I believe much depends on Wikipedia Mobile app. Users are mostly on mobile
now and they feel it natural to do any thing from mobile. If only, creating
articles and adding citations could be done easily through mobile app, can
make a big difference.
On Mon, 31 Dec 2018, 2:22 a.m. David Cuenca Tudela <dacuetu(a)gmail.com wrote:
Answering the initial question: It depends on how you
understand "death".
Wikipedia is the manifestation of a collection of algorithms running in the
minds of thousands of people. With time it could become less popular to run
that algorithm in your life, or you would like to try a different one. With
less people then the Wikipedias would be different as they are today. More
out-of-date information, less capacity to oversee the project, stagnation,
and perhaps eventually irrelevance. Myspace, digg, and winamp are still
alive, however people prefer other options these days.
I think it is important to move with the flow, and open new opportunities
for collaboration as the technology and our contributor base are ready for
them. Wikidata started 6 years ago, Structured Commons is in the making,
and who knows what could come next.
In the age of review manipulation and mistrust, I see opportunities in
identifying thought leaders, and building a balanced critique on a subject
based on multiple sources. Wikipedia does this partially, but it is not its
main aim. Assigning trust to people or organizations is something that the
community does quite well, so it could be applied to other contexts.
A snippet-pedia also sounds useful, specially if a topic could be explained
with different levels of complexity. Layman's explanations are really
useful and there are communities built around them (for instance ELI5 with
16 million subscribers), however their explanations are neither
collaborative nor structured, so it is quite difficult to improve them or
navigate them.
It doesn't matter so much that Wikipedia "dies", what matters is that the
Wikimedia community adapts with new projects that keep the spirit of
gathering, organizing, and sharing knowledge alive. Perhaps we could also
consider other approaches that could be executed in real life. With diverse
approaches, there would be different kind of contributors, aka more
diversity. I would definitely welcome projects that would attract 90% of
female contributors, even if they are radically different and they are not
a wiki. In the end our mission is to enable everyone to share knowledge,
not necessarily encyclopedic, and not necessarily using current technology.
Just because we have a hammer doesn't mean that all problems can be solved
with it.
Regards,
Micru
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:35 PM Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I have written a long text today (posted in my
FB) which the readers of
this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
that it is very easy to critisize me for side issues, but if you want to
comment/reply I would appreciate if you address the main issue. The
target
audience I was thinking about was general (not
necessarily
Wikimedia-oriented), and for the readers from this mailing list the first
several paragraphs can sound trivial (or even trivial and wrong). I
apologize in advance.
Cheers
Yaroslav
_________________
I currently have a bit of time and can write on the future of Wikipedia.
Similarly to much of what I write it is probably going to be useless, but
someone may find it interesting. For simplicity, I will be explicitly
talking about the English Wikipedia (referring to it as Wikipedia). I am
active in other projects as well, and some of them have similar issues,
but
there are typically many other things going on
there which make the
picture
more complicated.
Let us first look at the current situation. Wikipedia exists since 2001,
and in a couple of weeks will turn 18. Currently, it has 5.77 million
articles. I often hear an opinion that all important articles have
already
been created. This is incorrect, and I am often
the first person to point
out that this is not correct. For example, today I created an article on
an
urban locality in Russia with the population of
15 thousands. Many
articles
are indeed too short, badly written, or suffer
from other issues, and
they
need to be improved. There are new topics which
appear on a regular
basis:
new music performers, new winners of sports
competitions or prizes, and
so
on. As any Web 2.0 project, Wikipedia requires a
regular cleanup, since
there are many people happy to vandalize the 5th website in the world in
terms of the number of views. However, as a general guideline, it is not
so
much incorrect to state that all important things
in Wikipedia have been
already written. Indeed, if someone looks for information in Wikipedia -
or, more precisely, uses search engines and gets Wikipedia as the first
hit
— they are likely to find what they
need with more than 99% chance.
In this sense, Wikipedia now is very different from Wikipedia in 2008 or
Wikipedia in 2004. Ten and especially fifteen years ago, everybody could
contribute something important. For example, the article on the 1951 film
"A Streetcar Named Desire", which won four Academy Awards, was started in
2005, as well as an article on Cy Twombly, at the time probably the most
famous living artist. This is not possible anymore. This is why the
number
of active editors is currently dropping - to
contribute to the content
in a
meaningful way, one now has to be an advanced
amateur - to master some
field of knowledge much better than most others do. Or one can be a
professional - but there are very few professionals contributing to
Wikipedia in their fields, and there are very few articles written at a
professional level. Attempts to attract professionals have been made for
many years, and, despite certain local success, generally failed. They
have
been going now for long enough to assume they
will never succeed on a
large
scale. Wikipedia is written by advance amateurs
for amateurs. However,
despite the decline in the number of editors, there are enough resources
to
maintain and to expand the project. It does not
mean there are no
problems
- there are in fact many problems. One of the
most commonly discussed one
is systemic bias - there is way more information on Wikipedia on subjects
pertaining to North America than to Africa, and if a topic is viewed on
differently in different countries, one can be sure that the American
view
dominates. But it is usually thought - and I
agree with this - that these
drawbacks are not crucial, and Wikipedia is atill a useful and
sustainable
project. Wikipedia clearly has its ecosystem,
there are no competitors to
talk about, and all attempts to fork it were unsuccessful. There is a
steady development, and everybody is happy.
