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Looks like they nearly shut the door on new admins circa 2008 and the existing group is slowly attriting.
Wikipedia is an RPG and it’s too hard for new players.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Hopefully they realize it's not healthy for Wikipedia in long term and make a course correction.
No idea how they work internally but probably some kind of mentoring program would be in order. There's no way someone relatively new will learn all their quirks that have been developed in the past decade and too many people on the internet expect you to know everything already to be worth a shit to them.
There is a mentoring program and I'm a part of it. Unfortunately, a lot of the accounts going through it very blatantly aren't there to actually make a good Wikipedia article on something, but to instead promote themselves or their company.
Half-baked idea incoming.
Wiki Jr. A Wikipedia dedicated to kids culture. Kids contribute and edit, have a mentor, put it on college applications. When they turn 18 can migrate account to real Wikipedia.
Possibly, though Wikipedia and all of its related projects have an 18+ requirement. Likely because of copyright issues, as under 18 year olds legally can't give up a share-alike license on the content they make.
Note that this requirement is not really enforced
It is if you reveal you're underaged. But if you keep quiet about it, no one will know. That's true for the entirety of the internet.
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Free child labor, nice
I know it’s a joke, but the world isn’t super black and white. Kids want to help, by nature. My family owned a business when I was underage. I wanted to help and did little little things, but not allowed to help customers. When I was old enough I got hired for real and paid for it. By then I knew most things and was a good contributor, and learned a lot about balancing ledgers and counting registers, etc.
I also was manager at a young age after I moved out and went to other things, because I had experience already!
This isn’t to say I’m for child labor. Just that, for centuries kids have helped out and learned things by being a part of stuff. Blocking that off complete until they are 18 isn’t benefiting them either. Just to be clear though, the thought of kids working in meat plants and such; sickens me. 😷
I’m only pointing out the world isn’t black and white, and that perhaps there are in-between places which can benefit youths.
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How have they “basically shut the door” in new admins? There has been three new admins in the last three months and there is currently an ongoing request for adminship which has a 100% support rate
Maybe they were denied as a Wikipedia admin? lol
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Everyone's pointing out that this is specifically about admins (not editors) and the general difficulty of wikipedia editing specifically due to its rules and reversions, but I really feel compelled to offer a counterpoint: this applies to wiki editing in general.
I've been editing mediawiki-based game sites since the mid 2000s - before Wikia became Fandom, before it was evil, before it started gobbling up smaller wikis with tempting financial offers. I took a decade+ off and only recently found myself drawn back into the hobby in the last couple of years when I found a game I loved that had a burgeoning wiki that seemed to need help.
I was handed admin privileges within a month because an extension I wanted to use (ReplaceText) was locked behind admin. Two years later, I'm still there because I hold 85-90% of the edits on it. And I. Just. Can't. Get. Help. Not even from the site owner that handed me admin. I've gotten interest from I think seven whole people in all that time, and all but two dropped off within a week or two; the remaining two have a page or two they each maintain but leave the rest of the site to me. And this is a live service game, so it's a neverending stream of event pages and new content that I, and only I, keep going. (Worse: the live service content follows predictable formats, so most of my new pages start by copying another page. This would be so easy for anyone to learn.)
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
Not gonna lie. I think most people just don't want work for free for some company's benefit.
Why are you providing a service for some live service game that doesn't pay you for it ?
They do pay me for it actually, in in-game currency, as part of the same content creator program they use to reward fan artists and streamers and such. In the lonely "why bother" moments, it's all that keeps me editing.
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Did Marx and Lenin never write about "hobbies"?
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
Is there like... a way of "getting into" it? I feel part of the issue might be the lack of a cultural pipeline for people who are the right personality type to potentially enjoy it to ever be exposed to it as a potential hobby. The closest I've ever seen to any kind of popular internet culture referencing it is that Randall Munroe would occasionally make reference to wiki editing in his XKCD comics and blagposts.
Idk, for me getting into it was just a matter of (1) use wiki as a reference (2) see thing on wiki that needs fixed (3) try to fix it myself, hitting preview and pulling from other similar pages to get formatting right (4) it works - hobby interest awakens.
People nowadays seem too afraid to mess things up to ever consider trying step 3 on their own. I get this impression when I occasionally help other game wikis as well - sometimes one of their templates will seem especially complicated and I just drop the relevant info in their discord instead, and I get all the same pleading not to worry about messing things up before I say "actually I just had to get back to my own wiki and didn't have time to play with it, sorry!" (Shoutout to rimworld wiki admins for being neat and taking submissions through discord like that)
Interesting experience. We started a wiki for our open source project, the community hit the ground running with it. I couldn't have built a better wiki myself. Players love contributing to the wiki every game update. It's bizarre how polar opposite our experiences are.
It's not that bizarre - a community that's coalescing around an open source project is sure to be a lot more inclined toward technical hobbies than the one that gathers around an otome game. I knew that from the start... but still, I was hoping for more like-minded fans than none.
