"Familiarity of content" is not generally compatible with "flexibility and innovation." If the mobile site and apps are not "geared towards today's internet users" then what would be? EllenCT (talk) 03:21, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This essay put into well written words a few concerns I've had. The scarcity of volunteer time as a solution: "On Wikipedia, the solution is to throw volunteers at it until it is fixed, somehow, eventually...Crowdsourcing isn't the reason Wikipedia succeeded and we can't simply throw it at every problem as if it were magic." And the fact that we have a lot of bureaucracy and can't necessarily tap into more volunteers to fix what ills us: "Over the last two decades, however, Wikipedia's institutional culture has exchanged flexibility for bureaucracy and established volunteers have set themselves up as the new gatekeepers. Collectively they form a Team Encarta stifling innovation in favor of ossification." I'm glad the Signpost was able to secure the right to publish this. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 03:38, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
One thing I noticed teaching undergraduates about Wikipedia was how intimidating they found the markup. Back in the late 1990s an early 2000s, people used to often view the markup of web pages they visited. Today all you'll see is a mass of Javascript and CSS. Hawkeye7(discuss)04:25, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's not just a matter of attracting new editors, we need editors of the "correct" type. Attracting dogmatic editors, unable to compromise, will get us nowhere. We need editors who are prepared to accept the "consensus" aspect of Wikipedia. Similarly we already have editors that have a negative impact on the project, by driving well-meaning editors away. Nigej (talk) 09:13, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Great article! I think it makes a good case for the necessity of the WP:Welcoming committee. That project, while vitally important, unfortunately does not seem to be active enough or to have the boldness that would be needed to make meaningful positive change. For instance, I recently pointed out that the standard welcome message currently points new users to four different introductions/tutorials with tons of overlap and four different places to seek help, creating choice paralysis and contributing to the sense that WP is a labyrinth. However, I haven't gotten any responses (positive or negative) to a proposed alternative. I also haven't seen any indication that bigger changes such as making the Visual Editor the default for new users are coming any time soon. Sorry for plugging my own comments, but I think some more attention to this area by people who care about expanding WP's user base could really be useful for fostering innovation and fighting back against the phenomenon Fernandez pinpoints so well in this essay. Sdkb (talk) 10:58, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
What an excellent article. It has caused at least one editor to take a good, hard look at how they interact on Wikipedia, especially with regards to consensus building and citing of policy. Should be compulsory reading for all "experienced editors". Gog the Mild (talk) 13:26, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Quite a nice article! I think it is a good and appropriately sombre expression of problems that many have recognized. Not knowing what else will be in the book, I don't want to make too big a fuss about what additional topics could or should have been included in this particular essay. (Women in Red?) My only nit to pick is about "Eternal September": as I understand it, that term does not refer to students overwhelming Usenet at the beginning of term. Rather, it refers to AOL offering Usenet access to its subscribers, resulting in a rush of new users that did not abate, like what happened at the beginning of every school year but without respite — thus, the September that never ended. XOR'easter (talk) 18:00, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Glad to see the term "jalt". Some days I wonder if I'm the only person to notice this effect on other Wikipedians as their attitude devolves in steps from enthusiastic & altruistic volunteer to the final stage of a problematic individual about to be banned from the project. (Of course, not all go thru this devolution: some leave Wikipedia for one of the other projects, where there is not as much interaction with others. And some oscillate back & forth, from frustration over matters such as having to provide their own materials to write articles while WMF collect living wages for doing not obviously improving anything, to indifference or stoicism over matters as a while, then back to frustration.