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.
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.
Yaroslav, Which world are you talking about? North America and Europe?
When it comes to Asia (which I'm part of) and Africa, possibly Latin America too, we haven't even written down 1% of the diversity of these places. Leave aside getting it up onto the Wikipedia!
Of course, I agree with the suggestion for new approaches (if I read you right). This is particularly true in a part of the world where much of the discussion is still in the oral domain, is often not in print; when it's in print, it is not digitised. Even when digitised, chances are that it's in a non-English language, which is very hard to find very search engines. (No wonder that some of the prominent people from our regions are continually getting dismissed as non-notable, which I see as another form of 'systemic bias').
Give it a thought, please.
Frederick Noronha Goa
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 03:05, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@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.
Hi Frederick.
sure, I know. I am mostly writing about Russia, and I know there are a lot of topics which are not covered. I am usually the first one who says that there are many topics to even start an article on, and way more to improve.
But let us face it - if an English-speaking person looks for something in the English Wikipedia they are most likely to find it. The articles I create are definitely useful, but they get dozens of views per year.This is one of the reason we lose editors.
But my point is that we are about to lose most of our editors - at least in the first world countries which produce the most contribution in the English Wikipedia, USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. I guess India is different, but the trend is global, I think it is just a matter of time when it comes to that in India as well. And if Wikipedia would die in these countries, it will die in India as well.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:14 PM Frederick Noronha < fredericknoronha@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Yaroslav, Which world are you talking about? North America and Europe?
When it comes to Asia (which I'm part of) and Africa, possibly Latin America too, we haven't even written down 1% of the diversity of these places. Leave aside getting it up onto the Wikipedia!
Of course, I agree with the suggestion for new approaches (if I read you right). This is particularly true in a part of the world where much of the discussion is still in the oral domain, is often not in print; when it's in print, it is not digitised. Even when digitised, chances are that it's in a non-English language, which is very hard to find very search engines. (No wonder that some of the prominent people from our regions are continually getting dismissed as non-notable, which I see as another form of 'systemic bias').
Give it a thought, please.
Frederick Noronha Goa
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 03:05, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@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.
-- FN* फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا +91-9822122436 AUDIO: https://archive.org/details/@fredericknoronha TEXT: http://bit.ly/2SBx41G PIX: http://bit.ly/2Rs1xhl Can't get through on mobile? Please SMS/WhatsApp _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Ahhhh it's always nice to quote someone other than Mike Godwin and it seems Betteridge's law of headlines is alive and well. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 10:26 PM Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Frederick.
sure, I know. I am mostly writing about Russia, and I know there are a lot of topics which are not covered. I am usually the first one who says that there are many topics to even start an article on, and way more to improve.
But let us face it - if an English-speaking person looks for something in the English Wikipedia they are most likely to find it. The articles I create are definitely useful, but they get dozens of views per year.This is one of the reason we lose editors.
But my point is that we are about to lose most of our editors - at least in the first world countries which produce the most contribution in the English Wikipedia, USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. I guess India is different, but the trend is global, I think it is just a matter of time when it comes to that in India as well. And if Wikipedia would die in these countries, it will die in India as well.
Cheers Yaroslav
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:14 PM Frederick Noronha < fredericknoronha@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Yaroslav, Which world are you talking about? North America and Europe?
When it comes to Asia (which I'm part of) and Africa, possibly Latin America too, we haven't even written down 1% of the diversity of these places. Leave aside getting it up onto the Wikipedia!
Of course, I agree with the suggestion for new approaches (if I read you right). This is particularly true in a part of the world where much of
the
discussion is still in the oral domain, is often not in print; when it's
in
print, it is not digitised. Even when digitised, chances are that it's
in a
non-English language, which is very hard to find very search engines. (No wonder that some of the prominent people from our regions are continually getting dismissed as non-notable, which I see as another form of
'systemic
bias').
Give it a thought, please.
Frederick Noronha Goa
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 03:05, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@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.
-- FN* फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا +91-9822122436 AUDIO: https://archive.org/details/@fredericknoronha TEXT: http://bit.ly/2SBx41G PIX: http://bit.ly/2Rs1xhl Can't get through on mobile? Please SMS/WhatsApp _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
You paint the problem as being about us adapting to changing demographics. I'm not so sure--if only because the notion of attention-impaired millennials appears to be one of those self-propagating ideas whose supposed statistical support turns out to be fabricated.[1][2] If the concern is about getting more _readers_, by providing a digestible version of articles, Google already attempts to do that, and I'm sure we'll see better efforts down the line.
I think the bigger problem, and I'm not breaking any new ground here, is that our vectors for bringing people into the editing fold may be shrinking. Short versions of articles, whether we provide them or Google does, do not readily lend themselves to participation by outsiders. Mobile devices are inherently challenging to edit with: the WMF rightly has great people working to make it easier, but at the end of the day, I don't know if I would have ever started editing if I'd had to do it on a phone. (I hope my millennial brethren are hardier than I am.) And, as Frederick notes, even if someone gets to the point of editing, finding sources that we consider acceptable is going to be hardest for the areas in which we're most lacking coverage. These are hard problems, and I don't claim to have the solutions, but I don't know if your proposals would help on this front.
In any event, "slowly d[ying]" doesn't quite seem "imminent". Call it a side issue, but I'd prefer not to be clickbaited on this list.
Emufarmers, editor, a few edits
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790 [2] There's gotta be some Person's Law I can cite here, right?
Yaroslav Blanter wrote in part:
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.
[...]
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.
Regarding your subject line, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines very clearly applies. :-) No, the death of Wikipedia is not imminent.
I agree with a few of your points. For example, I agree that it should be easier to edit from a mobile device or tablet. (Though the simple counter-argument has often been that doing research sometimes does require a physically larger working space and that's not really a fact to be ashamed of.) I also agree that we need more and better multimedia within wiki projects. In particular, we need better videos, better animations, and better images.
That said, I'm not sure I understand what your concern is with long articles or lots of text. As your post here and my reply hopefully demonstrates, it's possible to have a long text and only interact with a piece of it. In terms of user interface, it is trivial to hide or collapse text if we want to. The default mobile view on Wikipedia collapses most sections of an article and only the introductory paragraphs are expanded. If readers find the default desktop view too overwhelming, we could hide or not even load every paragraph on the initial view.
I think we want to be in a position where we have too much information and can hide some of it or filter out the "noise" as needed, instead of being in the opposite position of not having enough content and not being able to adequately serve our readers' needs.
Or put more directly, if we have 50,000 words about the early life of Britney Spears, someone who's interested in researching where she was born does not need to read 50,000 words, they hopefully only need to read a few words in an infobox or in the relevant paragraph in a section of an article. Using Wikipedia and Wikidata as sources, we can also expand interactions such as query/answer services that would allow a user to simply ask "Where was Britney Spears born?" and get a direct, sourced answer. The content is still the centerpiece, while we create and adapt how the content is accessed.
A large part of what has made Wikipedia successful has been its open license. Readers and editors enjoy and can embrace free content. If a successor project comes along and can use the same free content in a better way, we should welcome that. That isn't the death of Wikipedia, that's a continuation and evolution of it, in my opinion.
And we should be open to a better future. The current model of having a very top-heavy Wikimedia Foundation Inc. headquartered in San Francisco is bad. While we never want to conflate change with improvement, there's plenty of room for the latter.
MZMcBride
Hi Yaroslav, Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have described reasonably well. Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary. I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in mobile. This would not be needed for all articles. Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should reflect editability and it doesn't.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Hi Yaroslav, Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have described reasonably well. Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary. I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in mobile. This would not be needed for all articles. Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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.
These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed. Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable of using it as well as anybody else.
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of generational decline is insulting.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should reflect editability and it doesn't.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Hi Yaroslav, Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have described reasonably well. Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary. I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in
mobile.
This would not be needed for all articles. Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction part of the article.
It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
It should hopefully only be 1-3 sentences, and to state what is all about and not a summary.
We do not live up to this recommendation all the time, but I have noticed that he introducion part on enwp generally are very long, in comparison
Anders
Den 2018-12-30 kl. 11:39, skrev Zubin JAIN:
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.
These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed. Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable of using it as well as anybody else.
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of generational decline is insulting.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should reflect editability and it doesn't.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Hi Yaroslav, Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have described reasonably well. Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary. I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in
mobile.
This would not be needed for all articles. Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section says pretty much the same:
The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies. The notability of the article's subject is usually established in the first few sentences.
that is, the intro section should be a short standalone article:
As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate.
For an extreme case, [[World War II]] gets *five* long paragraphs for its intro section.
- d.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 10:57, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:
In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction part of the article.
It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
It should hopefully only be 1-3 sentences, and to state what is all about and not a summary.
We do not live up to this recommendation all the time, but I have noticed that he introducion part on enwp generally are very long, in comparison
Anders
Den 2018-12-30 kl. 11:39, skrev Zubin JAIN:
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.
These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed. Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable of using it as well as anybody else.
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of generational decline is insulting.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should reflect editability and it doesn't.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Hi Yaroslav, Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have described reasonably well. Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary. I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in
mobile.
