from Hacker News

The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia

by polm23 on 9/26/21, 11:16 AM with 36 comments

  • by poxycat on 9/26/21, 7:20 PM

    Having contributed to the Danish Wikipedia, I was astounded by the arrogance and the accusations by the other contributors/mods. That was what made me not contribute anymore.

  • by AdrianB1 on 9/26/21, 9:21 PM

    As a long time, low volume contributor, I see 2 explanations for what happens:

    1. There is not a lot to contribute as a lot of matters are already covered. This is not a bad thing at all.

    2. Moderators do a very bad job. Last year I created an entire article about a popular vehicle, it took 6 months to be published and it was just about a page long with solid references. At one time it was rejected because it had "not enough external links", so I added half a dozen links to the dealers selling that vehicle, on top of the original manufacturer page. This discourages contributors and it is a serios problem.

  • by m0llusk on 9/26/21, 9:12 PM

    There is plenty of room for more content but deletion focused contributors remove whole classes of articles and tend to turn off whole groups of contributors in the process. The biggest challenge for Wikipedia now is to find some way to tame the rise of deletion as a form of contribution.

  • by pphysch on 9/26/21, 9:50 PM

    Part of the problem is that philosophically, Wikipedia wants to pretend that contributors are "thin" interfaces for pure knowledge. That there is a well-defined set of "reliable sources" and all contributors have to do is summarize and create hyperlinks to them.

    Not surprising given the ~Objectivist philosophies of its creators.

  • by cratermoon on 9/26/21, 8:28 PM

    It was never and can never be sustainable to depend on a small number of super-contributors for a "crowd-sourced" knowledge store.

    Maybe the Wikimedia Foundation should focus more on attracting and keeping a broader range and number of contributors instead of curating few it considered "good".

  • by wly_cdgr on 9/26/21, 5:21 PM

    This study sounds like it's part of a strategy to establish corporate control of Wikipedia

  • by sleepysysadmin on 9/27/21, 1:11 PM

    I don't know, but I wonder if the loss of these contributors is also why wikipedia became so biased.

  • by spoonjim on 9/26/21, 6:29 PM

    The bigger Wikipedia gets, the less contribution is required, since the “static” content gets more and more covered.