DACS & The Decline of Wikipedia (2)
Dana Edwards:
" One way to fix this would be to pay participants for valuable activities. "
“When participants get paid then more people participate which would make it sustainable. It’s time to decentralize Wikipedia and turn it into a DApp.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/
Graham Chapman:
" Have you heard of smallest federated wiki?"
Ian D. McLean:
" The way to fix it is to revert the no anonymous edit policy which grew Wikipedia exponentially at its inception and prevented the insular politics which have been enacted by various Western imperial institutions like the CIA, NSA, Ivy League schools, and corporate private security/PR firms."
Mark Larkento:
“It’s time for topic specialists to spawn topic specialty wikipedias.”
Dana Edwards:
“Ian what is wrong with pseudo-anonymity with reputation benefits?”
Philip Galanter:
" My understanding is that if Einstein were alive today he wouldn’t be allowed to edit the article on relativity theory. That’s crazy."
Ian D. McLean:
" Pseudo-anonymity and reputation politics have elitism and systematic exclusion as a dominant consequence. Eventually, vocal minority groups can and will capture the system of arbitration and control the point of view by the structure. More importantly, overtime people who can and should edit the Wikipedia and participate in it will tend to get driven away. Diminishing returns."
“The administrative overhead of writing and maintaining any given article becomes larger as the controlling population becomes smaller until the bureaucracy has more editing going on for it than the pages they are supposed to be editing.”
“Additionally, the current structure of wikipedia favors well publicized content for which there is common knowledge. The rarer the topic is the fewer people can be expected to know about it and the more unlikely anyone in the existing political structure will know about it. This makes Wikipedia a problematic platform for the dissemination of relatively new information.”
“Then there’s the NPOV issue. Wikipedia politics presuppose 1) there is a neutral point of view and 2) a neutral point of view is preferential in educational and informational technical writing. This leads to absurd consequences like GamerGaters hijacking the GamerGate article to disseminate lies under the pretense of neutrality. Or the NYPD to hijack the articles on police shootings and corruption on the pretense of neutrality. This is to say that pseudo-anonymity and reputation politics combined with the Wikipedia policies like NPOV can be exploited by elitist groups to disseminate a POV by systematic attacks to the reputation of less established or more explicitly controversial editors. A form of regulatory capture.”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Mark Larkento:
" Excellent points ^^^ Ian."
" We thought it was the beginning of an ‘Encyclopedia Galactica’, but now? Plus,
" Wikipedia has either killed off the alternatives or pushed them down the Google search results. In 2009 Microsoft closed Encarta, which was based on content from several storied encyclopedias. Encyclopaedia Britannica, which charges $70 a year for online access to its 120,000 articles, offers just a handful of free entries plastered with banner and pop-up ads."
Philip Galanter:
" my experience writing for Wikipedia was not positive. I’m a published expert on the topic. My work on the related article was met with accusations of self-promotion, back and forth editing tug-of-war incidents, bogus warnings being added to the page, debates with people who had little knowledge of the topic, etc"
Why have you opened up another DACS & The Decline of Wikipedia topic instead of posting this to the initial topic?
Snarky Answers:
(1) Because the Dewey Decimal System is dead as the Dodo.
(2) Because I can
(3) Disruption is creation
Serious Answer:
Because I see it as a separate thought topic that should be associated with, but separate from the other thought topic.
Overriding Issue:
Categorization, organization, and search structure are critical to a useful resource.
The current structure is inadequate.
Btw, I like the automatic copying of the original post, being replied to, into the new post.