Why Wikipedia Is Doomed, The Six Rotten Pillars of Wikipedia Options Rating

[Cedric]

Another excellent installment!

To some degree, WP governance does bears a resemblance to the government of Nazi Germany. A popular misconception about Nazi government is that it was ruthlessly efficient. Ruthless, to be sure, but efficient it was not.

If you are looking for an inefficient tyranny, Russia (of almost any era) could be a better example. But the best one could be the present Russia. It has a strong president (at present pretending to be the prime minister) but also warring clans of bureaucrats and oligarchs. The oligarchs can sometimes reach an almost presidential level and then fall quickly (including a permablock in Siberia) if the president intervenes strongly enough.

Not an ideal model of Wikipedia, but close enough.

Not a bad analogy, actually. Perhaps in part due to its vastness, Russia has never entirely escaped from its feudal past, in that the central government has always had to rely on local lords, party bosses and officials to enforce its will (albeit less so in Stalin's time). It reminds one of the old Russian saying that "God is in His heaven, and the Tsar is very far away".

[Cedric]

THE SIX ROTTEN PILLARS OF WIKIPEDIA

THE END GAME

When and how will Wikipedia’s death spiral play out? This is difficult to say with any certainty. The only thing that I can say with confidence is that The Six Rotten Pillars will continue to act together to erode confidence in WP, eventually leading to a sustained decrease in donations of both money and labor to the website. As both a charity and a volunteer project, such donations are WP’s lifeblood. It cannot survive without them.

WP’s demise as a website is desirable for various reasons. The most commonly cited reasons are the harm it does to the cause of spreading human knowledge and the harm it does to individual human beings. These are weighty and worthy reasons, as WP acts as a platform for libel, revenge, disinformation and the exploitation of the addicted and mentally ill. But there is another reason: due to its huge popularity and sheer size, WP syphons off much time, effort and resources that might well otherwise go to more worthy projects and pursuits.

Add to this that it will likely take WP’s demise to get the scales to fall from the eyes of many wiki-apologists in order for them to realize WP’s design was fatally flawed from the start. I am convinced, however, that there are a few bitter-enders for whom even WP’s utter destruction as a website will not be sufficient. They will always blame the trolls, the vandals, the “POV pushers”, the spammers, media “enemies”, and the “haters at WR” for WP’s fall. In other words, practically everyone except themselves. They will never come to realize that they contained within themselves a fatal mindset that there was never really that much wrong with “the wiki”; that all that is required is a few blocks, a few desysoppings and a few policy tweaks to make WP better than ever. I call this a “fatal” mindset because it is truly fatal for WP. It is a mentality shared not only among the cabalistas, but also by many other dedicated WP users, and it very effectively stands in way of there ever being any meaningful reform to save WP from itself. One could even call it “The Seventh Rotten Pillar of Wikipedia”.

Despite all the strong criticism I have for WP, I still believe that a free, online and reliable general use encyclopedia is a worthy goal, and I look forward to the day that we will have one. But that encyclopedia will never be WP, I’m afraid. The conditions needed for the reform of WP do not exist, nor does it appear they ever will. The media and public will not remain forever blind to the deep flaws of WP. WP is simply too big and its dysfunction too deep to hide or obscure these flaws forever. Perhaps one day a group of former wikipedians, left sadder but far wiser by the decline and fall of WP, will band together and get to work on a true encyclopedia that is deserving of our efforts. I, for one, would like that. It is comforting to think that something good and worthy can eventually arise from the pit of agony and dysfunction that is Wikipedia.


Cedric

[Proabivouac]

A brilliant series, Cedric. Thank you.

[Kato]

A brilliant series, Cedric. Thank you.

Indeed!

Bravo!

[Piperdown]

Instant editing got Wikipedia millions of articles and a top ten ranking. Jimbo is right to stick with a winning formula.

Yes. Instant editing is not the great problems. The real problem we are discussing ad nauseam here is actually WP meeting the Peter Principle ("In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence").

Most of the useful stuff on WP pages is still actually relatively free of wiki-politics and therefore not corrupted.

Millions of articles about crap. Still, Wikipedia cannot compete with a proper encyclopedia when it comes to any subject of substance, rather than about pornography, ill-disguised promotion of paedophilia, articles on pokemon, dr who, star trek or whatever.

Once every few months but as the trolling on here from the Wikipedia gets ever greater and more ridiculous and laughable I wonder if Awbrey was not right after all. To persuade people to solve a problem you first have to persuade them a problem exists.

i often see references in the media and on sites about mobile computing about the ability to "download" WP. Treated as a limited, finite encyclopedia.