This would not be needed for all articles. Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Thats excellent. It is just then to live up to that guidline, and foster people who can simplity the lead sections
For myself I remember how hard it was to get an educated physisct to write of the Coriolis effect in the lead section to make it understandable. He just squeemed that with simple language then it is no correct. And in it there is animations but without proper text it is impossible to understand
Anders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force is not easy to take in
Den 2018-12-30 kl. 13:23, skrev David Gerard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section says pretty much the same:
The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies. The notability of the article's subject is usually established in the first few sentences.
that is, the intro section should be a short standalone article:
As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate.
For an extreme case, [[World War II]] gets *five* long paragraphs for its intro section.
- d.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 10:57, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:
In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction part of the article.
It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
It should hopefully only be 1-3 sentences, and to state what is all about and not a summary.
We do not live up to this recommendation all the time, but I have noticed that he introducion part on enwp generally are very long, in comparison
Anders
Den 2018-12-30 kl. 11:39, skrev Zubin JAIN:
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.
These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed. Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable of using it as well as anybody else.
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of generational decline is insulting.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should reflect editability and it doesn't.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Hi Yaroslav, Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have described reasonably well. Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary. I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in
mobile.
This would not be needed for all articles. Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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The problem with using simple language in complex topics is that simple language almost always needs far more words to say the same thing. The simpler the language, the more words are needed, assuming that the original was not unnecessarily verbose. This is why specialist terms exist: they require previous knowledge, but can reduce the number of words needed to explain. The alternative is dumbing down, lies-to-children, Wittgenstein's ladder, and that sort of thing. Ideally all of these options would be available to the reader, who could choose the level which works best for themselves.
Editors who have invested a lot of effort to produce a technically correct and comprehensive explanation will nor look kindly at dumbing down the article, but may be entirely unconcerned about an alternative explanation provided in parallel with the more correct version. To a large extent, that is the intention of the lead specification, but one person's excessively complex is another's needless dumbing down. Procrustean methods will fail almost everyone. Alternative explanations can allow a "just right" version for more readers. This is obviously more work for editors, and just as obviously, the versions should be consistent with each other, so more work again. It is somewhat like translating, but in the same language.
Many editors would probably consider this a waste of time. They don’t have to do it, we are volunteers. Others would consider it very important. Maybe they will do it. I think that linking articles with the same title between en: and simple: could be a relatively easy way of testing the utility of the concept. And I don’t mean the sidebar link that most readers do not know about (does it even exist on mobile?), I mean something obvious and self-explanatory in the title area.
Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Anders Wennersten Sent: 30 December 2018 14:50 To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Thats excellent. It is just then to live up to that guidline, and foster people who can simplity the lead sections
For myself I remember how hard it was to get an educated physisct to write of the Coriolis effect in the lead section to make it understandable. He just squeemed that with simple language then it is no correct. And in it there is animations but without proper text it is impossible to understand
Anders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force is not easy to take in
Den 2018-12-30 kl. 13:23, skrev David Gerard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section says pretty much the same:
The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies. The notability of the article's subject is usually established in the first few sentences.
that is, the intro section should be a short standalone article:
As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate.
For an extreme case, [[World War II]] gets *five* long paragraphs for its intro section.
- d.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 10:57, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:
In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction part of the article.
It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
It should hopefully only be 1-3 sentences, and to state what is all about and not a summary.
We do not live up to this recommendation all the time, but I have noticed that he introducion part on enwp generally are very long, in comparison
Anders
Den 2018-12-30 kl. 11:39, skrev Zubin JAIN:
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.
These are gross generalizations and the ideas are similarly flawed. Anecdotes do not prove anything and while there is some evidence to suspect that attention span is reducing ( Though there has yet to be consensus and one should naturally be sceptical of any psychological finding given the fields replication crisis). Under 18 people such as myself probably use the site the most compared to any other demographic and most of us are capable of using it as well as anybody else.
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down has abousltley no basis on fact and data, is only supported by anecdotes and stereotypes. This is not to say that simplifying some Wikipedia articles and creating more video content is wrong, Wikipedia should be inclusive to all including those with disabilities or conditions that make the traditional encyclopedia unsuitable but making those changes out of ageist assumptions of generational decline is insulting.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should reflect editability and it doesn't.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Hi Yaroslav, Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have described reasonably well. Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary. I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in
mobile.
This would not be needed for all articles. Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:40, Zubin JAIN jain16276@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg a scris:
These are gross generalizations
That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
Nobody proposed that.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks.
I had a conversation with Dan Garry in Cape Town about why categories and navboxes are not shown on mobile and it seems they are not a "thing" anymore (aka not used by the readers, which prefer navigating through inline links). For the rest, I agree. What do you think of the CitationHunt tool? Would it help if integrated in the normal workflow?
În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:57, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se a scris:
In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction part of the article.
It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
How very interesting! I've always thought that Wikipedia should be accessible for people with middle studies (highschool) but I've been accused of trying to "dumb down" Wikipedia. Thanks for the idea!
More generally, yes, the introduction is the obvious candidate for what Yaroslav is proposing, the question is how do you put it to the best use? Are popups (currently enabled for anonymous users) enough? Movies and visuals are complicated for most people, would an audio help? Text to speech is pretty good (and dead cheap) these days and I know WMSE has done some work in this domain. Would an audio of the introduction help? What about reading the whole article?
This is a major topic, we should probably try to extract 2-3 ideas that can be pushed forward from it.
Strainu
That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but
the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?
But it's not supported by rigorous evidence, a few studies and a bunch of clickbait headlines hawking a decline narrative aren't things that should be used as a basis for deciding that the encylvopedia is out of date and Wikipedia should change itself to a primary video format
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
"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." Dumbing down seems to be a fair summary of the proposal
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 20:51, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:40, Zubin JAIN jain16276@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg a scris:
These are gross generalizations
That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
Nobody proposed that.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks.
I had a conversation with Dan Garry in Cape Town about why categories and navboxes are not shown on mobile and it seems they are not a "thing" anymore (aka not used by the readers, which prefer navigating through inline links). For the rest, I agree. What do you think of the CitationHunt tool? Would it help if integrated in the normal workflow?
În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:57, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se a scris:
In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction part of the article.
It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
How very interesting! I've always thought that Wikipedia should be accessible for people with middle studies (highschool) but I've been accused of trying to "dumb down" Wikipedia. Thanks for the idea!
More generally, yes, the introduction is the obvious candidate for what Yaroslav is proposing, the question is how do you put it to the best use? Are popups (currently enabled for anonymous users) enough? Movies and visuals are complicated for most people, would an audio help? Text to speech is pretty good (and dead cheap) these days and I know WMSE has done some work in this domain. Would an audio of the introduction help? What about reading the whole article?
This is a major topic, we should probably try to extract 2-3 ideas that can be pushed forward from it.
Strainu
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Thanks for the reactions so far, they have been very useful. Let me answer some of the points.
Re subject line: Obviously it is deliberately provocative to generate more response and reach out to more people. Whereas what I write I do seriously, if it stays a discussion of a dozen of people with the same views on the subject it is probably useful.
Re milennials: this is clearly not a red herring. Just ask Facebook what their demographics is and why the 18- generation is not using it.
Re introduction vs shorter articles: I agree that a well-written introduction is very important (though in practice it more often becomes a battleground than not, and for most articles on my watchlist with non-zero traffic it gets deteriorated with time, and it takes really a LOT of effort of the community to maintain them). However, there are many other things in the articles which are important as well, and I believe having non-introductory pieces separately, written in a simple language, and without excessive formatting is important. Currently, we can not accommodate them within the articles - because there are too many details to add, references, and formatting (the intro is an exception, it can indeed be written simply without references).
Re fork: I actually do not believe in forking Wikipedia. One can fork Wikipedia but so far all attempts to fork the community were unsuccessful, and I do not think they will be successful in the future. I do not have a problem with forking, I just believe it is not going to happen. What I believe it will happen is a completely new platform suitable for new ways of getting information. Just to give a perspective, imagine someone started a project in the 1980s based on videotapes, and produced a lot of tapes. By now they have either been copied to other media, or got completely forgotten because nobody can play tapes anymore, at least unless one is a very serious amateur or goes to a specialized library.
Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well, at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being done about it). We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural networks. We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we are discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest in Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe and Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?
Cheers Yaroslav
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 2:50 PM Zubin JAIN jain16276@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg wrote:
That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but
the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?
But it's not supported by rigorous evidence, a few studies and a bunch of clickbait headlines hawking a decline narrative aren't things that should be used as a basis for deciding that the encylvopedia is out of date and Wikipedia should change itself to a primary video format
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
"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." Dumbing down seems to be a fair summary of the proposal
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 20:51, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:40, Zubin JAIN jain16276@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg a scris:
These are gross generalizations
That's exactly the point here! Maybe not everyone is like that, but the pattern is supported by studies. The question is: how do we support (or, how do we make Wikipedia relevant for) this category?
The idea that Wikipedia needs to be dumbed down
Nobody proposed that.
On Sun, 30 Dec 2018 at 17:21, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks.
I had a conversation with Dan Garry in Cape Town about why categories and navboxes are not shown on mobile and it seems they are not a "thing" anymore (aka not used by the readers, which prefer navigating through inline links). For the rest, I agree. What do you think of the CitationHunt tool? Would it help if integrated in the normal workflow?
