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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

I may be an unpopular opinion, but Wikipedia doesn't work. It's ruled by people who don't have quality on their minds as much as power, politics, and maintaining their fiefdoms. It's not their "fault" either, because the system disproportionally rewards and empowers people who have these traits.

Encounters with Wikipedians are almost always toxic and unpleasant, be it to discuss changes to specific articles, discussions about policies, and even when it comes to throwing new ideas around on how the status quo could be improved. That's because they are generally very pleased with the status quo. People that weren't have been driven out long ago.

One of these days, I hope there will be a meaningful fork, and I hopefully article versions will simply be voted on.

Actually if anyone is interested in doing an experiment in this space, shoot me an email, I'd like to work on something like that.

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Wikipedia has all these problems... and yet it somehow DOES work.

I mean, I choose not to spend much time trying to edit it myself, because of these issues. But I use it ALL THE TIME to look stuff up. Don't you? And my impression is I'm getting at least as high quality information as from traditional print resources. I suppose it's possible I'm wrong, but we get into all sorts of epistemological questions there.

I said it in this thread before: if it's working for you, that's perfectly OK. I don't mean to imply you're wrong. Whether you believe Wikipedia is the pinnacle of what's possibly achievable with human knowledge, or whether you merely think it's a pretty good compromise that delivers satisfactory results - if you're within that spectrum I'm not talking to you.

If that's the case, my statements are not intended for you. I'm not trying to convince happy people that they're actually sad. I don't want to convince anyone that something needs to be done. I tried to reach out to people who already believe that it's time to start experimenting with alternatives. For everone else, absolutely nothing needs to change.

Yes, I use Wikipedia every day. But that doesn't mean I believe we can't do much better (at least for a deeply subjective value of "better").

> Wikipedia doesn't work.

> Yes, I use Wikipedia every day.

You can use the parts that work and ignore totally the parts that don't work.

When I spot an error in an article I do not ever bother to correct it, even if it is a trivial uncontroversial spelling error. I certainly would not attempt to change something that needs references, even if I have excellent references and even if the current error is unsourced.

That's not how WP is supposed to work and any wikipedian reading that should say that WP is broken, but plenty of them don't and are happy with the status quo.

Actually, there are many forks of wikipedia. (http://www.conservapedia.com/ and http://en.citizendium.org/ being 2 of the more well known forks).

If you want to fork, most information you need can be found here (wrt database downloads) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download . You might also want to look up http://mediawiki.org/ for the engine.

Voting on article versions could be a bit tricky. Can you come up with a voting system that wouldn't be gamed somehow? And how do you propose a voting system would counteract bias?

Absolutely agree that Wikipedia has these problems - I would never recommend that anyone edit Wikipedia and it loses a lot of expert knowledge by having significant barriers to contributing.

But most users don't see this. As a source of information, Wikipedia is unparalleled. There is nothing in existence that comes close.

So, it's difficult to say that Wikipedia doesn't work.

> So, it's difficult to say that Wikipedia doesn't work.

True, it would be more measured to say that some aspects of it don't work. Specifically, it doesn't really work all that well as a method of curating and incrementally improving content. That's because content is only a byproduct of what's truly happening there. Granted, it's a pretty awesome byproduct given the circumstances, without being facetious I would even say that Wikipedia should be considered one of the world wonders by right.

However, we're increasingly coming up against the limitations imposed by its horrendous culture. The reactionary nature of that culture will mean increasing calcification, and a high rate of actions that are net-detrimental to content quality [citation needed]. At some point, we'll need to move on and find better paradigms for content curation.

I tend to think that Wikipedia may work because of these problems, not despite these problems.

Very often people visit Wikipedia for a superficial overview of a topic they know nothing about - or perhaps to confirm a commonly known piece of trivia - which tend to be reasonably well curated.

For example, mathematical articles are often considered to be terrible because they miss this layperson target - they appear to be written by experts, for themselves. These are not necessarily people who are good at communicating their ideas to laypeople, nor even to other interested experts.

Wikipedia is not good for the long tails of research and expert knowledge - that's (for example) what research journals are for. I don't think Wikipedia could comfortably succeed at covering expert content while remaning so strong in its core.

