It was calming to read the thoughtful comments here after reading the interesting article submitted to open this thread. And I need some calming today, because I spent a lot of what was meant to be my "free" time yesterday evening in a rollicking dispute on my Wikipedia user talk page about one tiny edit I did the day before. Indeed, the experience of being a Wikipedia editor is usually not even fun, not to mention not rewarding.

The submitted article notes that "in July 2012, some editors started a page called WikiProject Editor Retention with the idea of creating a place to brainstorm ideas about helping newcomers and fostering a friendlier atmosphere. Today the most vibrant parts of that project’s discussion page have gripes about 'bullying done by administrators,' debates over whether 'Wikipedia has become a bloody madhouse,' and disputes featuring accusations such as 'You registered an account today just to have a go at me?'" Yep, I visited that WikiProject Editor Retention a while ago to see if I could pick up some tips there on how to encourage conscientious editors to stay involved in Wikipedia, but all I found was that kind of dispute and back-biting.

It happens that my main area of professional research is connected to topics that are among the ten most edit-warred topics on Wikipedia.[1] So from the beginning of my involvement on Wikipedia in 2010, I've seen lots of reverts and lots of article talk pages that go on and on and on and on to waste time about petty disputes. Because I used to a professional periodical editor, and later an academic journal editorial assistant when pursuing my postgraduate degree, I have a sense of what a collaborative editing looks like, and I try to suggest to Wikipedians[2] how we can all collaboratively built an even better free, online encyclopedia.

It's slow and pains-taking work to edit articles on controversial topics. I have found it helpful to compile source lists,[3] because Wikipedia always needs new sources, and then post links to the appropriate source lists to the talk pages of articles. Sometimes I see sources taken up by other editors months after I post such a link, gradually improving the quality of some articles. And of course I continually add new sources to my source lists whenever I learn about them from seeing them used in Wikipedia. I go to my alma mater's academic library frequently to circulate reference books about the topics I research (mostly for work, but also for Wikipedia), and I devote a lot of time to verifying sources. About two hours of "free" time today were devoted to transcription typing of quotations from reference books into Wikipedia-format citations, which I hope to use in the next few months to update articles.

To answer some questions that came up in comments posted before this comment, Wikipedia does have a too-radical culture of not taking experts seriously, but indeed that is partly because it is hard to verify who is an expert. Wikipedia got badly burned once by a young guy who claimed to be an older guy with academic credentials and actual expertise on certain topics, and that phony not only pushed around a lot of other editors while editing articles, but even got a job at the Wikimedia Foundation without his background being checked out beforehand.[4] So now Wikipedia is once burned, twice shy about anyone who claims to be an expert. Come with sources, and everyone will join in the scrum of deciding whether or not you are an expert.

One person in this discussion thread claims to be an expert (and I believe him) and he wonders how much of a detailed reference he has to give for a widely known fact. There are a BUNCH of the 4,359,600 articles now on English Wikipedia that cite no sources, or at best only cite the name of a book or article without any page reference. So if you are really sure that a standard reference book in your field backs up a fact you've just inserted in the article, you can add a reference like <ref>Smith Handbook of Physics</ref> and let other editors sort out what edition of the handbook, and what page of the handbook, backs you up. I see that iterative process of improving references happen all the time, sometimes over years.

We have frequent discussions of the defects of Wikipedia here on Hacker News. I still wonder if there is space for a new effort to build a nonprofit, free, online encyclopedia for the whole world. Is the current Wikipedia just the AltaVista that will be replaced by a yet unknown Google? I think a more healthy and professional editing environment could still let another effort to build an online encyclopedia take off and surpass Wikipedia, if only it had enough seed funding.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23354613

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Editing

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji#Source_L...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05wikipedia.htm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy