Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is failing/Archive 4

message: This essay and discussion are evidence people care. Wikipedia will make it because people care.
Every large system, culture, or community has its problems. Wikipedia's problems are being dealt with here, not tucked away.
Sometimes, the ripening process is frustratedly slow, inefficient, and abysmal. But that's the nature of democracy.
Wouldn't it be more constructive to criticize Wikipedia with the prospect of success rather than the prospect of doom?
:Well it does say Wikipedia is failing, rather than Wikipedia is going to fail. --Seans Potato Business 01:41, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikipedia will make it

message: Cyde added a paragraph questioning the criteria - here's my response.  I think in the essay it needs adding as an open question rather than a whole section of its own, because it is vague and there is no evidence to back the assertions made.
On the other hand, it could be a bad idea to use "Featured articles" and "Good articles" as criteria for judging Wikipedia's success. These are time-intensive criteria that probably aren't even applied to the majority of articles that merit them. - probably?  Where is the evidence to back that?
Certainly for the case of Good articles, there must be at least ten times as many articles that meet the criteria out there as ones that are actually tagged as "Good article", because very few people care about or use the "Good article" designation anyway, as it is an unofficial and arbitrary process. - must be?  Why?  Where are they?  What is unofficial about WP:GA?
There has to be some good way to judge the encyclopedic quality of Wikipedia as a whole, but simply using the numbers from "Featured" and "Good" articles doesn't appear to be it. - I didn't use just those numbers, as you must realise.  There is a very large sample of assessed articles, listed at WP:1.0/I.  Worldtraveller 16:18, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Several editors have pointed out here that even the WP 1.0 scale may not be accurate, since in almost every case an article will be reviewed as "Stub", "Start" and "B" unless it is already a Good Article, Featured Article, or perfect. I edited to essay to reflect their concerns. CMummert · talk 19:20, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I do not understand this.  You're saying that articles are rated as less than good, unless they are good, excellent or perfect?  What's the problem with that?  Worldtraveller 01:04, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questioning these criteria 

message: At current exponential rates of growth, in thirthy-eight (38) years, the number of English language Wikipedia articles will out number the mass of the Planet earth expressed in milligrams.  --Heathhunnicutt 23:07, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Exponential Growth

message: Changing the policy that allows anonymous editors to edit Wikipedia has been discussed many a time since 2003. There has been for some time, a perennial proposal to disallow anonymous editing; currently, the limited number of voters are 2:1 in favour of preventing anonymous editing. If you could mosey on over, read, discuss and vote, then maybe we could take this to the next stage. --Seans Potato Business 03:45, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  A positive change is within grasp! 

message: It is common on Wikipedia to decentralize articles.  Some Encyclopedias will treat the entire topic of thermodynamics in one article.  Wikipedia splits off an article for each of the three (or four) laws of TD.  If all these articles were merged, I'm sure our physicists could put together a FA-quality article.  As it stands, the individual articles are too short.  However, the advantage of the current system is that if I'm specifically interested in the third law, it's easier to get there.
This can be generalized to many articles.  There are a lot of small ones that could be merged into larger ones, which might then get closer to GA or FA level.  If we insist on using the decentralized wiki model, we will have to sacrifice that level of quality on a large scale.  I'm okay with that. YechielMan 05:22, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point(s). I agree that this most likely does reduce the number of FA candidates but also that the encyclopedia is probably more useful in this aspect since the main article can give an overview while the sub-articles can go into much more depth than might be desirable if they were all together on the same page. --Seans Potato Business 05:52, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: One reason there aren't more featured articles