În dum., 30 dec. 2018 la 12:57, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se a scris:
In my little duckpond (svwp) we have guidleines for the introduction part of the article.
It should use (simple) language to enable 14-16 years old to understand it (while the rest can use more complicated vocabulary)
How very interesting! I've always thought that Wikipedia should be accessible for people with middle studies (highschool) but I've been accused of trying to "dumb down" Wikipedia. Thanks for the idea!
More generally, yes, the introduction is the obvious candidate for what Yaroslav is proposing, the question is how do you put it to the best use? Are popups (currently enabled for anonymous users) enough? Movies and visuals are complicated for most people, would an audio help? Text to speech is pretty good (and dead cheap) these days and I know WMSE has done some work in this domain. Would an audio of the introduction help? What about reading the whole article?
This is a major topic, we should probably try to extract 2-3 ideas that can be pushed forward from it.
Strainu
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-- Sincerely, Zubin Jain _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com escreveu no dia domingo, 30/12/2018 à(s) 13:55:
Re milennials: this is clearly not a red herring. Just ask Facebook what their demographics is and why the 18- generation is not using it.
Stats show that Galinha Pintadinha was one of the most viewed articles in 2018 at the Portuguese Wikipedia: https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=pt.wikipedia.org&platform=a...
I seem to recall it got the 3rd place, but was undoubtedly among the 10 first. Galinha Pintadinha is a very sucessful Brazilian project that produces songs for children. Apparently those hits are being caused by children looking for the songs, who click on the Wikipedia article because it was among the first hits on Google (apparently it's not anymore, and the hits went down dramatically, accordingly). What this tells is that apparently an incredible number of very young children already have an easy access to Wikipedia, and from direct experience at wiki.pt, many of them stay there editing on the things they like, primarily animation series like Naruto. We get a lot of new editors who have about 9-12 years old, confirmed. While this brings a lot of new issues, because our old, "plastered" Wikipedia project is not really prepared to deal with children as editors, it's also very refreshing to observe that the community is continuously renewing itself.
At least in the Portuguese Wikipedia, a large, large fraction of our readers are children and teens, and a large fraction of our editors are teens - and this is not limited to Brazil, it's a phenomena I've been observing at the Portuguese speaking African countries, where our editors are in general very young, and even in Portugal. The only common trend here with what is generally publicly stated about Wikipedia is that it's mostly boys and young men, which should bring about some meditation about what could be the true causes of the Wikipedia gender gap. Girls and young women are indeed very rare as editors (though apparently they read and externally use us a lot).
This is not inline with that idea that we are losing the young generations, at least in the Portuguese speaking world. Surely they complain a lot about the usability of the project, and the outdated looks of it (that kind of 1990s flashback), but that is a common complaint that seem to cross all generations.
While we are at it, some anecdotic evidence of another curious phenomena I've observed at a recent Wikidata workshop we've organized at our National Library. We were expecting a participation mostly by young people, since it was mostly technical stuff. Instead, most of the participants were archivists and librarians with more than 40 years old, many above 50, 60, and up. And it was a success, they appeared to be kind of native to Wikidata, even if it was the first time they were touching it. A large number of them were women, too, I seem to recall the majority. I've been observing 10 years old featuring articles and getting to the rank of sysop at Wiki.pt (nobody knew how old they were at the time :P ), and now I'm seeing senior people at retirement age engaging with Wikidata - reality often is very different from what we imagine a priori.
I believe the potential is all there, we just need to understand who our targets are, and the proper way to get to them. And be creative on the ways to approach, not getting stuck to the old edithatons (of which efficiency I have many doubts, apart from some specific situations such as art+feminism which are also about activism, and so have a potential to result).
Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well,
at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being done about it).
Mobile editing really is a problem. I've been trying for months to engage new editors in Guinea-Bissau and Angola, and mobile editing really has shown to be a very powerful barrier for the participation on those places where everybody has a cell phone (sometimes even 3 of them, as I've been told is the case in Guinea-Bissau), but desktop computers are extremely rare.
We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural networks.
We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we are discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest in Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe and Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?
i don't believe it is correct to mix those things. The people that edit-war about trifles are often not the same that can propose, discuss and develop those higher scale improvements and evolutions; or at least they are in a very different mindset when they are doing that. And that kind of "trifle war" is useful, too, and sometimes lead to significative improvements in the quality of the articles. It's not always a Byzantine thing. I recall a conflict at wiki.pt between "Bombaim" and "Mumbai" as the proper name for the Indian city, when it was officially changed, which led to significative improvements on the etymology section, and the history of the region in the article.
Cheers,
Paulo (DarwIn)
בתאריך יום א׳, 30 בדצמ׳ 2018, 15:55, מאת Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt@gmail.com
:
Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well, at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being done about it). We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural networks. We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we are discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest in Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe and Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?
False dichotomy.
Wide participation in big strategic discussion is a Good Thing, but it doesn't mean that it's the only thing all the Wikimedians should be talking about. There are people who are less interested in strategic discussions and more interested in on-wiki fact-checking. Wikipedia editors' obsession for fact-checking is its strength—our strength. It's sometimes frustrating because it can go into silly technicalities or political ax-grinding, but for the most part it's the main thing that keeps Wikipedia relevant, trustworthy, and popular.
How can these fact-checking practices be harmonized with current technology and media culture is the right question to ask. If the people who often do this can *also* occasionally participate in strategic development discussions, there's a chance it will be answered. Invite them.
Happy public domain day and happy new year! :)
Thanks to Yaroslav who started this interesting conversation, and thanks for all the comments. I agree with lots of them, but especially this: Happy Public Domain Day!
On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 7:15 AM Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
בתאריך יום א׳, 30 בדצמ׳ 2018, 15:55, מאת Yaroslav Blanter < ymbalt@gmail.com
:
Re main point: People, let us be serious. We missed mobile editing (well, at least this has been identified as a problem, and something is being
done
about it). We missed voice interfaces. We are now missing neural
networks.
We should have been discussing by now what neural networks are allowed to do in the projects and what they are not allowed to do. And instead we
are
discussing (and edit-warring) whether the Crimean bridge is the longest
in
Europe or not because different sources place the border between Europe
and
Asia differently, and, according to some sources, the bridge is not in Europe. Why do you think that if we keep missing all technological development relevant in the field we are still going to survive?
False dichotomy.
Wide participation in big strategic discussion is a Good Thing, but it doesn't mean that it's the only thing all the Wikimedians should be talking about. There are people who are less interested in strategic discussions and more interested in on-wiki fact-checking. Wikipedia editors' obsession for fact-checking is its strength—our strength. It's sometimes frustrating because it can go into silly technicalities or political ax-grinding, but for the most part it's the main thing that keeps Wikipedia relevant, trustworthy, and popular.
How can these fact-checking practices be harmonized with current technology and media culture is the right question to ask. If the people who often do this can *also* occasionally participate in strategic development discussions, there's a chance it will be answered. Invite them.
Happy public domain day and happy new year! :) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2018 11:20 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
I still believe we need to "explode Wikipedia", by which I mean split curation templates, categories, lists and all other articles into more easily editable and curatable parts. This enables better linking to discrete Wikidata items while reducing the tedious task of curation for extremely long articles. Your comments, Peter, are still based on the 18-year-old idea of "it's the info that matters". It's no longer just the content that matters. Content curation, once advertised as being super simple (and still in the byline as "everybody can edit"), has become a tedious and complicated task, and efforts to make it easier have resulted with the visual editor for mobile, which still doesn't work for uploading to Commons. We need better upload interfaces for fixing spelling mistakes, adding blue links, categories, media, and all other common tasks. We should not let Google decide which sentences to index first, but we should be enabling those decisions to be made by human editors. Findability should reflect editability and it doesn't.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 9:18 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Hi Yaroslav, Several recent developments relate to this situation which I think you have described reasonably well. Short descriptions help a bit. But they are too short to help much Simple Wikipedia tries to keep things simple and easily understood, but perhaps concentrates too much on a small vocabulary. I do see a real need and a use for a "Readers Digest" or "executive summary" version of long and complex articles for people who don’t have a need for the full story, but as a complementary version, possibly linked from the top of a desktop view, and possibly the primary target in mobile. This would not be needed for all articles. Cheers, Peter Southwood
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yaroslav Blanter Sent: 29 December 2018 23:34 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
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1) Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the relevant used references.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you would have all the components to worry about. I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect. Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more. Unless I misunderstand your meaning... Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
1) Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the relevant used references.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Hi all,
Yaroslav has brought some very relevant points that unfortunately have not been discussed in great detail in the past but my conclusions differ a bit from those that he has drawn and the main source of the concerns he has identified. My thoughts are summarised in turn.
Firstly, Wikipedia does not seem to be endangered by the dramatic decrease in attention that people pay to written knowledge. Distribution of knowledge through new channels that emerged as a result of the technological evolution is becoming more popular but is simply insufficient for acquiring knowledge and creating a base for further learning assuming that people go beyond using it to check simple facts. For instance, nowadays you can take an online course on edX or Coursera to get knowledge of any scientific field but this is something that will never make you a good scientist; you can also play online chess and watch online videos and commentaries but this will not make you a strong chess player. Books (a form of written knowledge) are simply a must for advanced learning and this is something that is not going to easily change in near future, hence Wikipedia has its strength in place as a medium for converting the written knowledge from the books in a brief and more reader-friendly manner. My main concern, however, is that some topics are not covered in a simple way and require far advanced knowledge as a prerequisite for understanding (e.g. articles on topics in mathematics) and are poorly linked to the other relevant Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikibooks) due to the lack of content. Simplifying the way these topics are covered would be, of course, be beneficial for many readers.
