unimaginable just a decade ago. 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? i am absolutely not denying that there will always be many parts of Wikipedia that can be fleshed out, many new areas of knowledge, Wikipedias in other languages, etc. I am talking primarily about historical events, major figures from every walk of life, major historical idea-based topics, and other central parts of human knowledge (esp. in the West, where Wikipedias are closest to being "finished"), because these are the areas in which the dispiriting effects I observe seem most worrisome. David On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:

-- David Golumbia dgolumbia(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

-- Maryana Pinchuk Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org

phoebe ayers

8 p.m.

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:

"Finished" only very superficially. For example, take a look at the article on Simon Bolivar (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

Samuel Klein

7:32 p.m.

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:28 AM, David Golumbia <dgolumbia(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

a) "but for the shouting," many major Wikipedia areas, especially in core areas of human knowledge, are becoming effectively finished.

...

much of the initial excitement about Wikipedia, speaking very impressionistically, appears to me to have been due to the fact that there was so much to do. now, in such a short time, there is so much less to do. that isn't just a negative for Wikipedia--it's a negative for everyone. I am a college professor. At one time, it was fun to have students scope out areas of knowledge and either write or consider writing Wikipedia entries for areas of study. Now, I have the opposite problem. For many topics I teach (but by no means all) I must tell my students to avoid Wikipedia, because it produces the instantly demoralizing effect: "it's all been done/said already."

Mathematics and Classics both share an interesting approach to this: they strongly encourage students to work through the standard references, proofs, demonstrations -- on their own, and ideally finding a more elegant way to present a known idea, or a more general statement that applies to more than one specific. Students spend a great deal of their learning-time finding crossreferences across topics, or working through a classic exposition step by step, from first principles. This has the benefit that elegance and clarity, rather than "comperhensive coverage" becomes the standard -- and this is something constantly improving. students very quickly find any errors in the work of their predecessors, as this is also prized. And in the areas where there is truly no improvement to be made, a close reading and recreation of the work has great value in itself: as a model of clarity for others to follow. Modern mathematics is quite a joyful and not a demoralized field; we could do worse than follow in those pedagogical footsteps. Sam

Laura Hale

8:08 p.m.

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:28 AM, David Golumbia <dgolumbia(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

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. i know that's controversial in and of itself, but i have an even more controversial observation that I rarely hear discussed in wiki circles:

This is a point of view that depends on where you are editing from. There are national sport teams, ESPECIALLY on the women's side that do not have articles yet. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FIFA_national_women%27s_football_tea… give you an idea of this problem for football, which has had substantial work done to it. The 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics are coming up. This means a whole bunch of NEW notable athletes will be eligible for articles. There is a need to improve these. Many of the core articles related to sport need work. I'm not seeing a problem with running out of ideas. I do see a bit of a culture that discourages people from using red links though. -- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com

Peter Ansell

11:22 p.m.

On 3 May 2012 06:08, Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com> wrote:

...

I'm not seeing a problem with running out of ideas. I do see a bit of a culture that discourages people from using red links though.

I blame that on teachers that tell students not to use Red pens for historical reasons (which they would never seem to be able to elaborate on during cross-investigation). Some of the red-link-delinkers may be teachers still trying to rid the world of red text. It would be a nice sociology experiment to switch the wikipedia CSS stylesheets to use a neutral colour instead of red and see how many missing-wiki-links disappear and appear compared to previously. Peter

Paolo Massa

5:37 p.m.

You might want to use WikiTrip for getting a visual grasp about the number of edits received by a page over time. For example, this is the WikiTrip for First World War (non cumulative) http://sonetlab.fbk.eu/wikitrip/#|en|First_World_War|0 look at the chart on the top of the interface Hope it helps. On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 2:27 AM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:

...

-- -- Paolo Massa Email: paolo AT gnuband DOT org Blog: http://gnuband.org

Ben Kovitz

4 May 4 May

1:38 a.m.

Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:

...

Looking at a spinoff Shakespeare article: [[Shakespeare's plays]]. It's peak activity year was 2007. A dozen people made 10 or more edits. It has 26 citations and no bibliography. There are no scholarly journals. Half the citations are over 40 years old. Only one book was published after 2007. That profile strongly suggests editors who are unfamiliar with current scholarship.

...

With a couple minor exceptions the youngest source cited in the footnotes is 2006. The newest item in the bibliography is one book from 2007, I saw n=1 article in a scholarly journal (from 1969). Maybe it's ok for a college freshman but an English major so unaware of the recent scholarship would not get a good grade.

These sentiments worry me. Our mission in making an encyclopedia is to provide the most important facts about the most important topics, and present them in an accessible way for the lay reader. (Salient facts about notable topics, if you prefer.) We emphasize matters that have been settled after long investigation and debate. When it comes to conclusions that rest on complex thought that considers a wide range of information, we favor the established scholarly consensus. Verifiability and reliability are at the core of Wikipedia's approach to content. Favoring the most recent scholarly publications opposes Wikipedia in three ways. First, it opposes reliability. Scholarly publications are actually a forum for debate. Scholarly publication is mainly a way for the scholarly community to try out new ideas and, over years of criticism and refinement, see which ones stand up to informed scrutiny and which don't. Even the academic world, with its peer review and high standards, is prone to fads and fashions. New ideas come and go. Often, after a few years, ideas that dominated new scholarship come to seem ridiculous. Remember lit crit? Second, it opposes our selectiveness about the information we include. In a topic that has already received scholarly interest for decades or more, the main findings have been stable for a long time. Newer research tends to favor ever narrower and more esoteric subtopics. At some point, the salience of most new information or ideas being published drops below the threshold for inclusion in an encyclopedia--that is, in a *summary* of knowledge. Third, it opposes verifiability. Scholarly journals are usually written for a scholarly audience. They assume a reader with highly specialized knowledge. They are often filled with jargon and they follow highly refined conventions. Lay readers find them confusing and often misunderstand them. Ben Kovitz http://mypage.iu.edu/~bkovitz/

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Amir E. Aharoni
Ben Kovitz
David Golumbia
Laura Hale
Maryana Pinchuk
Paolo Massa
Peter Ansell
phoebe ayers
Richard Jensen
Samuel Klein
WereSpielChequers
Yaroslav M. Blanter