On Sat, 29 Dec 2018 at 22:35, Yaroslav Blanter <ymbalt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I have written a long text today (posted in my FB) which the readers of
> this mailing list might find interesting. I copy it below. I understand
> that it is very easy to criticize 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 still 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 video clips. 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
> follow up) 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 you tube 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 Media Wiki
> 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.