That's why I was a deletionist.

For the exteme trainspotting trivia on pokemon, power rangers, simpsons episodes, i believe WP should split itself out:

Wikipedia - traditional encyclopedia material. Rated PG-13. Subjects that are traditionally encyclopedic.

Pornpedia - all that shankbone shite.

Tellypedia - fanboy shite with first person diaries about every tv episode.

Sportspedia - bio's on obscure footballers that played on season with Southeast Middle Elbonia, and third basemen who batted once in 1931 for the Baltimore Brownnosers.

I'd like to be able to download a stable copy of the Encyclopedic part of Wikipedia to my mobile, and not have it bloated by fanboy crap, making it 100x bigger than it should be. And that version should not have any pages that you'd be ashamed to open in front of another human being.

[Somey]

Well, I always knew, pretty much from Day One, that Mr. Cedric was The Man. And it's always good to have threads like this that people can refer to, to get a general idea as to what we're on about... Maybe it's time to resurrect that FAQ idea once again...

I'd like to be able to download a stable copy of the Encyclopedic part of Wikipedia to my mobile, and not have it bloated by fanboy crap, making it 100x bigger than it should be...

I'd make some sort of wisecrack about how you shouldn't risk getting yourself banned from your own phone, but this is actually yet another way that the current WP regime inhibits the development of new knowledge-dissemination tools, even as it disseminates its own version of "knowledge" to more and more people. And what with the existence of wapedia.mobi, plus the fact that so many wireless phones now have web browsers, you end up with the Microsoft Effect™ - which is to say that nobody is going to produce a commercial alternative specifically for mobiles because wapedia already provides a WP interface for free, and so the people making that free interface (not to mention the WP folks themselves) have no competition incentive to improve it.

(Technically, though it wouldn't be that hard to "filter" a local copy of Wikipedia by some sort of value-of-category ranking - the categories already exist, so you (or they) would just have to provide a UI for ranking them, and something built into the software to offer to "go online" if the user clicks a link that leads to an article that isn't locally-stored. Of course, then people would just edit-war over the category rankings, so not much point in even trying as things stand now.)

[Kelly Martin]

Our best hope for the death of Wikipedia is that it gets so completely overrun with useless crap that there is real value in "rating" Wikipedia content . Fortunately, that's almost certain to happen; Wikipedia will attract those who will manipulate its content far faster than it will attract those who will police it for appropriateness (witness how "neutrality" has mutated into a rather well-defined house POV in the past couple of years). Before much longer Wikipedia will die the same death USENET did.

Of course, there's also the real possibility that the technology will blow up. Wikimedia has lost data twice in the past year due to hardware and management failures; it's a matter of time before the undermaintained and underfunded technological infrastructure that supports the site collapses under the steadily increasing load.

[Peter Damian]

Excellent and thank you Cedric - the full version is here. I haven't had a chance to make all the corrections (but you are welcome to edit it yourself as it is on a wiki - you have to ask Greg that's all).

http://www.wikipediareview.com/The_Six_Rotten_Pillars_of_Wikipedia

[Cedric]

Thanks to everyone for the kind words. Thanks also to Peter Damian for putting this up on Wikipedia Review.

Our best hope for the death of Wikipedia is that it gets so completely overrun with useless crap that there is real value in "rating" Wikipedia content . Fortunately, that's almost certain to happen; Wikipedia will attract those who will manipulate its content far faster than it will attract those who will police it for appropriateness (witness how "neutrality" has mutated into a rather well-defined house POV in the past couple of years). Before much longer Wikipedia will die the same death USENET did.

Of course, there's also the real possibility that the technology will blow up. Wikimedia has lost data twice in the past year due to hardware and management failures; it's a matter of time before the undermaintained and underfunded technological infrastructure that supports the site collapses under the steadily increasing load.

Despite having been a deletionist during my time on WP, I totally identify with this view. Anything that significantly increases "teh dramahz" on WP, also hastens the coming of The Great Wiki-Ragnarok™, and the opportunity for a more worthy project to take its place. That is why I continue to say

Hasten The Day!™

[Shalom]

Thank you, Cedric. Reading your series of essays was one of the most productive and fulfilling experiences I've had on the Review. (That's not saying much, but it's something.)

Somey, not joking about Peter Damian getting banned from his own phone: that was hilarious. I laughed out loud for almost a whole minute right here in my university library (if you care to snoop my IP address, you'll know which university it is...). Thanks for making me laugh.