message: Like many others I think there are issues, but that this essay goes too far and sometimes misses the forest for the trees. For instance, "There are about 1,300 featured articles. There are also about 1,700 good articles. However, there are currently 1,639,963 articles on Wikipedia. This means that slightly more than 99.8% of all the articles on Wikipedia are not considered well written, verifiable or broad or comprehensive in their coverage."
That conclusion seems clearly false. The cited statistics do NOT mean that 99.8% are not considered well written / et cetera. It means that 99.8% either are not considered well written OR just have not been assessed yet. Based on percentages seen in the large 'article assessment' projects I'd argue that the 'not assessed' portion is significantly greater than those 'assessed to be poor'... and a significant portion of those un-assessed articles are good.
Greater focus on pop culture is true, but not IMO a problem... because the number of 'core' encyclopedia articles of high quality is greater NOW than it was three years ago. 'Failure' would require that the overall core article quality be going down, rather than up.
Degradation of quality articles over time happens in some cases, generally when the growing user population overwhelms compromises on contentious topics which were forged by the handful of earlier editors, but it is not a universal problem and work on 'stable versions' is ongoing and presents a viable solution to this issue. 'Failure' would require that this problem be common to ALL featured articles, and that no plan for addressing it existed.
Finally, this essay focuses far too much on 'featured' and 'good' article percentages. These are new and subjective concepts which really have little to do with the value of Wikipedia to date. Personally, I think the current standards for even featured articles to be lacking the rigor of print encyclopedias... in that we do not systematically review the references to verify that they confirm the information they are given for. However, that doesn't mean Wikipedia is 'failing'... any more than Wikipedia was 'failing' back when we didn't have 'featured articles' at all. The existence of the mere concept of featured articles is proof that Wikipedia is succeeding. We've gone beyond just people showing up and writing about stuff they like to actually having formal requirements and review procedures, which have gotten consistently stricter over time, for identifying high quality content. Despite systematic reviews of old featured articles to remove those which no longer meet the heightened standards our count of featured articles continues to go UP... not down. That is indicative of success, not failure.
Wikipedia has not 'succeeded' in establishing an encyclopedia which is of equal/higher writing and reference quality as Britannica for all articles common to both yet... but it is definitely moving in the direction of success on that front rather than failure. And on the IMO equally important issue of providing useful information on topics which Britannica and the like do not, Wikipedia has certainly succeeded and continues to build on that success. --CBD 12:46, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is complete nonsense, at least if we go by what is happening to the article that I most understand, and have studied most, namely the Philosophy article (since Sep 2003).  Perhaps that article is unique, but I think not.  The article was always degrading, but the pace is accelerating.  Look at it now.  The current position is 2 expert editors against 3 cranks who are determined to wear us out, by concerted action over world time zones.  Of the last 50 edits, all without exception were reverts of some kind, not against vandalism, but against cranky and bizarre contributions by people with some strange theory or other.  I really am trying to let go and walk away, in which case the other guy will go, for sure.  Then, let the deluge begin.  These guys are really determined.  It is a hell of a lot of work just to defend what we have left, and if you divert your attention for a second, some other part is shot to pieces.  It feels like that scene in Apocalypse now where they get to the bridge, and 'Charlie' is everywhere.  They really have won.  Dbuckner 13:14, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: One article. On a contentious subject. Precisely the sort of thing I described being subject to degradation. NOT indicative of Wikipedia as a whole. --CBD 21:24, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, this is one article with one man's struggle to convey truth. However, this is still relevant to our discussion in that we need to systematically and comprehensively remove inaccurate and misinformed posts. Automation would be a nice plus, but not necessary. The unfortunate nature of truth is that there are always more voices for fiction to confuse the matter than there are voices of non-fiction. Therefore, we must determine a process for protecting articles against the uninformed, the misinformed, and even the maligned. Where can we have this discussion? J.H. Gorse 01:47, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

text:  I have to wonder if this article is not a prime example of an unwanted side-effect of WP:OWN. In simple terms, if no one owns an article, then no one cares if that article declines in quality. (I'm sure that the mis-named principle, the tragedy of the commons applies here.) This is not a sugestion that we repeal WP:OWN, but that perhaps tuning that rule -- say allow a WikiProject to adopt important articles & administer some form of the often-discussed "protected version" idea. However, I'll admit that even if a "protected version" tactic becomes policy, it will address only one piece of a larger problem. -- llywrch 21:26, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Something like ? --cesarb 21:53, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thoughts 

