Wikipedia - Can Teenagers Write An Encyclopedia? - Global Politician Options

[Google News]

Wikipedia - Can Teenagers Write An Encyclopedia?
Global Politician, NY - 12 minutes ago
The vast majority of Wikipedia contributors and editors are under the age of 25. Many of the administrators (senior editors) are in their teens. ...

[Kato]

This is a really good article.

Knowledge is not comprised of lists of facts, "facts", factoids, and rumors, the bread and butter of the Wikipedia. Real facts have to be verified, classified, and arranged within a historical and cultural context. Wikipedia articles read like laundry lists of information gleaned from secondary sources and invariably lack context and deep, true understanding of their subject matter.

[GoodFaith]

I submit that editors should be over age 21 and live within the jurisdiction of the United States. Admins should be at least 30 and pass a copyediting test.

[thekohser]

I submit that editors should be over age 21 and live within the jurisdiction of the United States. Admins should be at least 30 and pass a copyediting test.

Hah! That would require proof of age, which would probably require proof of identity, and then Durova and Slim would explode. Won't work, but nice concept.

[A Man In Black]

I submit that editors should be over age 21 and live within the jurisdiction of the United States. Admins should be at least 30 and pass a copyediting test.

It seems like an obvious thing to point out, but one of the main reasons Wikipedia is so popular is because it's so open to contributions from anyone. (Who'da thunk that a populist project might become popular?) Ditching that openness would make Wikipedia...Citizendium.

Particularly the age thing; aren't you guys awfully hard on people who are supposedly paid to edit? Blocking the mass of bored teenagers and college students would mean that the only people who would edit Wikipedia are truly devoted POV pushers, the unemployed, and people who are there getting paid. But, then again, nobody would edit anyway because it wouldn't be very popular!

This post has been edited by A Man In Black: Mon 23rd July 2007, 3:29am

[GoodFaith]

It seems like an obvious thing to point out, but one of the main reasons Wikipedia is so popular is because it's so open to contributions from anyone.

This "anyone can edit" stuff just isn't true. Yes, Wikipedia does invite tens of thousands of vandals, which justifies the existence of admins.

Ditching that openness would make Wikipedia...Citizendium.

Teenage boys are teenage boys. They're too young and they have no business backing orders to their elders. Let them go to MySpace, so I can ignore them.

Particularly the age thing; aren't you guys awfully hard on people who are supposedly paid to edit? Blocking the mass of bored teenagers and college students would mean that the only people who would edit Wikipedia are truly devoted POV pushers, the unemployed, and people who are there getting paid.

We have POV pushers and hacks already. If the maturity level increased, it might win back those who are driven away by the current regime.

But, then again, nobody would edit anyway because it wouldn't be very popular!

There's always eb.com. :rolleyes:

[A Man In Black]

This "anyone can edit" stuff just isn't true. Yes, Wikipedia does invite tens of thousands of vandals, which justifies the existence of admins.

Which part? The claim that anyone can edit, or the claim that it's the source of Wikipedia's popularity?

We have POV pushers and hacks already. If the maturity level increased, it might win back those who are driven away by the current regime.

Well, my comments on that point are a little misplaced because there wouldn't be any Wikipedia without the volunteers, and there wouldn't be any volunteers if the obstacles to entry were set too high. (Again, Citizendium.)

[GoodFaith]

This "anyone can edit" stuff just isn't true. Yes, Wikipedia does invite tens of thousands of vandals, which justifies the existence of admins.

Which part? The claim that anyone can edit, or the claim that it's the source of Wikipedia's popularity?

Wikipedia's success is solely due to hitting the PageRank jackpot. If Everything2 or Citizendium had won, things would be different.

We have POV pushers and hacks already. If the maturity level increased, it might win back those who are driven away by the current regime.

Well, my comments on that point are a little misplaced because there wouldn't be any Wikipedia without the volunteers, and there wouldn't be any volunteers if the obstacles to entry were set too high. (Again, Citizendium.)

