https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596682
And that this in turn is what drives editors away. So it very much supports my point.
That is explicitly what it isn't, anything but that.
> I can't comment exactly on the editor situation of the wiki, but it's to be expected a shift to more specialized and aggressive "curation" of articles, specially of more solidified topics. Wikipedia's fantastic performance contradicts this argument.
Wikipedia would still be a fantastic resource if nobody contributed to it from today forward. But that does not mean it couldn't be a whole lot better without the army of lawyer wannabes that are in a tug of war over who gets to have the most power over others by citing policies until the cows come home.
Lots of long time contributors have left because of this and the exodus is far from over. I agree that there is an expected shift to curation but the fantastic performance of wikipedia is not in any way evidence for there not being a significant negative undercurrent at work.
That's just evidence of how good the concept originally was and how much momentum it has built up.
Any kind of success will attract two kinds of people: those that wish to contribute and those that see it as a means to their personal ends, to get a piece of that success. Since wikipedia is not big on credit for contributions the only place where people craving for recognition get to achieve their fix is in becoming 'editors', and unfortunately the motivations of those editors are not always pure.
See elsewhere in this thread for some of the more bizarre displays of such behavior.
But you don't address the problems that some good faith editors have with making edits to improve the project.
These problems include over-zealous reverts by people making rapid automatic edits -- sometimes in a misguided attempt to show they "work hard" is a drive for adminship; page ownership and the accusations of bad faith that go with that (BDR fails hard when you have a group owning a page).
Wikipedia has strict socking policies so most experienced editors never try making a new account to edit, but I recommend that any experienced wikipedia edit tries this at least once a year. (And socking is allowed in this case because IAR)
IAR can be and indeed is invoked all the time, making Wikipedia a bad example of how strict rule adherence stifles a community. It was quite a simple point that needn't warrant downvotes, italics and so many HN searches.
> It was quite a simple point that needn't warrant downvotes, italics and so many HN searches.
You ask for more evidence in the same comment in which you rant against 'so many HN searches', do you notice the inconsistency there?
Try using WP:IAR anywhere on WP today and you'll quickly see how far WP has moved from founding priciples.
EDIT: I mean, just look at usernames. You're supposed to be able without a login, but sometimes that causes problems. So you go to create a username. The software has a list of words that you can not use (very. Few people think allowing a username like "JewKiller666" is a good idea). But then there's a username policy. This has been reviewed to make it more friendly to new users. But the application of those rules is still pretty hostile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username
That's the policy. See the changes to the "misleading" names section. That section had to be expanded because editors using their real name in a different script (eg, Japanese users) were being told their unicode name was misleading. Or a user with a eg psuedo-random string of characters was told that their name was confusing, even thoigh there wasn't any other name or namespace to confuse "kejdhdkaksaas983" with.
The "dealing with inappropriate usernames" section required a lot of work to prevent the admin-wannabe users from making many reports.
Once you've picked a name that gets past the software's filters but which an editor -or bot- thinks is bad you face:
1) templates. {{subst:uw-username}}
2) a RFC http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RFC/N
3) an administrator notice board http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_adminis...
Notice that bot reports which the not admits may be low quality get sent to UAA, not the lower levels of discussion.
4) a holding pen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_adminis...
This convoluted conflicting mass of policy is hostile to new users, especially in the way it gets applied by editors. Just try using "WP:IAR" during this process.