Secondly, a major source of concern is the evolution of the Wikimedia Foundation from an NGO to a technology corporation that does not show any signs of addressing issues like this and how people in the developed world are being affected by it. I have full respect to some employees who have excellent understanding about the movement and the major upcoming challenges (mostly coming from the community) but there are simply too many outsiders who do not even know the basics of the movement and do not care at all about people in the movement who are not affiliated with them or are not hangers-on to their agenda. The problem is becoming even more serious with their strategic objective to focus on underrepresented communities primarily from the Global South through collaboration with the largest affiliates from the Global North and pretending that the unaffiliated active contributors from the developed countries do not exist. This whole thing has probably culminated with the Wikimedia 2030 strategy, where no-one knows what its final outcome should look like, but much effort was put to make a base on unreal assumptions and it will apparently get forced through (fantasty world). My main concern is that they might even start to force you away from the movement in the event of not agreeing with what would probably become an open window for the future of Wikipedia.
Thirdly, the reason why our long-standing contributors from the Global North make the unpopular decision to go away can be derived from my previous point. These people have very good understanding of how the movement was created, what the original purpose of the Wikimedia Foundation was supposed to be and how the recent developments contradict it. Some of them even go so far to say that they feel frustrated from the misuse of their volunteer efforts to build the largest encyclopedia in the world and now to see getting unheard, while some think that the Wikimedia Foundation has made a paradigm shift in the motivation to edit from contributing to the fastest-growing knowledge-based project in the late 2000s to getting hired by the Wikimedia Foundation to earn above-average income in the late 2010s (conclusion drawn from direct communication with people). Fortunately, this is still in a normal range but the unfavourable rate of change gives me the intuition that it might turn into an overkill.
Lastly, the lack of focus on technology-related issues and the increasing need to adapt to the environmental changes is becoming increasingly difficult with no clear intent for major infrastructural shift. The community-based rather than technology-based strategic orientation, allbeit common sense, might become very costly if not properly ameliorated with some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether outreach to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting with something new.
I am sorry for the extensive text but there are things that need to be discussed.
Best, Kiril
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 11:03 AM Kiril Simeonovski < kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
Yaroslav has brought some very relevant points that unfortunately have not been discussed in great detail in the past but my conclusions differ a bit from those that he has drawn and the main source of the concerns he has identified. My thoughts are summarised in turn.
Firstly, Wikipedia do not seem to be endangered by the dramatic decrease in attention that people pay to written knowledge. Distribution of knowledge through new channels that emerged as a result of the technological evolution is becoming more popular but is simply insufficient for acquiring knowledge and creating a base for further learning assuming that people go beyond using it to check simple facts. For instance, nowadays you can take an online course on edX or Coursera to get knowledge of any scientific field but this is something that will never make you a good scientist; you can also play online chess and watch online videos and commentaries but this will not make you a strong chess player. Books (a form of written knowledge) are simply a must for advanced learning and this is something that is not going to easily change in near future, hence Wikipedia has its strength in place as a medium for converting the written knowledge from the books in a brief and more reader-friendly manner. My main concern, however, is that some topics are not covered in a simple way and require far advanced knowledge as a prerequisite for understanding (e.g. articles on topics in mathematics) and are poorly linked to the other relevant Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikibooks) due to the lack of content. Simplifying the way these topics are covered would be, of course, be beneficial for many readers.
Secondly, a major source of concern is the evolution of the Wikimedia Foundation from an NGO to a technology corporation that does not show any signs of addressing issues like this and how people in the developed world are being affected by it. I have full respect to some employees who have excellent understanding about the movement and the major upcoming challenges (mostly coming from the community) but there are simply too many outsiders who does not even know the basics of the movement and do not care at all to people in the movement who are not affiliated with them or are not hangers-on to their agenda. The problem is becoming even more serious with their strategic objective to focus on underrepresented communities primarily from the Global South through collaboration with the largest affiliates from the Global North and pretending that the unaffiliated active contributors from the developed countries do not exist. This whole thing has probably culminated with the Wikimedia 2030 strategy, where no-one knows what its final outcome should look like, but much effort was put to make a base on unreal assumptions and it will apparently get forced through (fantasty world). My main concern is that they might even start to force you away from the movement in the
Thirdly, the reason why our long-standing contributors from the Global North make the unpopular decision to go away can be derived from my previous point. These people have very good understanding of how the movement was created, what the original purpose of the Wikimedia Foundation was supposed to be and how the recent developments contradict it. Some of them even go so far to say that they feel frustrated from the misuse of their volunteer efforts to build the largest encyclopedia in the world and now to see getting unheard, while some think that the Wikimedia Foundation has made a paradigm shift in the motivation to edit from contributing to the fastest-growing knowledge-based project in the late 2000s to getting hired by the Wikimedia Foundation to earn above-average income in the late 2010s (conclusion drawn from direct communication with people). Fortunately, this is still in a normal range but the unfavourable rate of change gives me the intuition that it might turn into an overkill.
Lastly, the lack of focus on technology-related issues and the increasing need to adapt to the environmental changes is becoming increasingly difficult with no clear intent for major infrastructural shift. The community-based rather than technology-based strategic orientation, allbeit common sense, might become very costly if not properly ameliorated with some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether outreach to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting with something new.
I am sorry for the extensive text but there are things that need to be discussed.
Best, Kiril
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
an
explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:57 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you would have all the components to worry about. I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect. Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more. Unless I misunderstand your meaning... Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
- Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the relevant used references.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
may
not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
how
they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
an
explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Well of course it is impossible for me to peek in the kitchens of all other Wikipedia article creators, but speaking for myself, I don't blindly type into a blank editing window but prepare the way forward by knitting a sweater of edits, generally across various projects, including other language Wikipedias. I of course use Google to do the heavy lifting, often triggered by some annoying incorrect thing I heard from Siri/Alexa, but it could also be something inspiring I got off social media that made me curious. I rarely go from inspiration to page creation in one go, and the whole process sometimes takes me years. In the course of my tenure as a Wikipedia editor, I have built up quite a library of random articles, though most of them are related in some way to Dutch 17th century art. Since becoming active on Wikidata, I have also built quite a library of listeria lists in my userspace and elsewhere to check related edits across projects and these sort of drown out everything else in my watchlists unless I select a specific namespace only. In general, an article in my process moves from "quote in Wikitext somewhere" to "quote+cited source(s) in Wikitext somewhere" to "quote+cited source(s)+media file in Wikitext somewhere", to "quote+cited source(s)+Commons category for media file(s) in Wikitext somewhere" before it ever sees the light of day as a stand-alone article. These "pipeline nuggets" are often also line items in lists (thus my first explanation), but most of them are not. Once created, my articles are not orphans, but have a select number of incoming links that I also try to keep track of. Aside from my own personal "article pipeline", I also spend time de-orphanizing and interlinking such nuggets in existing articles and I would love to be able to watch them all in two-way linked stereo, but that is impossible today.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:57 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you would have all the components to worry about. I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect. Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more. Unless I misunderstand your meaning... Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
- Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the relevant used references.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
may
not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
how
they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
an
explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Sorry, you have lost me completely now, I cannot parse your idiom, or its relevance to the previous discussion, but it is not important enough to lose sleep over. Shall we just accept that we do things differently? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 31 December 2018 13:09 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well of course it is impossible for me to peek in the kitchens of all other Wikipedia article creators, but speaking for myself, I don't blindly type into a blank editing window but prepare the way forward by knitting a sweater of edits, generally across various projects, including other language Wikipedias. I of course use Google to do the heavy lifting, often triggered by some annoying incorrect thing I heard from Siri/Alexa, but it could also be something inspiring I got off social media that made me curious. I rarely go from inspiration to page creation in one go, and the whole process sometimes takes me years. In the course of my tenure as a Wikipedia editor, I have built up quite a library of random articles, though most of them are related in some way to Dutch 17th century art. Since becoming active on Wikidata, I have also built quite a library of listeria lists in my userspace and elsewhere to check related edits across projects and these sort of drown out everything else in my watchlists unless I select a specific namespace only. In general, an article in my process moves from "quote in Wikitext somewhere" to "quote+cited source(s) in Wikitext somewhere" to "quote+cited source(s)+media file in Wikitext somewhere", to "quote+cited source(s)+Commons category for media file(s) in Wikitext somewhere" before it ever sees the light of day as a stand-alone article. These "pipeline nuggets" are often also line items in lists (thus my first explanation), but most of them are not. Once created, my articles are not orphans, but have a select number of incoming links that I also try to keep track of. Aside from my own personal "article pipeline", I also spend time de-orphanizing and interlinking such nuggets in existing articles and I would love to be able to watch them all in two-way linked stereo, but that is impossible today.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:57 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you would have all the components to worry about. I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect. Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more. Unless I misunderstand your meaning... Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
- Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the relevant used references.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
may
not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
how
they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
an
explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
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I expect the degree of incidence of vandalism and its patterns would remain the same in the brethren articles as in the parent one, so more items to watchlist should not be a problem (it will be shown moreless the same times as if it was in one piece, but showing the parts). It can also allow for protections on those parts more prone to vandalism, leaving the main article unprotected, which is a plus, and actually reduces the number of things we have to watch for. Similarly, it can attract "specialized watchers" which are only interested in the genealogy of Cristiano Ronaldo, but don't care the least about his football skills (just an example), which would otherwise never watch the whole thing, since almost all the regular editions would be about football. Overally it seems a good idea to split, and keep only the more generic stuff in the main thing, indeed.