Does this mean that everything is fine and we do not need to worry?, just
to wait until missing articles get written, or even to help this by
writing
them ourselves?
Absolutely not. To understand this, we can look again at the editor base.
There are detailed studies, but, for a starter, it is a nightmare to edit
Wikipedia from a cell phone. It is possible but not much easier to edit
it
from a tablet. The mobile version is different
from a desktop one, and it
is not really optimized for editing. This is a known problem, but one
aspect of it is clear. Most Wikipedia editors actually own a desktop and
a
laptop. This brings them into 18+ category. There
are of course
exceptions,
but the fact is that the editor base gets older,
and this is a problem.
The
problem is not so much at this point that we all
die and there will be
nobody to edit Wikipedia. The problem is that the next generation (18-)
has
very different ways of getting information. And I
guess they are not
interested in editing Wikipedia, and they will not get interested when
they
grow up - possibly beyond introducing minor
corrections, which can be
done
from a phone.
Traditionally, students were always among the core of the editors base.
They already have some knowledge and they still have time to edit. When
they graduate, find a job and start a family, they have way less time and
typically stop editing. The next group are retirees. Between students and
retirees, we have a tiny fraction of dedicated enthusiasts who are ready
to
take time from work and family, but they are
really not numerous. Well,
and
very soon we are going to lose students as
editors. And we should be
happy
if we do not lose them as readers.
I am 51, and I do not know much about the 18- generation, but I know two
important things about them. They have a very short attention span and
difficulties to concentrate. And they get a graphical and visualized
information much more easier than texts. For example, my son is capable
of
watching three or four movies per day, but he has
difficulties to read 20
pages from a book.
Well, the first question is whether an encyclopedia is an appropriate /
the
best format for them to get knowledge (as it is
for us). I do not know
the
answer. What I write below assumes that the
answer is positive, otherwise
the rest of the text does not make sense.
The next question is what should be done. How Wikipedia should look like
to
be accessible to this generation? The answer
seems to be obvious.
Articles
must be short and contain a lot of graphic
information. May be they need
to
be videoclips. Short clips. Or, at lest, they
must contain clips, with
more
voice and less letters. If one needs more
detailed information or just
further information - one hops to the next article or watches the next
clip.
This is a paradigm shift. Currently, the editors generally consider that
it
is good to have long Wikipedia articles - because
long means more
complete.
Sometimes there are even proposals (fortunately
isolated and without
followup) to delete all short articles even if they describe notable
topics
and contain verified information. Clips are
almost not in use. Of course
they still need to be made, but this is not such a big problem - there
are
plenty of school students who have their own
youtube channel, if they can
make clips, everybody can.
The most difficult question is how this can be realized. I believe it is
not possible to just transform Wikipedia like this - make articles
shorter
and simpler and spit them. First, this might be
good for the young
generation, but this is still not good for the 18+ generation. Second,
such
reforms should be either be approved by Wikipedia
community through
consensus, or be imposed by the Wikimedia Foundation who owns the
project.
The likelihood of either is zero. Just to give
one argument, the
community
is, well, the community of editors, of the same
18+ people with laptops
who
have no difficulties reading long texts.
I envision it differently. Ideally, we have the Wikipedia as it is now,
but
on top of this, every article has a collection of
shorter companion
articles, simple and a paragraph or two long, so that each of them can be
read in half a minute, They should not have excessive markup, references,
categories or anything else which can be found in the main article if
needed. References in Wikipedia are required not for the sake of having
references, but as a means to ensure that the information is verifiable -
and if the main article does it the companion articles do not need to.
Some
of these companion articles can be in fact clips
- there is a difficulty
that clips can not be edited collaboratively, but I am sure this one can
be
solved. If anybody wants to solve it.
The status of what I have written above is science fiction. I am sure if
I
come with this proposal to a village pump of
Wikipedia, it will be dead
within a day. In addition, it requires some modifications of MediaWiki
which can only be done by the Foundation. And I am not really looking
forward for the Foundation implementing this either. I have a lot of
respect for some of the Foundation employees, but it has now grown up
into
a big corporation now and behaves as a big
corporation, where some people
care less about the product and more about other things, and some look at
Wikipedia editors, aka "unorganized volunteers", as some annoying
phenomenon, which they can tolerate but are not willing to listen to. My
forecast is pretty pessimistic. Unless a miracle happens (and I
currently,
at least not from my perspective, do not see any
reasons for a miracle to
happen), soon or late will realize this, It might be a startup company,
or
a non-commercial. And Wikipedia will stay as it
is, and, after the
standards change many times, it will not be readable / accessible to most
of internet users, and will slowly die. And the results of what were were
doing for 20 years will disappear. This is a usual development and
happens
to almost every human activity. We know that only
a few percents of
pieces
of Ancient Greek and Roman literature survived
until now.
Yaroslav Blanter, editor and administrator of the English Wikipedia, 125
000 edits.
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