On 9/13/07, WikipediaEditor Durin wikidurin@gmail.com wrote:
The overarching problem here is that Wikipedia is collapsing. This list is just a symptom of that.
- The Foundation has become ineffective and no longer cares about
its mission and goals. There's a number of symptoms resulting from this state. One such symptom is the abysmal state of fundraising. In hard numbers, the fundraising is better. In terms of per-capita analysis, absolutely terrible. In short, the importance, scale and complexity of Wikipedia has dramatically increased while fund raising has only slightly increased. It's not keeping up, and the more that it can't keep up the worse the problems will become. Another symptom; massive turnover at the Foundation level. Though the words we've been hearing from the departing people have all been nice, any outside observer can see that an organization that loses people by the droves has serious problems, regardless of what face they attempt to put on it.
- This list, which used to be an effective forum and regarded by Jimbo
as being THE place to do business is now ineffectual. Jimbo used to be a regular here. Looking from the perspective of number of posts per month, his participation here is down 43% this year from last year.
- Issues of scale are not being addressed. Analogous; Usenet newsgroups
were useful when there was a small community per newsgroup. When it became thousands per newsgroup, they became useless. See "Dunbar's number" article.
- Prior decisions on key points are being disregarded, despite lengthy
debates leading to those decisions. Precedent is meaningless now. The community has lost its ability to move forward because all decisions are immediately obsolete and carry no relevance for tightly related circumstances.
- General behavior on Wikipedia has led to a narrower definition of the
typical Wikipedian. Wikignomes, for example, are no longer valued.
- While we have a crossed 2,000,000 articles, one automated study
showed that about 3% of our articles...just 60,000...have anything above a few sentences and a handful of references. I.e., vast swaths of Wikipedia are very far from being encyclopedic in content and structure.
I could go on for a *long* while about the ails of Wikipedia and all the various symptoms that show its imminent demise.
Of course, all of what I've said above will be disputed, and I'll be shown by massive writings that I'm insane, criminally wrong, etc. The arguments will continue ad nauseum. I do not care for rebuttals at this point. I just hope people read this and take it to heart. Yes, the end of Wikipedia is nigh. Yes, I'm the quack standing on a corner with a sandwich board on me. Don't say I didn't warn you.
on 9/13/07 4:10 PM, George Herbert at george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I still find it unfortunate that (from what I have seen) you have reacted this negatively to the shift in consensus position on fair use of non-free images.
I think your personal experience has come to illustrate a rather negative long-term trend, though, the editor / admin burnout problem.
It would be easy for me to run down your itemized list and rebut a bunch; instead, I'll just note that growing pains are real, Wikipedia is not the same as it once was (at any level), and that some aspects of this are unfortunate at the same time as others are exhilirating.
Regarding the burnout problem; I am beginning to think that the fundamental problem is with the personality of the people who make good editors and admins. We are the types of people who, while basically functional in normal society, also can get very focused and obsessed on particular points.
I spent my late teens and early 20s figuring out how to unfocus and acknowledge when I had worked myself into a mental corner on an issue or problem. A majority of my talented friends and good coworkers haven't worked that out, yet, and I think that it's common on Wikipedia. Being able to identify it in yourself, and listen when others are trying to point it out to you, is a prerequisite to dealing with a situation by de-escalating, de-stressing, letting go and letting someone else handle it for a while. Those skills are the only way for people like us to keep focused on a project or issue for long periods of time. If we don't have them, we tend eventually to get locked in to some issue or problem we cannot personally actually solve, and it destroys our ability to keep working on the project or problem.
Pretty insightful stuff, George. Thank you.
Marc