Cheers,
Paulo
Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net escreveu no dia segunda, 31/12/2018 à(s) 08:57:
I would see more items to watchlist, as in place of one large item you would have all the components to worry about. I don't follow the easier to de-orphanise aspect. Also don’t see how having to have the reference section on half a dozen sub-articles is simpler than having the whole list on one. In the extreme case where no reference is used in multiple sections, it would be roughly the same, where a reference is used across several sections, which is common, it looks like more work: from a little more, to a lot more. Unless I misunderstand your meaning... Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 31 December 2018 10:41 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
- Not that I know of, 2) not that I know of, 3) fewer items to watchlist
and maintain (if one creates them), easier to de-orphanize articles, and easier to curate pieces of large wikipages where it's hard to check the relevant used references.
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
may
not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
how
they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
an
explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Hi all,
Yaroslav has brought some very relevant points that unfortunately have not been discussed in great detail in the past but my conclusions differ a bit from those that he has drawn and the main source of the concerns he has identified. My thoughts are summarised in turn.
Firstly, Wikipedia do not seem to be endangered by the dramatic decrease in attention that people pay to written knowledge. Distribution of knowledge through new channels that emerged as a result of the technological evolution is becoming more popular but is simply insufficient for acquiring knowledge and creating a base for further learning assuming that people go beyond using it to check simple facts. For instance, nowadays you can take an online course on edX or Coursera to get knowledge of any scientific field but this is something that will never make you a good scientist; you can also play online chess and watch online videos and commentaries but this will not make you a strong chess player. Books (a form of written knowledge) are simply a must for advanced learning and this is something that is not going to easily change in near future, hence Wikipedia has its strength in place as a medium for converting the written knowledge from the books in a brief and more reader-friendly manner. My main concern, however, is that some topics are not covered in a simple way and require far advanced knowledge as a prerequisite for understanding (e.g. articles on topics in mathematics) and are poorly linked to the other relevant Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikibooks) due to the lack of content. Simplifying the way these topics are covered would be, of course, be beneficial for many readers.
Secondly, a major source of concern is the evolution of the Wikimedia Foundation from an NGO to a technology corporation that does not show any signs of addressing issues like this and how people in the developed world are being affected by it. I have full respect to some employees who have excellent understanding about the movement and the major upcoming challenges (mostly coming from the community) but there are simply too many outsiders who does not even know the basics of the movement and do not care at all to people in the movement who are not affiliated with them or are not hangers-on to their agenda. The problem is becoming even more serious with their strategic objective to focus on underrepresented communities primarily from the Global South through collaboration with the largest affiliates from the Global North and pretending that the unaffiliated active contributors from the developed countries do not exist. This whole thing has probably culminated with the Wikimedia 2030 strategy, where no-one knows what its final outcome should look like, but much effort was put to make a base on unreal assumptions and it will apparently get forced through (fantasty world). My main concern is that they might even start to force you away from the movement in the
Thirdly, the reason why our long-standing contributors from the Global North make the unpopular decision to go away can be derived from my previous point. These people have very good understanding of how the movement was created, what the original purpose of the Wikimedia Foundation was supposed to be and how the recent developments contradict it. Some of them even go so far to say that they feel frustrated from the misuse of their volunteer efforts to build the largest encyclopedia in the world and now to see getting unheard, while some think that the Wikimedia Foundation has made a paradigm shift in the motivation to edit from contributing to the fastest-growing knowledge-based project in the late 2000s to getting hired by the Wikimedia Foundation to earn above-average income in the late 2010s (conclusion drawn from direct communication with people). Fortunately, this is still in a normal range but the unfavourable rate of change gives me the intuition that it might turn into an overkill.
Lastly, the lack of focus on technology-related issues and the increasing need to adapt to the environmental changes is becoming increasingly difficult with no clear intent for major infrastructural shift. The community-based rather than technology-based strategic orientation, allbeit common sense, might become very costly if not properly ameliorated with some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether outreach to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting with something new.
I am sorry for the extensive text but there are things that need to be discussed.
Best, Kiril
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 9:14 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
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Kiril Simeonovski kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com escreveu no dia segunda, 31/12/2018 à(s) 10:05:
some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether outreach to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting with something new.
I've been experimenting this personally for some time, firstly with the Art+Feminism initiative, which past experience has shown to be highly counterproductive if handled in a simple, amateurish way - events have been organized here in Portugal without appropriate support, which resulted in massive eliminations of the articles created, with a consequent traumatizing experience for the people that took part in them, that never again wanted to hear about Wikipedia. The 1lib1ref in its basic form also do not seem to be ideal to catch the attention of librarians over here, but alternative ways of organizing it seem to result. Edithatons in general have shown to be a bad option for reaching to new editors, except in the cases where we have some motivated work force already available (feminist activists, students being evaluated, etc.). My personal experience is that participating in edithatons "just because" is simply not fun nor attractive, there must be something to gain from it (promoting a specific cause, getting good grades, etc). We should indeed get innovative here, and above all, share our experiences, so that we can build something on this together.
Cheers,
Paulo
Hi Paulo,
I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new and what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor and the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor. There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is reasonable to believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to allow new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people that we reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are eager to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the articles reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.
Best, Kiril
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 19:09 Paulo Santos Perneta paulosperneta@gmail.com wrote:
Kiril Simeonovski kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com escreveu no dia segunda, 31/12/2018 à(s) 10:05:
some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether
outreach
to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting with something new.
I've been experimenting this personally for some time, firstly with the Art+Feminism initiative, which past experience has shown to be highly counterproductive if handled in a simple, amateurish way - events have been organized here in Portugal without appropriate support, which resulted in massive eliminations of the articles created, with a consequent traumatizing experience for the people that took part in them, that never again wanted to hear about Wikipedia. The 1lib1ref in its basic form also do not seem to be ideal to catch the attention of librarians over here, but alternative ways of organizing it seem to result. Edithatons in general have shown to be a bad option for reaching to new editors, except in the cases where we have some motivated work force already available (feminist activists, students being evaluated, etc.). My personal experience is that participating in edithatons "just because" is simply not fun nor attractive, there must be something to gain from it (promoting a specific cause, getting good grades, etc). We should indeed get innovative here, and above all, share our experiences, so that we can build something on this together.
Cheers,
Paulo _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
P.S. I can give you a very nice example of this happening in practice from my personal experience. Few years ago, we produced high-quality videos documenting physics and chemistry experiments that had to be added to related articles. The project was welcomed by some chapters, mostly despised by the Wikimedia Foundation, while the communities appeared to be not ready for the introduction of such videos with only some users on Wikimedia Commons showing some interest and sharing their thoughts.
The main problem seems to be the lack of coordination between various stakeholders inside the movement on technology-related questions that are strategically important for the future of Wikipedia.
Best, Kiril
On Mon 31. Dec 2018 at 19:59, Kiril Simeonovski kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Paulo,
I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new and what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor and the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor. There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is reasonable to believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to allow new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people that we reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are eager to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the articles reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.
Best, Kiril
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 19:09 Paulo Santos Perneta < paulosperneta@gmail.com> wrote:
Kiril Simeonovski kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com escreveu no dia segunda, 31/12/2018 à(s) 10:05:
some innovations. The problem with expanding an unchanged and obsolete infrastructure to underrepresented groups might result to no avail and further incentivise a major shift, thus doubling the cost invested in infrastructure. Definitely, it is an open topic to discuss whether
outreach
to new communities should be done using the old methods or experimenting with something new.
I've been experimenting this personally for some time, firstly with the Art+Feminism initiative, which past experience has shown to be highly counterproductive if handled in a simple, amateurish way - events have been organized here in Portugal without appropriate support, which resulted in massive eliminations of the articles created, with a consequent traumatizing experience for the people that took part in them, that never again wanted to hear about Wikipedia. The 1lib1ref in its basic form also do not seem to be ideal to catch the attention of librarians over here, but alternative ways of organizing it seem to result. Edithatons in general have shown to be a bad option for reaching to new editors, except in the cases where we have some motivated work force already available (feminist activists, students being evaluated, etc.). My personal experience is that participating in edithatons "just because" is simply not fun nor attractive, there must be something to gain from it (promoting a specific cause, getting good grades, etc). We should indeed get innovative here, and above all, share our experiences, so that we can build something on this together.
Cheers,
Paulo _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Dear Kiril, I assume you mean these lovely experiments by Shared Knowledge: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_Republic_of_Mace...