I wished to respond to Cedric's fifth point, "EXPLOITATION OF THE ADDICTED AND MENTALLY ILL." I can't think of anyone who is truly mentally ill and simultaneously a competent administrator, but I can relate to the experience. One of the things I did when I was going through a very difficult period in my personal life was to spend hours at a time on Wikipedia. My contribution logs are open for all to see, and forever will remain so unless the servers catastrophically lose their data (as Kelly hints might happen someday). I learned when performing sockpuppet investigations that a person's contribution logs, especially if that person has been editing for a year or longer, reveal a tremendous amount of detail about that person - more detail than if I simply knew the IP address but didn't know which articles the user had edited, how often, or at what time of day or week. If I were to undertake a retrospective analysis of my own contributions, I would have to conclude that I was at least mildly addicted to Wikipedia - not in the joking "Wikipediholic" sense, but really in a way that was not constructive to my broader life goals. This problem is one of the unknown secrets that nobody ever talks about, but is worthy of real discussion. Among all of Cedric's points, the suggestion that Wikipedia's structure exploits people who may obsessively patrol recent changes or new pages or other problem areas really hit home.

[The Joy]

A brilliant series, Cedric. Thank you.

Indeed!

Bravo!

Huzzah! Indeed! We are in the presence... of a master!

[Kato]

Cedric's piece is remeniscent of Sam Vaknin's Wikipedia's Six Cardinal Sins, which is also worth a read.

http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20080229/s...-cardinal-sins/

[EricBarbour]

For the exteme trainspotting trivia on pokemon, power rangers, simpsons episodes, i believe WP should split itself out:
Wikipedia - traditional encyclopedia material. Rated PG-13. Subjects that are traditionally encyclopedic.
Pornpedia - all that shankbone shite.
Tellypedia - fanboy shite with first person diaries about every tv episode.
Sportspedia - bio's on obscure footballers that played on season with Southeast Middle Elbonia, and third basemen who batted once in 1931 for the Baltimore Brownnosers.
I'd like to be able to download a stable copy of the Encyclopedic part of Wikipedia to my mobile, and not have it bloated by fanboy crap, making it 100x bigger than it should be. And that version should not have any pages that you'd be ashamed to open in front of another human being.

Sounds good to me. Although perhaps Shankbone should PAY FOR HIS OWN HOSTING.

And there's a few websites full of TV-show cruft.
Their quality is already even more variable than WP, if such a thing is possible.
Example:
http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/
http://tvrage.com/
http://tvtropes.org (actually more interesting than a typical fansite)
and tv.com in some areas.

Not to mention things like rottentomatoes.com etc.

If someone really cared, WP articles about popular entertainment would resemble IMDB entries, perhaps with a longer precis. But that wouldn't be any fun, of course.

[everyking]

I said it before, but I'll reiterate, just to provide a counterpoint to the praise being heaped on Cedric's essay, that I don't think there's any value in broadly attacking Wikipedia's fundamentals. Those fundamentals have made it possible to build a massively successful, tremendously useful popular reference work. Wikipedia's problems are rooted in its failure to develop a functioning system of deliberative community governance and responsible administration to replace the cult of the bold individual admin. Even if it is too late (and I don't think it is) for Wikipedia as a website to reform its internal control mechanisms and the associated culture, the reference work remains, and the same fundamental principles would need to be applied in building any successor project if that project was to enjoy anywhere near the same level of success.

[Moulton]

The fundamentals of Wikipedia are most insightfully characterized by its governance model. It took me a long time to get a handle on Jimbo's governance model since it predates any governance model I had ever studied before.

But with Cedric's help, I am on to a new diagnosis...

Inclusion/exclusion in the tribe is established by blocking and banning (ostracism), which is perhaps one of the oldest techniques found in species who organize into hives, packs, or tribes.

Politics certainly do have a tendency to be local (i.e., tribal). I would agree that unless one understands this concept, you really have no hope of understanding what is going on at Wikipedia.

Cedric

I was astonished to discover that Wikipedia was operating under an anachronistic tribalistic culture that predates the advent of the Rule of Law.

Here was Wikpedia, launching (at the time) one of the most advanced pieces of software for Web 2.0 collaboration, while at the same time adopting an utterly primitive socio-cultural model.

Jimbo's pre-Hammurabic socio-cultural model was so anachronistic it took me a long time just to place it in the timeline of the annals of human history.

But given that Jimbo's cult is pre-Hammurabic, that means the community will have to reprise the classical sequence of liminal social dramas that originally took place some 3500 years ago in human history.

I suppose the best known of those dramas correspond to the sequential contributions of Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Lao Tsu, during the period between the advent of Hammurabi's Code (1750 B.C.) and the advent of Christianity.