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:03, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Jalt" is an interesting concept. Would like to see more exploration around the insight that initial altruism can become a sense of entitlement, and discussion about how this plays out with capacity building. If we want volunteers to be effective as outreach ambassadors, we need to ensure that highly committed volunteers are supported and recognized, not simply exploited. We might want to reconsider how we view things like transit fare, a souvenir mug or T-shirt, providing more scholarships, including partial support for attending events, support for purchase of reference materials for article writing, etc. We also need to ask ourselves some tough questions about the different outcomes in this community, where one subset of editors gets trolled and doxxed, another subset lives in isolation (or even poverty) due to internet/Wiki addiction, and meanwhile, other editors leverage interaction with Wikipedia into paid careers, lucrative business, professional, and academic opportunities, and fame. Oliveleaf4 (talk) 14:32, 1 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It is no accident that the text-heavy interface of today's Wikipedia looks much like it did in 2001 and is not geared towards today's internet users; it is a direct result of this resistance to change and innovation." One of my interests is adding photos and images to articles. Wikipedia is text-heavy because so many photo sites and photographers seem to want to copyright everything. It was because of this that every photo I take is licensed under creative commons. We need more freely-available photographs. Peter Flass (talk) 23:25, 27 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I think the issue is that precisely the factors that Hill identifies as being the foundation for Wikipedia's success are also large contributors to its culture. The lack of ownership leads to decentralized, fragmented discussions and control by the so-called "obsessives." And as EllenCT suggests, the fact that everybody has a common notion of what an encyclopedia is means that anything that looks different is viewed with suspicion. So if those really are the things that made us successful, I don't know if there's an easy way to embrace the sort of change you want without giving them up. —Emufarmers(T/C)05:00, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This is an excellent article – thanks to Robert for writing it and the Signpost for publishing it. If the rest of the Wikipedia@20 book is like this then I shall be getting a copy. To confront the "asshole consensus", please consider another book: The No Asshole Rule. Wikipedia has some rules of this sort, such as WP:CIVIL, but enforcement has been patchy. But currently there are three admins before Arbcom for being too obnoxious. The outcomes of those cases will be a sign of the times ... Andrew🐉(talk) 20:36, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Andrew Davidson, some of those admins may not have been as obnoxious as your opinion portrays them - let Arbcom decide on that; some may have contributed significantly to what Wikipedia is today, in other ways than prolific creation of content, while other users have systematically contributed with impunity for years to making RfA the toxic process it has become. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:02, 1 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well written, it's nice to see such a critical article, even though I disagree with a lot of the points made. Wikipedia's stable interface is effective and accessible even on modest computers, and many people (myself included) from the traditional open-source culture view the idea that interfaces need to constantly replaced as a form of consumerism and also counter-productive, in that it forces people to continuously re-learn how to do the same thing, fuelling the planned obsolescence and throw-away society culture associated with the rapid obsolescence of computers that aren't expected to do any more than they did two decades ago. In fact, I have been editing wikipedia on a iMac G4 for almost fifteen years now. Wikipedia's modest interface is accessible from text-mode browsers such as w3m and lynx, which run effectively on devices from 20 years ago. Flashy interfaces also usually require JavaScript, which is refused by many people for many reasons. [1][2]. Further, the syntax is extremely fast, flexible, and powerful to work with once you're experienced. Some computer science experts view user friendliness in tools as a weakness, since all tools must be learned. The juice (utility) of must be worth the squeeze (learning curve). Modern interfaces are often less useful than their uglier predecessors [3]. Concussious (talk) 02:26, 2 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I also treasure the fact that it's possible to easily contribute to Wikipedia on a low-spec computer or a non-flagship smartphone. Wikipedia and wikicode's minimalist low-tech nature and resistance to change means that it has dodged the framework inflation which plagues all the trendy Web 2.0 interaction methods. After suffering through the loading hell and bloat on every household-name social media website it's refreshing to deal with an actually responsive (and not in the web design weasel sense of the word) article editing form. True, we're losing some potential editors by not having a trendy interface to compete with Facebook and Instagram, but we'd be losing some other editors if we had that, and let's face it, people active on such websites aren't particularly interested in writing an encyclopedia. Moreover, it's a well known fact in advertising that people distrust the slick and the neat. We could lose readers not only by fumbling the design, but also by being too good at it. I fancy we've actually done a much better job at this than we think. DaßWölf18:41, 29 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You're presenting a false