They are lovely, and look like they are now in use. I like specific examples like these; was there any description of the project afterwards covering its welcome, the steps towards its inclusion, notes for future research groups tackling similar projects in the future?
Kiril writes:
The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily
bypassed
even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and the changes usually
get
rejected as good-faith attempts.
A dedicated Draft-Wiki, like [test] but for text and media, with much simpler standards for structure, sourcing, and metadata [perhaps combined w/ incubator?] would be a simple and welcome solution. It would help not only small media projects but also massive uploads from existing archives and GLAMs take their first steps without overly complicating things. I think this is one of the most valuable simple additions we could make.
There is also a more general solution already available: to create a new tool that participants in a new initiative use (which only later gets integrated fully into the standard workflow on various projects). But that takes a bit of technical preparation each time.
Amir writes:
There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions. They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors
because
they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to implementing Jane's suggestion.
Yes! and thanks for bringing up T2167 -- that and adding a simple mechanism for federating such data (so that every owner of a lowly small-scale mediawiki instance can add to or revise metadata namespaces) feel more like a basic expansion of wiki-nature --- with associated expansion of the kinds and magnitude of knowledge included in our projects -- than like just another set of features.
Warmly + medialogically, SJ
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 2:18 PM Kiril Simeonovski < kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com> wrote:
P.S. I can give you a very nice example of this happening in practice from my personal experience. Few years ago, we produced high-quality videos documenting physics and chemistry experiments that had to be added to related articles. The project was welcomed by some chapters, mostly despised by the Wikimedia Foundation, while the communities appeared to be not ready for the introduction of such videos with only some users on Wikimedia Commons showing some interest and sharing their thoughts.
The main problem seems to be the lack of coordination between various stakeholders inside the movement on technology-related questions that are strategically important for the future of Wikipedia.
Best, Kiril
On Mon 31. Dec 2018 at 19:59, Kiril Simeonovski < kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Paulo,
I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new
and
what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor and the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor. There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is reasonable
to
believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to
allow
new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people that
we
reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are
eager
to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the articles reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement
and
the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.
With respect to complexity of language, we have some data in publication, looking at the the leads of English medical articles over time. Good news is that they have improved over the last 10 years from a reading level of close to "grade 16" to just under "grade 13". This has been a concerted effort by a small group of us since 2014 and I believe has helped approach our goal of writing for a general audience rather than a specialist one.
Happy holidays to those getting time off :-) James
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 5:51 PM Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Kiril, I assume you mean these lovely experiments by Shared Knowledge:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_Republic_of_Mace...
They are lovely, and look like they are now in use. I like specific examples like these; was there any description of the project afterwards covering its welcome, the steps towards its inclusion, notes for future research groups tackling similar projects in the future?
Kiril writes:
The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily
bypassed
even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and the changes usually
get
rejected as good-faith attempts.
A dedicated Draft-Wiki, like [test] but for text and media, with much simpler standards for structure, sourcing, and metadata [perhaps combined w/ incubator?] would be a simple and welcome solution. It would help not only small media projects but also massive uploads from existing archives and GLAMs take their first steps without overly complicating things. I think this is one of the most valuable simple additions we could make.
There is also a more general solution already available: to create a new tool that participants in a new initiative use (which only later gets integrated fully into the standard workflow on various projects). But that takes a bit of technical preparation each time.
Amir writes:
There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki
that
are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content
Revisions.
They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors
because
they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to implementing Jane's suggestion.
Yes! and thanks for bringing up T2167 -- that and adding a simple mechanism for federating such data (so that every owner of a lowly small-scale mediawiki instance can add to or revise metadata namespaces) feel more like a basic expansion of wiki-nature --- with associated expansion of the kinds and magnitude of knowledge included in our projects -- than like just another set of features.
Warmly + medialogically, SJ
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 2:18 PM Kiril Simeonovski < kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com> wrote:
P.S. I can give you a very nice example of this happening in practice
from
my personal experience. Few years ago, we produced high-quality videos documenting physics and chemistry experiments that had to be added to related articles. The project was welcomed by some chapters, mostly despised by the Wikimedia Foundation, while the communities appeared to
be
not ready for the introduction of such videos with only some users on Wikimedia Commons showing some interest and sharing their thoughts.
The main problem seems to be the lack of coordination between various stakeholders inside the movement on technology-related questions that are strategically important for the future of Wikipedia.
Best, Kiril
On Mon 31. Dec 2018 at 19:59, Kiril Simeonovski < kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Paulo,
I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new
and
what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor
and
the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor. There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is
reasonable
to
believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to
allow
new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people
that
we
reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are
eager
to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the
articles
reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus
can
not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement
and
the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hi Sj,
The project documentation can be found on Meta and the story was also featured in the GLAM newsletter twice.
The idea about dedicated environment either as a separate wiki or as part of the incubator for testing novelties is sound, and it would be interesting to see how that will work in support of their ultimate implementation.
Best, Kiril
On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 01:51 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Kiril, I assume you mean these lovely experiments by Shared Knowledge:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_Republic_of_Mace...
They are lovely, and look like they are now in use. I like specific examples like these; was there any description of the project afterwards covering its welcome, the steps towards its inclusion, notes for future research groups tackling similar projects in the future?
Kiril writes:
The problem is that a general community consensus can not be easily
bypassed
even when the novelty is an obvious improvement and the changes usually
get
rejected as good-faith attempts.
A dedicated Draft-Wiki, like [test] but for text and media, with much simpler standards for structure, sourcing, and metadata [perhaps combined w/ incubator?] would be a simple and welcome solution. It would help not only small media projects but also massive uploads from existing archives and GLAMs take their first steps without overly complicating things. I think this is one of the most valuable simple additions we could make.
There is also a more general solution already available: to create a new tool that participants in a new initiative use (which only later gets integrated fully into the standard workflow on various projects). But that takes a bit of technical preparation each time.
Amir writes:
There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki
that
are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content
Revisions.
They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors
because
they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to implementing Jane's suggestion.
Yes! and thanks for bringing up T2167 -- that and adding a simple mechanism for federating such data (so that every owner of a lowly small-scale mediawiki instance can add to or revise metadata namespaces) feel more like a basic expansion of wiki-nature --- with associated expansion of the kinds and magnitude of knowledge included in our projects -- than like just another set of features.
Warmly + medialogically, SJ
On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 2:18 PM Kiril Simeonovski < kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com> wrote:
P.S. I can give you a very nice example of this happening in practice
from
my personal experience. Few years ago, we produced high-quality videos documenting physics and chemistry experiments that had to be added to related articles. The project was welcomed by some chapters, mostly despised by the Wikimedia Foundation, while the communities appeared to
be
not ready for the introduction of such videos with only some users on Wikimedia Commons showing some interest and sharing their thoughts.
The main problem seems to be the lack of coordination between various stakeholders inside the movement on technology-related questions that are strategically important for the future of Wikipedia.
Best, Kiril
On Mon 31. Dec 2018 at 19:59, Kiril Simeonovski < kiril.simeonovski@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Paulo,
I agree that more or less we know what activities are intended for new
and
what for experienced users. The challenging part is to make a sensible decision on whether to reach out to new users using the visual editor
and
the translation tool or to continue with the old-fashioned code editor. There are multiple pros and cons of either decision but it is
reasonable
to
believe that these tools were developed for some specific purpose. This will gain even more weight once the mobile editing gets improved.
Other examples soliciting important decisions are whether and how to
allow
new users to use videos across articles or how to shape an article's structure that differs from the standard one. In many cases, people
that
we
reach out to are smart in pinpointing Wikipedia's weaknesses and are
eager
to propose innovative solutions that primarily aim at making the
articles
reader-friendlier. The problem is that a general community consensus
can
not be easily bypassed even when the novelty is an obvious improvement
and
the changes usually get rejected as good-faith attempts.
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Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com escreveu no dia terça, 1/01/2019 à(s) 00:51:
Dear Kiril, I assume you mean these lovely experiments by Shared Knowledge:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_from_the_Republic_of_Mace...
They are lovely, and look like they are now in use. I like specific examples like these; was there any description of the project afterwards covering its welcome, the steps towards its inclusion, notes for future research groups tackling similar projects in the future?
Here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:NeuroMat%27s_partnership_with_Ma... you have a number of videos that were produced by the Wikimedia Community UG Brazil to illustrate mathematical concepts, many of them awarded as Quality and Valuable content for Wikimedia Commons. I believe all of them are in use as well.
I've seen some resistance from the Wikipedia community against content like this, as some people see it as a promotional tool for universities and research institutions. Personally I don't see nothing wrong with win-win situations as those "promotions" where valuable content is produced by universities and donated to us, but not all people look at it this way.
A dedicated Draft-Wiki, like [test] but for text and media, with much
simpler standards for structure, sourcing, and metadata [perhaps combined w/ incubator?] would be a simple and welcome solution.
+1 on the Draft Wiki, it would be great to have a safe environment to play, but allowing the final result to be imported into Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects. Cheers,
Paulo
בתאריך יום ב׳, 31 בדצמ׳ 2018 ב-10:14 מאת Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net>:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
Not exactly, but it's doable and it's desirable.
There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions. They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors because they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to implementing Jane's suggestion.
