What will be the warning signs of the coming collapse? Options

[Unrepentant Vandal]

A comment I made recently made me realise that Wikipedia will collapse when wikipedians realise their folly and begin to leave it in droves.

What will be the warning signs? How will we recognise that the end is nigh? I've been thinking and I believe that it will be worth documenting and carefully analysing when it does happen, as the dying days and collapse will be of considerable value to several fields.

This post has been edited by Unrepentant Vandal:

[blissyu2]

Many of the most important subject matters are ones which people do not readily agree with. Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution was widely discredited at the time, and even now is hardly accepted as fact, yet it has become a very important theory in discussing species, humanity and many other aspects of who people are. Sigmund Freud's various psychiatric theories were widely discredited, and continue to be widely discredited, yet he is perhaps the single most widely quoted philosopher in history, and his theories are used in many other more established theories elsewhere.

That there is no consensus to agree with it does not make something bad. In lower educational levels, everyone agrees with everything, but as time goes on it becomes more debatable. Fringe theories in any subject become prone to heated debate. In science, the theory of black holes (which is still just a theory, and will never be proven fact) has always been highly disputable, although nowadays it is considered to be okay to teach some elements of the theory to small children. The big bang theory is another highly debatable theory.

But the difference is that when people are discussing, for example, chaos theory, you know that the language is so complex that the only people who will be debating it are EXPERTS in the field, or at least SEMI-EXPERTS, such that all dialogue is meaningful, and you end up with, yes, disputes, but not ones that end up with anything particularly ridiculous being listed.

Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed, and in the end the idiots are being pushed forward in the name of consensus and neutrality.

If you write in a way that any idiot can understand, any idiot will have an opinion. If you then go by consensus, then you have the consensus of those idiots.

What should be happening of course is that only experts should be writing on the topic, and it should then be dumbed down to a level that is acceptable to idiots, that they can understand.

Part of the problem with Wikipedia is that it insists on every version being written in a way that is already dumbed-down, thus encouraging people who don't have a clue what they are talking about to over-ride actual experts. This is fine when its about simplistic issues like which Pokemon character is best against fire-based attacks. But it is not good at all when you are talking about why the Weapons of mass destruction lie was used to justify attacks on Iraq.

Ultimately, what Wikipedia should be doing is encouraging people to demonstrate their biases, so that people can account for them. They might not necessarily get the most expert people in the world writing about a given subject, but as expert as they can get.

[Wolfe]

Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed, and in the end the idiots are being pushed forward in the name of consensus and neutrality.

I see the problem with the 9/11 conspiracies somewhat differently. You have two groups of people who are obsessed with the issue. The 9/11 truth movement take advantage of the open nature of the internet by having their relatively few members spam wikipedia and sites like digg with rubbish. People like MONGO see it as their own personal mission to wage war on the "truthers".

Both groups are wrong, and both groups are damaging Wikipedia. Wikipedia policy should be to minimize the number of edits by each individual editor to each particular article and to maximize the number of editors who edit each particular article.

At present, the entrenched "ownership" of certain articles by individuals or groups serves as a disincentive to casual readers to edit. But the whole point of the wisdom of crowds is that you want to encourage the casual editors to edit, and dissuade the obsessives. That way, the net of opinion is cast as wide as possible.

If the obsessives were prevented from editing 9/11 articles, you would quickly find that the 9/11 Truth stuff would be marginalized, because most people don't believe it. It's the nutters who are trying to ensure that the article matches their own personal beliefs for all time who are corrupting the articles. And as we all know, the people who tend to win in these contests are the kind of control freaks who aren't representative of the general population.

That's what I mean when I say that people who edit too much should be banned.

[JohnA]

Whilst if you debate a similarly disputed issue in the humanities, the problem is that a bunch of idiots who don't have a clue what they are talking about jump in and insist that they know all about it. Look at people like Morton Devonshire and MONGO for example, who jump in to the whole "9/11 theories" when they actually have no clue about them, just like to delete the whole lot just out of ignorance. Experts are getting banned, expertise dismissed, and in the end the idiots are being pushed forward in the name of consensus and neutrality.

I see the problem with the 9/11 conspiracies somewhat differently. You have two groups of people who are obsessed with the issue. The 9/11 truth movement take advantage of the open nature of the internet by having their relatively few members spam wikipedia and sites like digg with rubbish. People like MONGO see it as their own personal mission to wage war on the "truthers".

Both groups are wrong, and both groups are damaging Wikipedia. Wikipedia policy should be to minimize the number of edits by each individual editor to each particular article and to maximize the number of editors who edit each particular article.

At present, the entrenched "ownership" of certain articles by individuals or groups serves as a disincentive to casual readers to edit. But the whole point of the wisdom of crowds is that you want to encourage the casual editors to edit, and dissuade the obsessives. That way, the net of opinion is cast as wide as possible.

If the obsessives were prevented from editing 9/11 articles, you would quickly find that the 9/11 Truth stuff would be marginalized, because most people don't believe it. It's the nutters who are trying to ensure that the article matches their own personal beliefs for all time who are corrupting the articles. And as we all know, the people who tend to win in these contests are the kind of control freaks who aren't representative of the general population.

That's what I mean when I say that people who edit too much should be banned.

I'm sorry Wolfe but you're just wrong. The "Wisdom of crowds" assumes that truth is a majoritarian construct, but the history of the world shows the madness of crowds to be the norm since crowds are easily manipulated especially when objective facts are hard to come by and rumors abound. The Internet does not make this easier because we have to consciously filter a large amount of crap put there by people with an agenda - an agenda that may not even be rational.

In this situation, the obsessives always win. Look at Usenet for an example of this: the place swarms not with people with knowledge but crackpots and paranoid schizophrenics.

Knowledge is not a democratic process which is decided on by majority. Truth is not arrived at by many ignorant people as an emergent property.

Your textbooks at college were not written by crowds, neither was your house or car built by whoever came in off the street and lent a hand. Why should you expect the very fabric of knowledge upon which we all rely suddenly emerge from many ignoramuses?

Its simply preposterous on its face.

Nobody would ever get into an airplane built by wikiengineers unless they were completely mad. Yet somehow we are supposed to approve of this massive intellectual virus that dominates the Internet search engines?

This post has been edited by JohnA:

[Kato]

I'm very much with John on that.

When I first arrived at WP, I assumed that people editing a particularly article would have a very good understanding of the topic, perhaps with some form of professional expertise. It became apparent that not only were most of the editors largely ignorant, but many of the people were simply warped! And they were getting away with it - protected by various pseudo-policies or their on-site social ability. Over 95% of editors weren't up to it, and almost every content edit I saw was poor. Simple as that.

When an obvious expert and good editor arrives on the scene, I wanted them to own the article. I didn't want goons and fools getting in there debasing the text. And having a misleading, ill-informed pile of tripe sitting at the top of a google search. But the failed consequences were inevitable. Knowledge and education actually deteriorates as a result.

This essay explains things better than I could here.