dilemma. There can be more than one editing interface. The simple fact is my parents might have some useful contributions they could make, but they are never ever going to understand wikitext, period. You're implying a WYSIWYG editor is merely a "trendy" thing, rather than something that enables an enormous portion of humanity to do something they simply can't otherwise. (There's a reason computers didn't become something everyone used daily until GUIs became widespread.) Try to edit in wikitext without using your eyes and/or hands sometime, something that some people are unable to do! (Amazingly, some people can edit this way, but it's quite a challenge.) Your attitude is basically what the essay is criticizing: "If people have issues contributing to the project as it is now, too bad. Buzz off; you obviously have nothing useful to add." --47.146.63.87 (talk) 04:48, 5 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia already has a WYSIWYG editor and even a more user-friendly wikitext editor. Judging from a look at recent changes, they together constitute a little under 10% of edits. I don't see either Concussious or me claiming that WYSIWYG cannot coexist with wikitext. We all seem to agree here that many people need more friendly means of editing and WP needs their contributions. There is however a disturbing trend of websites removing functionality in the opposite manner (I find myself more often than not confronted with the same attitude you confer when hoping to interact on Web 2.0 websites). Let's not forget that WP has not only become one of the world's most-visited websites, but has also single-handedly killed the for-profit encyclopedia market, while relying on wikitext in the face of VisualEditor and even longstanding rich text technologies like WordPress. DaßWölf23:58, 5 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, sorry, I might have misunderstood you a little. I wonder how many "non-regulars" are drawn to the other editors. I've read anecdotes that a lot of people don't realize they could edit Wikipedia. Seems like this area could be helped by some research. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 07:02, 7 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
An interesting article. I agree that ease of editing was a factor, but another thing which I think helped Wikipedia become the dominant online encyclopedia is its democracy. Even in the early days, the copyleft meant that the editors could fork it, so no-one could take it over or take it in a direction most of the editors did not want. HLHJ (talk) 04:47, 2 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Concussious has an excellent point here. The fact that Wikipedia isn't the next incarnation of FaceTwitTube is a feature, not a bug. It is better to have an interface that is powerful, flexible, and portable, than one which is pretty. Now, of course, if we can add functionality without damaging that core, by all means. The article is inaccurate in that regard. The community did not object to Visual Editor and MediaViewer on principle, but rather because they were not yet sufficiently developed for use. Once those problems were fixed, community consensus was sought to enable those tools, and was obtained with relatively little fuss. So the objection wasn't "We never want this", it was "This is not yet ready for production use". So far as why Superprotect is still brought up, well, WMF can say all they want that they learned their lesson, but then...Oops! They did it again! (And the issues with a WMF overbearing attitude began even before those issues, too.) Once they demonstrate, by keeping hands off, that they actually learned from those mistakes, trust can be rebuilt. That will take time. SeraphimbladeTalk to me04:08, 4 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
A bit late to the party, unfortunately, because this is a very thought provoking article. Many thanks to Robert Fernandez for writing this up. I don't know if Mr. Fernandez is one of WP's entrenched regulars, but if not I applaud even more his effort to come in and start the discussion. I spend fairly little time on WP compared to the majority of people commenting here, yet it still seems that I'm always running into the same people on Wikipedia, including Signpost bylines.
I absolutely agree that we need more non-asshole voices to break down the asshole consensus. However, I think some of this problem is not an avoidable behaviour problem among the self-selected regulars, as much as it is WP's spontaneous way of doing necessary HR work. The are many problems we don't have to deal with because we aren't an organisation with stratification via ranks, roles and seniority, but there are still those at which we can't wave the "we're a community" magic wand, and some people end up effectively volunteering to fill the role of the HR. (I'm not thrilled about people self-selecting for this role, but I'm also not thrilled about WMF -- despite it being one of the more competent organisations out there -- appointing its own for this job.) How good a job are these people doing? How do we judge what's necessary HR work and what's gatekeeping and acting out personal whims? A confounding factor is that by nature of their work, HR people always end up perceived as assholes. DaßWölf18:41, 29 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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