[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Re: Wikipedia FYI

David, A couple of weeks ago I noticed that there was a thread called WIKIPEDIA in one of the forums of Distributed Proofreaders. So I investigated . . . When today the last contribution below arrived, I thought you’d like to take a look. I am leaving out only two small irrelevant comments in between. I contributed on the 6th of April 2013.: 31 August 2012 (Start of thread) Well I finally gave up on Wikipedia after close to a decade of contributions, particularly in the topic of astronomy. (Over 70,000 edits, many many new articles, reviews, citations, and 20 featured articles.) My main beef was with certain stubbornly foolish individuals who managed to sap all of the enjoyment out of the process. I think I'll spend a lot more time on DP now because it's a more structured process and there's very little negativity here. Plus it's a nice feeling to know that the contributions you make here won't get wiped out by some nincompoop. Just needed to vent a little. 31 August 2012 Funny you should say that. I recently looked over a project in P1 and found that on one page the only change made by the proofer was replacing a clearly correct (both visually and grammatically) comma with a semicolon. Nincompoops Of The World, Unite! 6 September, 2012 This is why many do not bother with it at all. I have added things in the earlier days only to have whole pages replaced by someone that has no idea what they are talking about. Then bicker over the changes I make to correct thier misinformation. 6 April 2013 (This is my contribution) Just came across this thread. I would love to work on Wikipedia, and I have made some contributions; but the negativity and sheer difficulty of navigating their processes turned me off completely. Not to mention the bumptious rudeness of what I assume to be young males with absolutely no perspective. My SO and my "young male" son, who both do a huge amount for Wikipedia, have managed to tolerate and survive Wikipedia. Interestingly, neither of them work in DP, although my son did sign up before even I did, but has probably lapsed since he never contributed. I would like to know how much of an overlap there is between contributors to Wikipedia and DP. Since both are concerned with volunteers making knowledge available for free to the whole world, one would expect a good match. But the very different cultures seem to attract different populations. Any comments? 24 April 2013 Wikipedia and DP aren't the only crowdsource information-aggregating projects. I'm a very low-level Wikipedia contributor, but a medium-level contributor at CCEL and the Open Directory Project. 25 April 2013 A topic I could probably write a lot on... after sitting in an armchair... and I'm not going to do that for everyone's sake. Some quick thoughts: DP, presumably, appreciates that older, public domain works have value--intrinsically, historiographically, etc.--while Wikipedia tends to minimize anything but the au currant. Wikipedia calls this "recentism", which is a by-product of the interests of the average 20-something editor: movies, video games, current news events, biographies of often marginally notable living people, etc. If "scholasticism", if you will, was ever a value for Wikipedia users during the site's formative years, that has largely been lost. Wikipedia shares certain transactional similarities with DP that would also appear to make them similar; you edit a page, and there is no commitment beyond that edit. The difference, I think--getting to my unsupported thesis that the cultures are quite different--is that DP contributors have some abiding interest in seeing the specific projects they work on succeed, while many Wikipedia edits/editors expend great effort on non-abiding matters. This is often called "drive-by" editing, or "gnoming"; generally a disinterested affair that does nothing to further explicate the subject of the article. I'm referring to correcting a typo, reverting vandalism, reverting good-faith additions because someone didn't provide a source; and worst of all, adding those pointless templates that say "the lede is too short" or "this article has an essay-like tone". The handful of editors that actually research and write good content on Wikipedia, which is of course the hardest and most "loving" job by far, is drying up quite quickly, it seems to me, because the culture and norms no longer reflect the ostensible "encyclopedic" goal of the project. "Encyclopedia", after all, is an "old" idea; and Wikipedia's users are young; and they have gradually morphed that idea into more of a quick-fix, add-a-factoid, add-a-template style of editing and construing knowledge, that is frankly at the polar opposite of truly engaging with an encyclopedia subject: like a book on DP does. So there's a certain pleasure, I presume, that we all take in bringing out fully-fledged texts, even if they're old, something that can be chewed on--and that counters the short-attention-span world we live in. I therefore think that at the median, there is a surprising disjunct between who would edit Wikipedia a lot, and who would edit DP a lot. --------------------- Bess Richfield Somerset West