This suggestion is not even very new. In a way, the extremely old bug https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2167 , originally filed in 2004 (!) suggests pretty much the same thing: separate interlanguage links and other metadata from the page content. Interlanguage links were mostly separated from pages thanks to Wikidata, but categories still aren't, and a lot of other kinds of metadata appeared since then: DEFAULTSORT, newsectionlink, notoc, and many others. Authority control, navbox, and infobox templates, as well as links to disambiguation pages, can probably be converted to separately-stored metadata as well.
Wikidata can probably play a major role in getting this done, but it's not the only factor, and a lot of development is needed to better integrate Wikidata with other projects.
But yes—I generally agree with Jane that better modularization of wiki pages' content components can go a long to making them easier to edit, easier to search, easier to query, etc. It's not the only major change that our technical infrastructure needs, but it's among the more important ones.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
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Ahh, it would really be a fantastic improvement if we could get rid of all that template & category clutter from the articles.
Wikipedia categories are generally anathema to newbies, more like some weird and absurd core they have to do in order to have their article accepted. Even to me, who have been there for almost 10 years, Wikipedia categories have little use (and I actually came to develop a crescent hatred for them, due to the mess they have been causing in Wikidata, due to the inappropriate linking to Commons categories). Let me tell a little story: Some months ago I was in a workshop with a group of librarians, and they were creating articles using VE. At some point all of them came under a barrage of fire from resident wikipedians, bombing them with warnings saying "you MUST add categories" and pointing them to the oldfashioned instructions on how to add them on wikicode, totally useless for newbies using VE. It was the first time I was using VE myself in a more intensive way, and while all of we were hastily trying to find where the heck categories were hidden in VE, the librarians kept asking, puzzled - what are those categories that seem to be of such a crucial importance to wikipedians? The sad fact is that 99% of those people that send those useless warnings have not the least idea what categories are for, they simply notice they are missing in a newly created article, and as they know they are not supposed to be missing because they have been warned themselves, they mimic the behavior perpetually, not even stopping to think how useless and outdated they came to be, how hard it is for a newbie to understand they exist at all, let alone what they are for, and that throwing warnings designed in 2006 and never changed since then at newbies is absolutely useless and only serves to confuse and annoy them, and make them feel unwelcome in the project.
I really wish there was a better solution for what categories still do in Wikipedia, so that they could be abolished for good. That would certainly be an improvement in usability.
Paulo
Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il escreveu no dia segunda, 31/12/2018 à(s) 19:56:
בתאריך יום ב׳, 31 בדצמ׳ 2018 ב-10:14 מאת Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net>:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
Not exactly, but it's doable and it's desirable.
There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions. They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors because they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to implementing Jane's suggestion.
This suggestion is not even very new. In a way, the extremely old bug https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2167 , originally filed in 2004 (!) suggests pretty much the same thing: separate interlanguage links and other metadata from the page content. Interlanguage links were mostly separated from pages thanks to Wikidata, but categories still aren't, and a lot of other kinds of metadata appeared since then: DEFAULTSORT, newsectionlink, notoc, and many others. Authority control, navbox, and infobox templates, as well as links to disambiguation pages, can probably be converted to separately-stored metadata as well.
Wikidata can probably play a major role in getting this done, but it's not the only factor, and a lot of development is needed to better integrate Wikidata with other projects.
But yes—I generally agree with Jane that better modularization of wiki pages' content components can go a long to making them easier to edit, easier to search, easier to query, etc. It's not the only major change that our technical infrastructure needs, but it's among the more important ones.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
may
not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
how
they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
an
explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
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בתאריך יום ג׳, 1 בינו׳ 2019, 07:37, מאת Paulo Santos Perneta < paulosperneta@gmail.com>:
Ahh, it would really be a fantastic improvement if we could get rid of all that template & category clutter from the articles.
[...]
Let me tell a little
story: Some months ago I was in a workshop with a group of librarians, and they were creating articles using VE. At some point all of them came under a barrage of fire from resident wikipedians, bombing them with warnings saying "you MUST add categories"
I spent my first year or so on Wikipedia, editing and creating quite a lot without understanding how categories work. Those were the days... Other people, to who I'm deeply thankful, quietly fixed them after me. I later learned how to work with them myself. If my edits were deleted because I did not add categories, I'd possibly be away from this project.
and pointing them to the oldfashioned
instructions on how to add them on wikicode, totally useless for newbies using VE.
This is another symptom: many of the help pages are hopelessly out of date. And the main reason for this is that they are too localized: they were initially created before we had better (but still not perfect) tools for global pages and translation. Now the veterans think they're good even though they rarely need them, and the newbies are just puzzled by them, and for the developers of new features it's too hard to manage help pages that are so dispersed across wikis and languages.
It was the first time I was using VE myself in a more intensive
way, and while all of we were hastily trying to find where the heck categories were hidden in VE,
So here are a couple of things that you can do, and please tell everyone else to do them: use the VE more! It will very frequently save you time, and it will help you understand newbies better.
If it's not good enough for you to use more, report bugs! The only ways to find bugs are to use it more yourself and to carefully observe other people using it (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-06/Op-e... and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6sS0M9TpYQ&t=27m28s ; note that the relevant part of the video begins at 27:28).
And every time a newbie asks you how to do something, check whether the relevant help page in your wiki documents how to do it in VE, and if it doesn't, take a few minutes to add the info.
None of these things will by themselves make a big strategic difference, but it will make the work smoother for a lot of people, at least in the short term.
the librarians kept asking, puzzled - what
are those categories that seem to be of such a crucial importance to wikipedians?
Well, categories should actually be fairly easy for librarians to understand. If these librarians had a hard time with them, it doesn't mean that they are stupid, but that our categories system is badly broken.
The sad fact is that 99% of those people that send those
useless warnings have not the least idea what categories are for, they simply notice they are missing in a newly created article, and as they know they are not supposed to be missing because they have been warned themselves, they mimic the behavior perpetually
Yes! Don't tolerate the perpetual mimicking of very old practices. Speak up and change stuff.
Wikipedia should be a big club of people who like sharing knowledge, and not a small club of people who managed to learn wiki syntax.
Interesting, but I don't really understand the implications. Is there an example of how such an article might be represented? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Amir E. Aharoni Sent: 31 December 2018 21:56 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
בתאריך יום ב׳, 31 בדצמ׳ 2018 ב-10:14 מאת Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net>:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
Not exactly, but it's doable and it's desirable.
There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions. They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors because they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to implementing Jane's suggestion.
This suggestion is not even very new. In a way, the extremely old bug https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2167 , originally filed in 2004 (!) suggests pretty much the same thing: separate interlanguage links and other metadata from the page content. Interlanguage links were mostly separated from pages thanks to Wikidata, but categories still aren't, and a lot of other kinds of metadata appeared since then: DEFAULTSORT, newsectionlink, notoc, and many others. Authority control, navbox, and infobox templates, as well as links to disambiguation pages, can probably be converted to separately-stored metadata as well.
Wikidata can probably play a major role in getting this done, but it's not the only factor, and a lot of development is needed to better integrate Wikidata with other projects.
But yes—I generally agree with Jane that better modularization of wiki pages' content components can go a long to making them easier to edit, easier to search, easier to query, etc. It's not the only major change that our technical infrastructure needs, but it's among the more important ones.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or may not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or how they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to an explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
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No, because no one has invented it yet. An example of what I mean by a "pipeline nugget" is "The necktie was invented in Croatia". This quote is mentioned in various language Wikipedias and is 1) a publicity stunt, 2) an example of intangible national heritage, 3) a poorly sourced statement in a list. Maybe with an example like this you can grasp the concept a bit better.
On Wed, Jan 2, 2019 at 8:01 PM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Interesting, but I don't really understand the implications. Is there an example of how such an article might be represented? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Amir E. Aharoni Sent: 31 December 2018 21:56 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
בתאריך יום ב׳, 31 בדצמ׳ 2018 ב-10:14 מאת Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net>:
Does the technology exist? Is it available? How does this splitting make maintenance easier? Cheers, Peter
Not exactly, but it's doable and it's desirable.
There are two relatively recently developed components in MediaWiki that are important for developers: Content Model and Multi-Content Revisions. They are not discussed very much among the less technical editors because they are pretty internal, and I'm really not an expert on what they do myself, but as far as I understand them, they can serve as steps to implementing Jane's suggestion.
This suggestion is not even very new. In a way, the extremely old bug https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T2167 , originally filed in 2004 (!) suggests pretty much the same thing: separate interlanguage links and other metadata from the page content. Interlanguage links were mostly separated from pages thanks to Wikidata, but categories still aren't, and a lot of other kinds of metadata appeared since then: DEFAULTSORT, newsectionlink, notoc, and many others. Authority control, navbox, and infobox templates, as well as links to disambiguation pages, can probably be converted to separately-stored metadata as well.
Wikidata can probably play a major role in getting this done, but it's not the only factor, and a lot of development is needed to better integrate Wikidata with other projects.
But yes—I generally agree with Jane that better modularization of wiki pages' content components can go a long to making them easier to edit, easier to search, easier to query, etc. It's not the only major change that our technical infrastructure needs, but it's among the more important ones.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: 30 December 2018 15:42 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Is the death of Wikipedia imminent?
