User:Timbktoo/Survey/responses/Mortee

Response to User:Timbktoo/Survey from Mortee

Your role

What exactly do you do (most specific user group)?

I'm an editor. I'm not certain what 'user groups' means, but the permissions I have are rollback, pending changes reviewer, AFC reviewer (assessing articles created by new users and deciding helping them get to publishable quality) and AWB so I can do semi-automated fixes like fixing common typos. When I was most active, I spent my time on a whole mix of things. I've written some articles, rescued some others, fought vandalism, all sorts. I have a long (and not shrinking!) to-do list if you want a flavour of it.

How long have you been an editor/admin/user of Wikipedia?

Apparently I registered as an editor 4 years, 1 month and 26 days ago. I'm not sure when I first started using it, but probably around 2003, 2004.

How active are you in that capacity?

I'm almost inactive as an editor currently, but I read it voraciously.

Do you consider this your primary occupation or only a hobby?

A hobby. Reading, editing or administrating Wikipedia should almost never be an occupation because it's generally against the rules to be paid for it.

Your thoughts

What do you think of Wikipedia as a project?

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Wikipedia is one of the great accomplishments of the modern age. It's done an astonishing job of making a giant swath of knowledge available globally, easy to discover, and completely free, both to read and to re-use. On top of its incredible value as a source for readers, by allowing commercial re-use it also drives and enables for-profit products of enormous value - the great majority of Alexa's general question answering capability, for example, is derived from Wikipedia, and Google derives a lot of its on-page information from us.

That's the result of Wikipedia, but as a project to take part in, it's more complicated. On one side, it's a striking testament to the capacity for and potential of large scale human cooperation. It's also, perhaps inevitably, become highly bureaucratic and wastes a lot of time on pseudo-legalism and debates, controversies and self-policing that, while necessary to a degree, can be a distraction when looked at with the big picture in mind.

What do you see in the future for the site?

A couple of thoughts. One is that structured data will only become a bigger component of what we do. Expanding the use of Wikidata makes it easier for different articles, and particularly articles written in new languages, to make use of work that has gone before, and it also makes technical exploitation of that information (e.g. Alexa, Google as above) much easier. On the other hand, wrangling that data can be cumbersome and boring, and because it's less transparent it's easier for mistakes and bad design to linger. Making it possible and appealing for a far wider group of people to contribute to that will be a big and important challenge.

For another, as Wikipedia has expanded to cover so many topics, more of the work involved is in maintenance rather than creation. What I mean by that is that articles need to be improved, cleaned and updated, rather than written from scratch. That appeals to different people, and perhaps fewer, which raises challenges. That shift will only continue over time. It also leads to a lot of the bureacracy, internal gatekeeping and drama that can make Wikipedia a frustrating place to spend time as an editor. Because so much of the work inevitably involves changing other people's writing, to which they naturally have some attachment, emotions can get involved in a way that's unhelpful. Likewise, as Wikipedia has become such a visible and important site, people come to see articles as somehow definitive of their subjects, which means any change is seen as more significant – perhaps without a proper sense of proportion.

How might the subjects covered by Wikipedia be expanded?

Rewrite the guidelines about notability. These are the least principled and most limiting component of Wikipedia's rules about itself. The general rules are good, and derive in a principled way from the fact that our articles must always be verifiable, i.e. based on reliable sources. But a whole series of other restrictions have grown up in particular topic areas that are wildly varied and inconsistent with one another. On one side they mean that we have an incredible number of almost empty articles about footballers, for example, because literally anyone who's played in a match between two important teams – at any time – is considered notable. On the other, it's allowed, for example, calm, patient moral crusades to wipe out a lot of our coverage of pornography and related subjects on the basis that performers are covered by more specialist publications, not the New York Times, and by disallowing industry-specific awards as an indication of significance. (Having written this, I learn that we actually deprecated those particular guidelines two years ago when I wasn't looking, prompted by someone's concern which was the opposite of my own but it is nonetheless good news. Other examples are available.) In general, I'm not convinced that notability should be a consideration. If the facts in an article are shown through reliable sources to be correct, why shouldn't we cover everything, no matter how trivial it might seem to some people? That's an interesting debate that's no doubt been continued in one form or another since January 2001. The article deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia is relevant here.

Also, better measurement and outreach about neglected areas. Women in Red is a fantastic example of a project on Wikipedia to identify a set of related articles that are missing, in this case biographies of women, to highlight them and provide enough information for editors to get started on doing the research needed to rectify the situation. More of that would be excellent. One idea would be to combine the many such efforts that no doubt exist in specific niches on pages that make them more discoverable to a broader audience. I'm sure a lot of that is already happening and I should look into it at some point.

In general, there's a big challenge about recruiting and retaining editors. That's a very complex topic but it's fundamental to any expansion of topics. If you're going to get new articles and keep old ones up to date, you need editors to do that.

Your experience

What have you seen, do you have any stories?

A few things. One of the biggest dramas during the time I was most active, but which I stayed out of almost entirely, was the Second Infobox Wars. You can see the resulting ARBCOM case here and sample the tenor of the conversation here or various of these.

How big a problem is vandalism?

Quite big. When people first realise that Wikipedia is both very visible and freely editable, a lot of them have the instinct to mess with it, either just to see that they can do it, or for thrills, or to annoy others.

How easily is vandalism dealt with?

It's become much easier to deal with both through automation and through the automated flagging of potentially bad edits on the recent changes page. Nevertheless, a lot of human work has to go into keeping the place clean and tidy. The more volunteers sign up, add pages to their watchlist and look through changes to see what's causing trouble, the better the encyclopedia will be.

Comments

Since this is all very interesting I thought I might add a couple of my reactions to others' survey responses here. Anyone reading this is equally welcome to comment on my own below or whereever else.

Elliot321 makes some great points with admirable brevity.

• I think the site will stick around for a while. I agree. For any site, the real question about its future is whether it will exist in any meaningful form. We're far enough into the internet age to all know of sites that have been huge and have fallen by the wayside. I don't see that for Wikipedia. It's doing something important in a way that's extremely difficult to reproduce. In 2040, I wouldn't be surprised if the world has moved on from Facebook and Twitter, but I think Wikipedia will still be around.
• More reliable coverage of niche topics would be useful for expansion. This is an extremely good point. Wikipedia relies on reliable sources. As print media and specifically local reporting collapse, that makes it more difficult, not easier, to find good sources for topics we would otherwise cover. Perhaps we'll find a way to contribute better to the development of the primary sources the encyclopedia relies on, or perhaps the current decay will continue and Wikipedia will only be able to cover more prominent topics. We'll see. We might have a moral imperative to do so, since the free availabilty of information is one of the forces behind that collapse, and Wikipedia is contributing to it (with the best of intentions and a lot of significant benefits).
• Sneaky vandalism is much worse. Exactly right. Crude vulgarity is easy enough to spot with a program and either fix directly or bring to the attention of editors. Cocking with someone's date of birth is a common enough vandal pastime that it tends to be spotted quickly. But more subtle and elaborate falsehoods can last a long time, especially if they fake references, which are otherwise our best method of maintaining the trustworthiness of the site. You might enjoy List of hoaxes on Wikipedia