It occurs to me that Wikipedia will have to go through those phases before anyone there will be ready for the Age of the Enlightenment and the introduction of 17th Century Scientific Cultures and Twentieth Century Systems Era Cultures.

[Cedric]

I said it before, but I'll reiterate, just to provide a counterpoint to the praise being heaped on Cedric's essay, that I don't think there's any value in broadly attacking Wikipedia's fundamentals. Those fundamentals have made it possible to build a massively successful, tremendously useful popular reference work. Wikipedia's problems are rooted in its failure to develop a functioning system of deliberative community governance and responsible administration to replace the cult of the bold individual admin. Even if it is too late (and I don't think it is) for Wikipedia as a website to reform its internal control mechanisms and the associated culture, the reference work remains, and the same fundamental principles would need to be applied in building any successor project if that project was to enjoy anywhere near the same level of success.

I have no problem with members bringing up the counterpoint. As I see it, that is a good part of the reason this board exists; so that we may have informed discussions of these things. I hope then that you will not mind if I repeat Dogbiscuit's query: Define "success". I also have a question of my own: How long do you think an essay like mine would ever survive on Wikipedia itself?

Kato: Thanks for bringing up Vaknin's essay. I only vaguely remember reading that before, so I cannot say that it was a direct influence, but it was very interesting to read it again all the same. What I find particularly interesting is that although we approach the problem of Wikipedia from different angles, we end up discussing the same things and make basically the same conclusions, with the exception that Vaknin also discusses the problem of copyright violation. As Jon Awbrey has frequently reminded us, plagiarism and copyright violations are real problems at WP.

I never intended to discuss every significant problem with WP, because frankly that would require an entire book. I only intended to identify and discuss the prime causes for WP's process of self-destruction.

EDIT: I didn't read through Moulton's post before posting the above. He may be onto something here.

[Kelly Martin]

I think everyking has a point in that Wikipedia's policies to date have allowed to to amass a considerable quantity of useful material. The problem is that, now, finding new good content on Wikipedia is like gleaning the trash dumps for valuable items. People can (and do) do this, and sometimes find quite a bit of value, but it's not a pleasant way of doing business, and it's not the sort of thing most people want to do.

Wikipedia's open editing policies that served Wikipedia well in its its infancy no longer serve it now that it is no longer an infant; they are now turning Wikipedia into a trash heap, and forcing anyone who wants to use it to be a gleaner.

[Son of a Yeti]

Why not fork wikipedia and start a new one with the same license?

I know, the user base, Google link priority etc. etc.

But still it would be possible if Google did take part in this wikicide, funding the new encyclopedia and giving its articles priority over WP on the search lists.

The new encyclopedia would be 100% democratic and free of any cabals.



One can always have a dream, can one?

[Peter Damian]

I think everyking has a point in that Wikipedia's policies to date have allowed to to amass a considerable quantity of useful material. The problem is that, now, finding new good content on Wikipedia is like gleaning the trash dumps for valuable items. People can (and do) do this, and sometimes find quite a bit of value, but it's not a pleasant way of doing business, and it's not the sort of thing most people want to do.

Wikipedia's open editing policies that served Wikipedia well in its its infancy no longer serve it now that it is no longer an infant; they are now turning Wikipedia into a trash heap, and forcing anyone who wants to use it to be a gleaner.

True. Critics of Wikipedia tend to divide into those who think the product is all right, but have some sort of moral or personal objection to the methods used to produce it, and those who see the product as fundamentally flawed.

I'll say it again: given that there is no evidence of slave labour or a sweatshop or poor working conditions, and given that all of those who built this monstrous edifice seem to do so on a voluntary basis, it is rather immoral to campaign about this - given there is much more suffering that could be prevented by joining Amnesty International, or being more careful about where we buy those cheap shirts and shoes (and dresses).

I say it again: it is the product that is the problem. Here is the page about one of England's greatest philosopher-theologians, also one of the handful of the greatest thinkers who has ever lived:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham

Compared to his influence, the space allotted him is pitiful. There are also some significant factual errors in the article itself. Compare this with the following article

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=249018622

which is about the same size, but concerns an individual who is insignificant. There are hundreds if not thousands of articles like the one on Ockham - subjects deserving of a lot more work and careful research. There are thousands if not tens of thousands of articles like that about our friend Faulkner, most or all of them written by their own subject. This is where Wikipedia falls down.

The sad thing is that very few people on this forum understand that. They, like the rest of the world, have been educated by Wikipedia. The boundaries of their world are the boundaries of the project - what Wikipedia does not talk about, let us pass over in silence.

[Basil]

If it is any consolation Peter, while Charles Faulkner was viewed 645 times in October, William of Ockham was viewed 9191 times.