Britannica has survived since 1768 with zero volunteers.

[A Man In Black]

Wikipedia's success is solely due to hitting the PageRank jackpot. If Everything2 or Citizendium had won, things would be different.

I'm not up on all the conspiracy theories, so you'll have to bear with me. Barring some sort of Diabolic Collusion between Google and WMF, high pagerank tends to come as a result of popularity, not the other way around. (I know the scrapers inflate this.) Wikipedia has managed to have a lot of users (and thus a lot of content) because they'll take literally everyone.

People tend to defend and promote things they feel they own, and there's no way to promote ownership more than by making someone a part of making something.

Britannica has survived since 1768 with zero volunteers.

Dissimilar case. Britannica isn't a volunteer project, and it rests as much on the authority of its authors (who are typically respected in their respective fields) as on the authority of its sources.

[Somey]

Barring some sort of Diabolic Collusion between Google and WMF, high pagerank tends to come as a result of popularity, not the other way around.

That's looking at it too simplistically, I'm afraid. The reason there's a problem is because of the snowball effect created by Google's ubiquity in conjunction with WP's high PageRanks. IOW, popularity leads to high PageRanks which increases popularity which further increases PageRanks, ad infinitum.

So the real problem isn't simply that Wikipedia is ranked too highly - it's that there's no way for more stable content to be ranked higher based on its stability when that stability is more appropriate to the content.

Google rewards sites that constantly change, because of the misassumption that change is always good, and that information is always updated to become more accurate, not less. That's good in the case of sports statistics, for example - up-to-date sports statistics are better than out-of-date sports statistics. But it's not good in the cases of history or biography, or a wide variety of other subjects that benefit from not being fiddled with on a near-daily basis.

The PageRank algorithm is just a chunk of code, it isn't self-aware, and it doesn't know the difference between the latest football scores vs. a biography of John Wesley. It just sees a bunch of bytes in an HTML stream. I would assume that it also uses checksums to determine if something has changed, which means it doesn't know the difference between a revision that corrects one typo vs. a complete rewrite of a major article.

What's more, it only knows that en.wikipedia.org is a well-linked-to domain, and a heavily-clicked one - it doesn't keep track of wiki categories, or WikiProjects, or individual wiki pages. So all pages on Wikipedia get the benefit of being on Wikipedia, not just the popular ones - and certainly not just the accurate ones.

And there you have it in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen...?

[A Man In Black]

That's looking at it too simplistically, I'm afraid. The reason there's a problem is because of the snowball effect created by Google's ubiquity in conjunction with WP's high PageRanks. IOW, popularity leads to high PageRanks which increases popularity which further increases PageRanks, ad infinitum.

I know it snowballs, but Wikipedia's initial popularity didn't come from Google; it came from openness in both membership and subject matter. (Becoming Slashdot's latest darling also helped.)

I'm not saying that this openness is entirely a good thing in the abstract, but it has led to Wikipedia becoming popular.

[Somey]

I'm not saying that this openness is entirely a good thing in the abstract, but it has led to Wikipedia becoming popular.

OK... But just so we're clear on this, how are you defining "popularity"? There's Google rankings, Alexa ranking, registered-user counts, number of edits per month, and so forth... Clearly it's popular in all those respects, but in your opinion has the open-editing model led to all of those things, or just one or two in particular?

And just to get back to the original point, I'd say that Sam Vaknin, who is a strident anti-Wikipedian who makes many of us look like lightweights, is mostly concerned with Google rankings - and I'd have to say that most PR and advertising people are mostly concerned with that too. Big Money types want a certain number of eyeballs on a specific page (or piece of content); they don't care about how well the site does overall, especially if they can't buy banner ads on it. And Google rankings, despite being hugely flawed at a conceptual level, are unfortunately one of the most easily-checked and easily-understood measurements in existence. The others, ehhh... maybe not so easy.