Policies which I personally dislike, such as the poor culture amongst editors and pointless deletion policies, surely annoy me. But these may mean that editors who have chosen to contribute to Wikipedia focus better on creating the content which actually matters, rather than on infinitely long strands of esoteric knowledge.

I'm not asserting that people who are satisfied with Wikipedia are wrong, I'm just proposing an alternative for people who are not satisfied.

For instance, it's not at all clear to me that a database of human knowledge could not do both - giving general overviews and provide in-depth information. Even Wikipedia kind of does both in a lot of places.

Research journals are not a good place for in-depth information because they're closed source and because they put too much emphasis on single studies (which are often wrong and need to be seen in the context of other evidence). The need for curated in-depth content is just as real as it is for high school-level summaries and there is nothing in principle preventing a wikipedia-like database from providing arbitrary depth.

It seems we have already taken a big step in this direction with the formation of Wikipedia, but for all the tremendous mileage already achieved it's a vehicle that doesn't seem to be taking us much further. Indeed, we seem to be rolling backwards and losing knowledge from the pool again.

Again, this is not a critique of people who are mostly happy with Wikipedia. It's a faint hope that something new will emerge from the midst of those who are not happy.

Let's not forget that Wikipedia is essentially an iteration of paper encyclopedias. Encyclopedias have been the best form of the breadth of human knowledge for 2000 years

Wikipedia was not the only online/open encyclopedia, but it was the only successful one. To some extent online encyclopedias form a natural monopoly, and if that's the case then it's better that Wikipedia is it (rather than maybe Microsoft Encarta or Encyclopedia Britannica).

But I think I agree with you: this space benefits from having encyclopedias with different goals and ethos. IMHO ethos used effectively to be how paper encyclopedias competed.

I, for one, would welcome a good competitor: do you have enough of an idea to execute something potentially successful? Even if I am optimistic, that's difficult to imagine.

I’m curious, why do you think voting on article versions will make it better?

I think it's voting edits, not articles that's meant here.

Comments > Votes.

Moving towards a meritocratic model would be one of many steps that are worth experimenting with, but it can't be the only one. Culture needs to be addressed specifically, though if the current Wikipedia population stays just where they are that could be a great start. There would of course have to be some technical changes as well.

How is that not a non-sequitur? I mean, what does voting have to do with meritocracy (usually, its considered characteristic of democracy, not meritocracy.)

Yes, I used the wrong word for that. When I say meritocratic model, I mean a model where content rules based on its merit, not a statelike structure where individual people rule.

I'm talking about introducing a way to measure this merit. So I apologize for the misnomer that confused you. However, I'm hesitant to call such a system democratic either, though that might be a closer match.

Ideally, I'd like to decouple ego and personality from the act of content creation as much as possible - to the extend that is possible while still motivating people to work on it. So you see why I might describe this as having democratic or meritocratic traits, without actually being a *ocracy.

I'm also open to the idea of such a system being distributed, which would solve another problem Wikipedia has. If that's feasible, you might even be tempted to use terms such as adhocracy or federation. My beef with all these phrases is they're describing forms of government, whereas what I'm looking for is more a mode of content curation.

But let's talk about actual substance instead of nomenclature. I don't claim it's a silver bullet, but I think those are some ideas that may be worth experimenting with.

This editor is having a couple of bad days. Here is my good faith effort. I think this editor had something bad happen in their personal life that made them very mean and vindictive. This editor has been using terse, aggressive, rude language towards other users, in addition to the edit discussed here. I would like to see this arbitrated at a higher level. This user should be given a week off and recommended to take a spa vacation and read Covey's note on “It's All Over” Syndrome. Then, all should be forgiven, forgotten, and we can all go forward. This is my hope.

> It's ruled by people who don't have quality on their minds as much as power, politics, and maintaining their fiefdoms.

I think its ruled by people who just have different views of quality than their critics. Since quality is highly subjective, but people are frequently very heavily invested with the idea that their vision of quality is universal and objective, its very common for people who disagree with a speaker on what quality is to be described as not caring about quality.

> One of these days, I hope there will be a meaningful fork, and I hopefully article versions will simply be voted on.

So Wikipedia driven by Stackoverflow's interface. Love it!

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