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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This analysis is off in a couple ways.

First: the incentives to spam Wikipedia remain enormous; Wikipedia has incredible search mojo. The kind of spam he's talking about is of a kind with Wordpress comment spam, but the kind of spam Wikipedia deals with in reality is more sophisticated, and involves entire bogus articles.

Second, flagged revisions are a tool that suppresses edit wars, and are used on (last I checked) a tiny subset of all the pages on WP. That "most important technical change" restricting "anyone from editing" WP hasn't been and never will be deployed sitewide.

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Agreed I wasn't endorsing the link, just put it there for completeness.

FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors. It would require a huge investment of course but I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. I mean you could kill Facebook with the same site.

Good luck, but I don't think you'll be successful with that, because I think notability is an extremely important part of the glue that holds the Wikipedia project together. Without it you not only get a torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff, but you also lose the critical factor that makes the editorial challenge of Wikipedia tractable; without notability, you simply have too many potential articles to fact-check, and no way to fact-check them.

About 15 years ago some friends and I started a company whose technical premise boiled down to taking IRC and replacing the static tree-based "routing" system it has with a real dynamic routing protocol. No more netsplits! Arbitrary topologies! It was so simple! Why would anyone want anything other than a biconnected IRC? It turns out that the moment you lose the static tree property, the whole system goes to hell. All the sudden, messages aren't (and can't be) reliable, because the network can change out from under them while they're being forwarded. So you figure you'll just build a simple reliability scheme for messages to ride on. Oh, wait: IRC is a group messaging system, and not only is the distributed systems GMS problem not particularly easy to build in a "realistic" network, but providing reliability on it is essentially the multicast reliability problem, which is itself so annoying that it's part of why IP multicast failed.

My long-winded point is, sometimes something that seems like an obvious weakness of an existing system is actually fundamental to that system's viability.

"torrent of pointless, trivial content that readers have to sift through to find the real stuff"

I don't think people page through online encyclopedias that way. I'm not notable, if I had a wikipedia page I don't think it would link from any page that actually exists today. How could that ever bother you? I don't think you'd come across it unless you googled my name and it took you to my wikipedia page in which case it would seem to be doing good.

I used to hit the [random] link and know I'd get something interesting.

Now, not so much. I'll get a tiny stub of something programmaticly dragged in from some huge database - a town name with maybe some population figure and location; an obscure politician with party affiliation and birthdate.

For people who enjoy gnoming these kind of articles are tedious - what's the point of correcting a comma if no-one is likely to see it?

How hard would it be to reprogram the random button to only hit pages in the top X00,000 or with at least Y words?

Supporting the random button isn't what I'd call anywhere near the top 10 most important functions an encyclopedia of any kind ought to provide. Serendipity is useful in a library or a bookstore, but when you open a book, the bibliomancy becomes avant garde art at best.

> FWIW I think the formula to beat wikipedia is obvious: mirror it, get rid of notability, get rid of anonymity and hire the most prolific editors.

I would mirror the 100,000 most important articles. I'd then fact check them vigorously. Emphasis would be on truth, not verifiability. I'd keep anonymity, but I'd throw out the Wiki - editing would be done by paid employees from "suggested improvements" made by visitors. I'd pay people to create excellent quality diagrams, and include plenty of them. I'm a fan of translating STEM information into Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

Again, this would require lots of cash.

There's no reason the ideas aren't compatible. I'm all for having different editing standards for the top X articles (senior edits can freely edit, edits from plebes have to wait Y hours or be ok'd) and the less notable articles.

If you wanted to run with the FB idea you could even have special privileges for the "confirmed user" for certain parts of their own bio page. If I don't know you and go to your page I see a wiki bio and whatever anyone has added. If we're wiki-friends I see all that plus your anything in your wikifriends area (pictures, whatever).

My theory on getting rid of notability is you'd have say Z million people come and make webpages for themselves and their friends and family. They'd learn the edit tools and process. And so you'd get an organic growth effect in both natural users and editors.

And of course the big incentive is that we're cutting good editors in on some adsense sharing, idk base it on some function of how substantive an edit is, how long it lasts and how popular the page is.

Encarta, Britannica and Citizendium have already proved many other approaches and/or management styles substandard.

Getting rid of notability: Are you talking about something like Wikia? Currently the largest network of gaming sites (30M unique views/mo.), but overall progress has been surprisingly slow since the start in 2004. Jimmy Wales as a founder and 11M raised less than a year ago.

I think you can beat wikipedia by focusing on its weaknesses, but anonymity is not one of them, per se (at best it's a weakness as well as a strength).

Notability: a dumb policy that is more harmful than good.

Mod/admin power tripping: this is where anonymous edits might be a weakness because they validate the existence of mods who think they contribute more to the site than they actually do. Maybe some sort of gamification/karma system would be workable.

Weak sourcing constraints: wikipedia's criteria for a good source are basically "some notable entity believes it". A site that invested a significant amount of resources in valuing and even hosting and validating primary sources and more rigorous sourcing of facts would be a tremendous complement to wikipedia.

Clumsy formatting: wiki markup is definitely holding back wikipedia, there are other ways to present data and there are opportunities for competitors to take advantage of better presentation systems (not just prettier or easier but more usable and practical).

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