Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, [EDIT to prevent tedious distracting subthreads] operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

> When asked to identify Wikipedia’s real problem, Moran cites the bureaucratic culture that has formed around the rules and guidelines on contributing, which have become labyrinthine over the years. The page explaining a policy called Neutral Point of View, one of “five pillars” fundamental to Wikipedia, is almost 5,000 words long. “That is the real barrier: policy creep,” he says.

I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...

> Their version reads: “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.”

They should probably have "and has the stamina to out-last the people incorrectly reverting good edits for spurious reasons" in there somewhere.

One example close to me (I guess everyone has their own) is how the Spanish Wikipedia systematically misspells the name of dozens of Spanish cities and towns, changing the official toponyms for largely invented ones that "sound more Spanish".

This has been the source of endless debates that haven't done anything to change the position of the senior contributors in control. So we have an absurd situation where a non-trivial amount of Spanish toponyms are more accurate in the English Wikipedia than in the Spanish one.

In the global context, this is probably a small issue. And yet I wonder how many people are put off contributing when they perceive that a small in-group is able to push their opinion like this.

> estimated to be 90 percent male

Why did you include this? It seems out of place, unless you're saying it's the heavy skew of males that's causing the beurocracy?

It's a quote from the article. Why are you fixated on that sentence fragment from a much larger quote?

It just seemed out of place and unexplained.

If you had said "90 pourcent female", I think people would have felt inconfortable. I don't see how the gender has anything about the bureaucracy.

But I didn't say it, I just quoted from the article.

I edited the quote.

There isn't any good reason why an online encyclopedia would have such a massive gender imbalance. The fact that this is the case points at deep problems in the community.

> I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre....

HN has easily several million words on Apple. Here's a search https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix...

that doesn't mean that it is impossible for anyone to know anything about the culture and the policies on HN.

Posting something on HN about Apple without knowing the history of the conversation here won't do much to you except maybe a downvote.

Posting something on WP using the wrong sort of dash might have your changes reverted and hours of work tossed in the garbage followed by weeks of fighting with self-righteous poorly socialized neck beards who bury you in hopeless bureaucracy on the off-chance that your work will be reinstated. All solved much more easily if the WP editor simply changes the dash like they wanted and everybody moved on with their life.

But my search is specifically about Wikipedia process. Those half million words are not about dashes as an encyclopedic article, those words are people bickering over, for example, "Mexican–American War" versus "Mexican-American War" (at least 20,000 words just on the hyphen / dash in the title).

Once you've ploughed through all that can you transfer your new dash-knowledge to other articles? No, that other article will have its own thousands-of-words long discussion about the correct dash to use.

That's bad enough, you can probably ignore dash types and let other people sort it out.

But it's a great example of how Wikipedia fails. Any discussion is won by the person who has the time to win.

> The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere ...

Management wisdom of the crowds.

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