message: Let's make a game of it! boys like a little competition, no?  In one day, I made sixteen referenced, categorized articles that didn't exist before from the "D" hotlist at Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles.  If you truly care about truly encyclopedic content, let's see what you can do.  Anyone who bellyaches about the absence of encyclopedic articles and doesn't create sixteen equivalent articles by tomorrow has to...oh, I dunno, there must be a suitable punishment...any suggestions? ;) Willow 17:00, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Here's my alternative competition - get as far up WP:WBFAN as you can.  Bonus points if you get a formerly missing encyclopaedic article as one of your nominations.  Interesting to note that it looks like before too long, I'll be top of that list, without even doing any more writing, because Emsworth's FAs are sadly a regular sight at WP:FAR.  Worldtraveller 19:03, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Oh, loads for cyclol.  I'd be very happy if I felt motivated enough to write more articles, and it would be more fun than complaining, but sadly I don't.  I sometimes wonder what Wikipedia would be like if there were a hundred or two hundred people who could write one FA every two weeks, instead of just a handful.  OK, here's another small challenge - start an article, and get it to a standard where you can nominate it for FA within 24 hours.  It can be done!  Worldtraveller 20:00, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: To that, I can respond that, as "Townie" from The Waterboy famously said, You can do eet!. –Outriggr § 03:00, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No new missing articles today, but I did write one the other day on flying ice cubes. Wait, is that cruft? ;) Opabinia regalis 04:01, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Let's play a better game! :)

message: Since I said above that it's much more productive to discuss how to improve the places where it isn't working very well, I decided to try to do something along these lines, and created Wikipedia:Problems with Wikipedia, where we can objectively list the problems we find with Wikipedia and brainstorm implementable solutions for them. --cesarb 21:19, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  A different approach 

message: That the sample of 300,000 articles assessed, with results listed at WP:1.0/I, is representative of the whole encyclopaedia.. Considering 100% of FAs are assessed and listed there, but only 20% of all articles we have are assessed, this sample is not representantive: it is biased towards higher quality article (which are more likely to attract attention and be assessed).-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  07:43, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wrong assumption 

message: Some good views expressed here.  In these situations I always like to have a list of like-minded people that I and others can refer to. I have started one on my  user page.  To be like-minded you have to agree there is some sort of problem with Wikipedia, and you must believe there is a way of changing it, perhaps gradually, or a little bit, from the inside.  
If you would like to put your name down, please feel free to edit my user page, or leave your name on my talk page.  If you edit my page, please restrict the edit to the format that is already there, under the 'list of like-minded'.
I have put some names there already - if any of those people feel they are not like-minded, or don't like being on lists, please remove!  Thanks edward (buckner) 11:31, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  List of like-minded 

message: This fundamentally assumes that FA is an accurate assessment tool; it is not, it is going the same way as GA: arguments over citation by editors who frequent the place, but who understand neither the subject of the article, nor the function of citation. It should not be surprising, since many of these are the same editors. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:30, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: FAC is currently the only means of identifying which articles are the very best.  It may not work as well as we like, but apart from FA numbers we have no other means of saying how many of our articles are of the highest quality.  I haven't frequented FAC for a few months, but I do see a lot of people voting in support of articles just because they have a lot of citations.  There seems to be an extremely unhealthy mania to cite crazy things, like saying Firstname Surname1 is a popular2 singer3.  Worldtraveller 14:40, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia is a social structure and FAC is a clique within that structure. It may be doing useful work but it is far from clear that the articles it identifies are "the very best." It's criteria are more formalistic than substantive and it makes no pretense of reviewing more than a tiny fraction of articles. In its present form is not suitable as a way to evaluate Wikipedia. Wikipedia lacks a broadly applied evaluation system and it may not be possible to build an effective one internally. Perhaps the best approach is for outside experts to evaluate a sample set articles in their field. The few times this has been tried, Wikipedia did quite well. --agr 15:57, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Is FA a good test?

