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This seems somewhat important. Things, even major institutions in the internet, can be very generational. Never thought about that in terms of Wikipedia before.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Everyone's pointing out that this is specifically about admins (not editors) and the general difficulty of wikipedia editing specifically due to its rules and reversions, but I really feel compelled to offer a counterpoint: this applies to wiki editing in general.
I've been editing mediawiki-based game sites since the mid 2000s - before Wikia became Fandom, before it was evil, before it started gobbling up smaller wikis with tempting financial offers. I took a decade+ off and only recently found myself drawn back into the hobby in the last couple of years when I found a game I loved that had a burgeoning wiki that seemed to need help.
I was handed admin privileges within a month because an extension I wanted to use (ReplaceText) was locked behind admin. Two years later, I'm still there because I hold 85-90% of the edits on it. And I. Just. Can't. Get. Help. Not even from the site owner that handed me admin. I've gotten interest from I think seven whole people in all that time, and all but two dropped off within a week or two; the remaining two have a page or two they each maintain but leave the rest of the site to me. And this is a live service game, so it's a neverending stream of event pages and new content that I, and only I, keep going. (Worse: the live service content follows predictable formats, so most of my new pages start by copying another page. This would be so easy for anyone to learn.)
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
Not gonna lie. I think most people just don't want work for free for some company's benefit.
Why are you providing a service for some live service game that doesn't pay you for it ?
They do pay me for it actually, in in-game currency, as part of the same content creator program they use to reward fan artists and streamers and such. In the lonely "why bother" moments, it's all that keeps me editing.
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Did Marx and Lenin never write about "hobbies"?
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
Wikis attract rules lawyers and no one likes rules lawyers. People have better things to do with their time than writing a fucking dissertation to keep an edit correcting a typo from getting reverted.
While I agree that's a super frustrating experience, I think you're projecting an experience you had on one (larger, probably more rigid) site to every site that shares its software. Not every small wiki team is like that.
When I get a correction on one of my pages, I welcome it. Even when it's a grammatically incorrect mess, I do my best to incorporate the information added while smoothing out the wording. Even when the correction is outright wrong (there's one drive-by I used to get every couple months who liked to change singular "die" to "dice" when it wasn't appropriate) I explain my reversions in notes and offer to discuss if there are any questions, hoping to leave the door open for a future editor, because that's someone who cared enough to hit the edit button, and I appreciate that.
So while I get that you're turned off from the hobby - and that's a shame - not all of us need a "fucking dissertation" to have decent collaboration.
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Exactly my experience with Archwiki and Wikipedia. I've tried to contribute with minor edits and corrections; I get non-stop pushback on the most un-controversial edits of things like punctuation or adding cross-links. I just walked away after a few attempts to satisfy whomever reverts the edits. What's the point of adding the stress of dealing with these people to one's life when there is utterly no personal benefit?
Interesting experience. We started a wiki for our open source project, the community hit the ground running with it. I couldn't have built a better wiki myself. Players love contributing to the wiki every game update. It's bizarre how polar opposite our experiences are.
It's not that bizarre - a community that's coalescing around an open source project is sure to be a lot more inclined toward technical hobbies than the one that gathers around an otome game. I knew that from the start... but still, I was hoping for more like-minded fans than none. Back when I started editing on an MMORPG wiki, people were a lot more willing to pitch in, even if they weren't that confident.
Glad to hear your project is going well, at least.
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The war against dead links is never ending
Many people pointed this out in the link but yeah, it's much harder to make edits / entries in wikipedia nowadays.
The rules are more strict and you have to respect an increasing number of rules, etc.
I remember when Wikipedia started to get some steam, it was basically a text editor with very basic hyperlink-style formatting.
Minor changes / typos are still easy to do, but frankly I wouldn't know how to start anymore if I wanted to create a new entry.
I've corrected a typo before and had it reversed by a bot. Why the fuck would I help them again?
What was the typo correction? Are you sure the article wasn’t e.g. written in British English while you use American English?
Yes, I'm sure. I don't remember because I left and never gave it a second thought.
I've tried editing a few articles years ago, only to have everything undone hours later with no explanation why and nothing in the way of constructive criticism for whatever invisible criteria the power users were looking for. I don't even bother anymore and avoid using the entire site if I can find what I need elsewhere.