Well it is not difficult to imagine when you consider for example line items in the case of list articles. Many lists could be split into such line items and kept in a static assembled form by some sort of "assembly template". Many of these line items are either articles or parts of articles. Such "line items" may or may not have Wikidata items, may or
may
not be suitable for Wikidata items, and may or may not be able to be structured in any way, shape or form than the one they currently have. I would like to be able to address these "line items" as "findable editing snippets" in the wikiverse, possibly curatable by voice activation, reversing the way we can sometimes get them read to us by Siri/Lexa.
On Sun, Dec 30, 2018 at 1:48 PM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Jane, I do not understand what parts you would split these things into, or
how
they would make Wikipedia easier to curate and edit. Could you link to
an
explanation or clarify the concept? Cheers, Peter
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On Sat, 29 Dec 2018 at 21:35, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@gmail.com wrote:
I have written a long text today (posted in my FB)
Facebook, is that still a thing? Gah, whatever is being posted there, many of us Wikipedians are never going to see it. It would be nice to see more people writing decent essays as blog posts rather than as messages on a closed cynical data harvesting platform that makes a multi-billionaire even richer.
There is a problem with the emphasis of (en) Wikipedia being on the glory of ''creating'' an article. As a result many newbies and oldies are driven to create lots of stubs and mediocre articles which may never be much expanded. The primary criticism I hear from academics is that the articrles for their subject area are ghastly, relying on outdated sources, outdated ideas and seem so badly written that they remain a concern for any student relying on Wikipedia as a starting point for finding quality reliable sources for further reading.
Yesterday I was flagged on twitter about potential bias of "Feminist views on transgender topics". It's a pretty sorry example which gives an initial impression that the vast majority of feminists positively hate trans people. However a closer read shows that the sources focus on inflammatory writings, many sources and quotes being from the 1970s, so several decades out of date. The outcome is a polarised essay which paints a social war, because that is what self-aggrandising pundits, newspapers and social media focuses on, when real life experience is nothing like this. Being a trans or sexuality related article, sadly means that it is hard for newbies to understand the special attention this gets on Wikipedia, with most newbie edits being rapidly reverted and these contributors finding it frustratingly complicated to talk about what they want to change.
If Wikipedia(s) are to have a revitalising period in the 2020s, there needs to be more built-in ways to encourage and reward newbies to work collegiality building up ''existing articles'', and to recognise that those boldly trying to rewrite and restructure existing mediocre articles to turn them in to good up to date topics are doing a far, far more difficult and skilful thing than obsessive old lexicographers trying to carpetbag red links.
Links 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics
Fae
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@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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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@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@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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Etiamsi omnes, ego non _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
As someone already mentioned earlier in this thread, I believe there is a concrete structural obstacle in mobile editing, which has to do with the ability of searching resources, quickly reading books, papers, PDF articles, a plethora of websites, news, etc, and using them in Wikipedia articles in such a limited visual space. Turning "dumb editing" easier will certainly have the collateral effect of bringing huge amounts of vandalism from some given networks, leading to the complete blocking of those networks from editing in Wikipedia, or even in all Wikimedia projects, as is has been happening with some regularity since mobile editing was released. This for smartphones.
Editing from tablets is a total different story, as it can be very similar to what we do in the laptops and desktop computers, a tablet solution, as proposed, possibly could have success in providing a better environment. On the other hand, the current desktop version works fairly well in tablets, so we just have to switch from the mobile version, which is really suboptimal, and quite difficult to use, to that one.
Cheers,
Paulo
Yethrosh yethrosh@gmail.com escreveu no dia terça, 1/01/2019 à(s) 21:19:
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@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@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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Etiamsi omnes, ego non _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Hi,
Please, remember the Wikipedia / Wikimedia mission and vision.
Our aim is to be a global movement of free, global, multi-lingual knowledge. Globally smartphones are already the main and primary device to access the Internet for the majority of people. Therefore:
(1) We should do everything we can to invite the the mobile Internet-users to become editors. All improvements to the mobile editing experience helps.
(2) We should invite people to work on content that works well on smartphones. Short summary texts and videos summarising topics are good.
Another idea: Have anyone tried to create podcasts / audio book our of categories? It could be a bit like a “create a book” -feature. You collect articles or select a category and a software create text to audio file with the content. Audio works well on mobiles.
- Teemu
On 4 Jan 2019, at 9.10, Paulo Santos Perneta paulosperneta@gmail.com wrote:
As someone already mentioned earlier in this thread, I believe there is a concrete structural obstacle in mobile editing, which has to do with the ability of searching resources, quickly reading books, papers, PDF articles, a plethora of websites, news, etc, and using them in Wikipedia articles in such a limited visual space. Turning "dumb editing" easier will certainly have the collateral effect of bringing huge amounts of vandalism from some given networks, leading to the complete blocking of those networks from editing in Wikipedia, or even in all Wikimedia projects, as is has been happening with some regularity since mobile editing was released. This for smartphones.
Editing from tablets is a total different story, as it can be very similar to what we do in the laptops and desktop computers, a tablet solution, as proposed, possibly could have success in providing a better environment. On the other hand, the current desktop version works fairly well in tablets, so we just have to switch from the mobile version, which is really suboptimal, and quite difficult to use, to that one.
Cheers,
Paulo
Yethrosh yethrosh@gmail.com escreveu no dia terça, 1/01/2019 à(s) 21:19:
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@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@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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Etiamsi omnes, ego non _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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This is a long thread, with a somewhat confusing first post. One of the core ideas I can pull out of it, is along the lines of: "we should have more dynamically variable content for different audiences/needs". I.e. For any given topic: Some people want the 10 word version, Some people want the 2 sentence version, Some people want the 2 paragraph version, Some people want the 2,000 word version, Some people want the 20,000 word version, and Some people want the n-subarticles version.
This is a broad set of ideas that has come up regularly over our history. It has obvious connections to Wiktionary and Wikidata for the shortest "versions". It has obvious connections to the spectrum of Mergism to Seperatism.[1] It has obvious connections to manual of style guidelines about intro/lead-sections.[2] It has obvious connections to Simple Wikipedia and the various adapted-for-kids/schools versions (WikiJunior, Vikidia, and many more). It has obvious connections to different display/consumption types (widescreen vs tablet vs phone vs audio).
The first two version-types have been proposed, or implemented, in various forms many times. A few years ago I made a summary table of the existing variations, in an attempt to stop the wheel-reinvention.[3]
Making complex content be /dynamically variable/ in length, has also been tried externally before. As I wrote in an earlier Strategy discussion: "For example, The Encyclopedia of Life had an interesting "complexity slider" interface in their early versions, that let readers set how complex or scientific/formal they wanted their content [See ancient screencast at youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28T7q01pG50&t=167 (30 seconds worth) and the preferences panel that let the reader restrict the content to "Authoritative sources only" youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C05jAgJkuPw&t=198 (40 seconds)]. -- A 10 year old person doesn't (always/often) benefit from the same content as a PhD, and we want to help both. The books The Diamond Age and Ender's Game contained the idea of software that auto-adapted to suit the educational needs of the user. To me that's the final goal, and it's a long way off, but we can make steps and experiments towards it."[4]
Sadly, EoL removed that feature and I don't know why; perhaps due to software complexity or perhaps due to the complexity for authors of writing different versions. I do think dynamic content is an incredibly important goal that we should work towards, but I also think we're already in midst of many incredibly important and vastly complex goals and I suspect we don't have the capacity to scale to encompass many more simultaneously. However, Eventualism is (generally) what got us to where we are, and is likely what will get us to where we want/need to be.
TLDR: I hope some people collaborate on a wikipage to write down the various ways a dynamic content system might technically work, so that we can analyze the pros/cons of each method more efficiently than in a tangent-filled email thread. I hope we eventually have a glorious scifi future where the computers automagically adapt content, neutrally(!), to best fit our individual needs in the moment. I hope we can figure out a smooth transition path to move everyone happily towards that long-term future goal, perhaps as part of the Strategy discussions. I hope nobody attempts to get it all done too soon. ;-)
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mergism and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Separatism [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q10966628 and related sections within other pages. [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Concise_Wikipedia#A_summary_of_existing_shor... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikimedia_Strategy_2017/Cycle_1...
An executive summary is common at the head of many reports and articles. Only sections in the body of the article would be cited. Somewhat like a lede but more detailed. The main body of the article would still have a lede.
Fred Bauder
Hoi, I spend some time formulating my thoughts on the subject. Arguably I am not a Wikipedian but apart from the necessary changes we must go through, I see a great future for our work. What I have to say is on my blog [1]. The most important change is that we need to become less US-American to be more effective. The most relevant reason: our public is not there.
What will also have a positive effect when we make our relation with partners less parasitic. more symbiotic. Why not point to Open Library of the local library when people read about books or authors? Why not show the publications of scientists based on what we know, largely thanks to ORCID and Crossref? We say that Wikipedia should not be quoted but we can make external source much more findable. Sharing the quest for the sum of all knowledge is more effective by sharing the limelight with our partners..
Happy 2019 GerardM
[1] https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-decline-of-wikipedia-as-we-...
On Sat, 29 Dec 2018 at 22:35, Yaroslav Blanter ymbalt@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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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