message: Okay - I'm new here.  Please don't kill me.  But for the past few months I've been wandering about through both the article space and the back alleys of Wikipedia, and I recently started using some of my idle time to clean up obvious vandalism.  I would not contend that I am intimately familiar with the way things work around here, though I would say that I'm passing familiar with a lot of it.
With that preamble out of the way, here's what I notice.  Wikipedia's main flaw, at least so far as the problems illustrated in this essay goes, appears to be not the constant threat of anonymous vandals (I've had to give up just grabbing random IP edits to check for vandalism from the Recent Changes page because so many of them are good, constructive material), but that the project as a whole seems to have little in the way of management.  Absolutely everything is controlled by the community, except for the things that aren't (and hopefully that description accurately depicted how blurry the line can get).
This is a fine way to run a democracy, if that's your thing, but for finishing a project with a goal, it doesn't work out so well.  The reason why none of your vital articles are in good shape is because what experts Wikipedia attracts will likely be interested in working on things that they have expertise in.  Or, to put it differently, they'll be more interested in working on the theoretical physics articles (things that are interesting to experts) than they are on the basic physics article (wouldn't YOU be bored with it if you'd been working with it so long it was burned into your soul?).  Given the fact that any attempt to build consensus around basic concepts, like those that the vital articles concern themselves with, are likely to spark dispute and unpleasantness, why would anybody, least of all an expert, want to work on them?
That disincentive to work on vital articles isn't going to go away.  There are always going to be more people that think they're qualified to edit the general Philosophy article than the specific article on Hyperreality (as evidence, I would say, by the fact that some recent Colbertorrism managed to persist there until I happened to notice it on a random trip through, while the rest of it was cleaned up in neat order).  The problem is that these articles need to be written.  The encyclopedia doesn't need greater quality and specificity in non-vital articles, if the goal is to build from the vital articles out.
Now, if this were a project at any business, all that would happen is the manager would go find some person and order him to write the article.  Maybe we should brainstorm some ways to get people to work on things the encyclopedia needs before they get the opportunity to work on the things that they might really want to?  Not sure how to implement it (forcing one update to an essential article before opening you up to edit anything else for the day is the first thing that comes to mind, but that seems like it might cause more harm than good), but it seems to me like we have to fill the management vacuum and start getting people to do what needs to be done.  I could be wrong, though.  Just thought I'd put it up as an observation from a relative newcomer.Cool moe dee 345 15:45, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a volunteer project. In a job, if your manager wants you to do something that is less interesting than what you want to do, you'll still do it, because you are being paid to do it. In a volunteer project, if people are prevented from doing what they want to do, they do not just work on what other people tell them to. And if it's enforced, they say "This is stupid. I am volunteering my time, only to be told that I must do boring things. I quit." Then, we have next to no experts, so the vital articles are still not very good. And the specialist articles got worse, because they now have no editors. -Amarkov moo! 18:25, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Volunteers are, by definition, altruistic people.  I don't think there would necessarily be an exodus of editors if a modicum of editorial direction and control was applied.  In addition, many of the people who might work on the vital articles are a bit put off by the fact that 75% of the 'encyclopaedia' seems to be about cartoons and pop stars.  For me, writing about vital articles was fun, until I gradually came to realise that there really weren't that many other people doing so.  Worldtraveller 18:40, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Working on many of those vital articles is not fun for most people. I'm going to go edit one of them right now, and see how my change is reverted. -Amarkov moo! 18:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Why would it be reverted? are you going to vandalise it?  Worldtraveller 19:05, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Okay, so it's not as bad as I thought (excluding philosophy articles). Still, the fact remains, it's not fun for some people, and this is a slap in the face; "Your contributions are not good enough unless you contribute in this way." -Amarkov moo! 19:13, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: But we already have numerous policies and guidelines defining what contributions are acceptable and what are not.  WP:NOT is the main list of them.  Worldtraveller 19:19, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's different. WP:NOT, along with all policies, says "X, Y, and Z are not acceptable for Wikipedia". This says "Q is acceptable for Wikipedia, but only if you've done enough W". If a class of contributions is truly acceptable, and not just grudgingly tolerated, then you don't require other things as a condition. -Amarkov moo! 19:26, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Yet Another Modest Proposal