Push away eager contributors and you're stuck with the old guard before you realize it.
That was my experience trying to clean up some obvious typos. I've never bothered trying to contribute again.
I fix dead links too. References to news websites are the worst.
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Yea, I'm happy to make minor edits and do reverts on vandalism, but starting something? Man, I have no idea what the best practices are.
In general you can just do it. As long as it's not malicious it's probably fine.
One of their rules/motos is "be bold"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
Creating new articles seems hard though
I always work on new articles in my userspace before putting it out into the main article area. Since you're much more likely to run into conflict if you're putting out an article with a couple of sentences and one source, even if you're planning on expanding it, than if you move a more fully formed article into the mainspace all at once.
frankly I wouldn’t know how to start anymore if I wanted to create a new entry
Read about it in advance (from decent sources, as much as possible), find a few similar articles to see how they're usually formatted, map out how you want your article to look (while generally respecting the format of the other articles), and do it. The formatting is a bit trickier in the raw editor, but I think the visual editor is the default now. They also have help articles of all sorts, and a message board for new users looking for help.
And if you make some technical mistake, some bot or no-lifer who edits 50 articles a day will smooth it all out anyway.
And if you don't make a mistake, it'll probably get fast tracked for deletion anyway
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I've lost all my respect for the official wikipedia when they deleted a page that I frequented regular. It was an overview about the generational differences between products from one large manufacturer. iirc it was dismissed as an ad or something.
The infuriating part was that this page existed for 10+ years, had 200 different authors, and 100k+ monthly views. But yeah, mods went power tripping with no regard to the dozens of hours unpaid volunteers put in. Fuck this
It's a massive problem. Pro wrestling pages have been fucked over by the same powertripping mods for years. Earlier the page had all the moves/finishers and entrance music written there but all of it was removed for no logical reason.
Yeah any good faith edit I’ve ever made gets reverted within 5 minutes. Why should I care to contribute if that’s the case? I stopped donating to wikipedia.
The handful of people that maintain it can have their kingdom.
After I noticed this bs the very first thing I did was checking if archive.org had a copy, which they did, and since then I regularly donate to them instead.
Just a showerthought:
Maybe that's part of a much bigger generational divide. Maybe Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the old pre-commercialization internet. "From the people for the people", but actually from people whose hobby it is to spend time in front of a computer screen.
BBS systems, usenet, forums, early websites, slashdot, open source, Wikipedia, early reddit, ...
in contrast to: ConpuServe, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, Tiktok
Editing early Wikipedia waa easy, fun, and meant something. You freed information from behind a paywall. Free as in speech.
Now, everything is free as in beer ("some restrictions apply") and editing a wiki is no longer easy when you grew up swiping an iphone, not hacking a unix terminal. This, plus admin culture.
If I understand this correctly, Wikipedia might be in trouble once the old guard retires because new ones aren't coming?
That's one take away. An alternative I've seen is that it's much harder to become an admin. The alternative makes sense to me, but definitely still be an issue since most people only have so much free work they're willing to put in.
No, new ones are coming, they’re just old accounts
I think this happens to all professions.
I edited articles as a teenager in the early 00s when most people still used brittanica and Encarta. The quality was probably really bad, but the articles didn't yet exist or only had a stump.
But the articles now have a much higher quality, with good sources and a very consistent style. If an article doesn't exist today, it was purposefully removed because it did not meet the criteria to have a wiki page.
Obviously, such a thing becomes more of a dedicated hobby and not something a few amateurs do on a whim.
Similar things happened to YouTube videos, or historically, to things like singing, story telling, quilting, etc.
As something becomes more popular, the pool of participants grows and the selection becomes more difficult.
I gave up editing as a hobby when others got really pissy with me when I said that just having a newspaper mention a restaurant did not make the restaurant notable.
On wiki I constantly see some obscure metal band mentioning something in a lyric makes it notable
Heh, yeah, probably because the keyboard warriors running the site don't let anyone else help.
I found an error in a math Wikipedia page, fixed it, it got reverted with no comment.
I gather that's most people's experience dipping in. Good resource overall but they are only welcoming if you're read- only.
Though since this is specifically about being an admin and not just an editor on Wikipedia, is this necessarily an issue? A lot of admin activity has become automated since those early days, so you don't need as many people to deal with vandalism or other forms of backlogs.
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