Back when I started editing on an MMORPG wiki, people were a lot more willing to pitch in, even if they weren't that confident. I've asked for help enough times in the past and just got "looks too hard" and other blank stares in response, with a tacked on "thanks for all your work" to maintain the status quo.
Glad to hear your project is going well, at least.
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This seems somewhat important. Things, even major institutions in the internet, can be very generational. Never thought about that in terms of Wikipedia before.
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Many people pointed this out in the link but yeah, it's much harder to make edits / entries in wikipedia nowadays.
The rules are more strict and you have to respect an increasing number of rules, etc.
I remember when Wikipedia started to get some steam, it was basically a text editor with very basic hyperlink-style formatting.
Minor changes / typos are still easy to do, but frankly I wouldn't know how to start anymore if I wanted to create a new entry.
I've corrected a typo before and had it reversed by a bot. Why the fuck would I help them again?
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I've tried editing a few articles years ago, only to have everything undone hours later with no explanation why and nothing in the way of constructive criticism for whatever invisible criteria the power users were looking for. I don't even bother anymore and avoid using the entire site if I can find what I need elsewhere.
Push away eager contributors and you're stuck with the old guard before you realize it.
That was my experience trying to clean up some obvious typos. I've never bothered trying to contribute again.
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Unfortunately as more and more people got online it became more and more ripe for abuse. I can't imagine Wikipedia not getting horrible defaced if its editorial standards were still in 2006. Old Wikipedia had some weird shit. Not every mid-level WW2 Nazi commander needed a page of thinly-veiled apologia, and thankfully many of those excesses are already dealt with. Also, the articles in general are of a higher quality than they used to be.
I hope they can work out a solution that allows trusted junior editors to become admins more easily.
It is funny looking back to the earliest articles and how little rules and regulations there were for making them. Including just how loose the reliable source rules were, since there was little oversight on using, say, someone's blog as a source of information.
Back in the early days, I noticed my town had a wikipedia entry, but no demonym (word for people who live there; e.g. New Yorker, San Franciscan). I thought of a slightly rude word whose first half happened to be my town's name (think if, say, Parisians were called "Parisites"), and added it as the demonym, totally unsourced, as a joke to show my buddy. It stayed. For a few years it stayed, never questioned. Then, the new Mayor used it in a speech; presumably, she'd looked it up on wikipedia. That speech was published in the local paper. The local paper was added to the page as a source, and not by me. A high-school gag between friends was now a sourced and cited fact.
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Yea, I'm happy to make minor edits and do reverts on vandalism, but starting something? Man, I have no idea what the best practices are.
In general you can just do it. As long as it's not malicious it's probably fine.
One of their rules/motos is "be bold"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold
Creating new articles seems hard though
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I've lost all my respect for the official wikipedia when they deleted a page that I frequented regular. It was an overview about the generational differences between products from one large manufacturer. iirc it was dismissed as an ad or something.
The infuriating part was that this page existed for 10+ years, had 200 different authors, and 100k+ monthly views. But yeah, mods went power tripping with no regard to the dozens of hours unpaid volunteers put in. Fuck this
It's a massive problem. Pro wrestling pages have been fucked over by the same powertripping mods for years. Earlier the page had all the moves/finishers and entrance music written there but all of it was removed for no logical reason.
Yeah any good faith edit I’ve ever made gets reverted within 5 minutes. Why should I care to contribute if that’s the case? I stopped donating to wikipedia.
The handful of people that maintain it can have their kingdom.
After I noticed this bs the very first thing I did was checking if archive.org had a copy, which they did, and since then I regularly donate to them instead.
Just a showerthought:
Maybe that's part of a much bigger generational divide. Maybe Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the old pre-commercialization internet. "From the people for the people", but actually from people whose hobby it is to spend time in front of a computer screen.
BBS systems, usenet, forums, early websites, slashdot, open source, Wikipedia, early reddit, ...
in contrast to: ConpuServe, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, Tiktok
Editing early Wikipedia waa easy, fun, and meant something. You freed information from behind a paywall. Free as in speech.
Now, everything is free as in beer ("some restrictions apply") and editing a wiki is no longer easy when you grew up swiping an iphone, not hacking a unix terminal. This, plus admin culture.
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I think this happens to all professions.
I edited articles as a teenager in the early 00s when most people still used brittanica and Encarta. The quality was probably really bad, but the articles didn't yet exist or only had a stump.
But the articles now have a much higher quality, with good sources and a very consistent style. If an article doesn't exist today, it was purposefully removed because it did not meet the criteria to have a wiki page.
Obviously, such a thing becomes more of a dedicated hobby and not something a few amateurs do on a whim.
Similar things happened to YouTube videos, or historically, to things like singing, story telling, quilting, etc.
As something becomes more popular, the pool of participants grows and the selection becomes more difficult.
If I understand this correctly, Wikipedia might be in trouble once the old guard retires because new ones aren't coming?
That's one take away. An alternative I've seen is that it's much harder to become an admin. The alternative makes sense to me, but definitely still be an issue since most people only have so much free work they're willing to put in.
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I gave up editing as a hobby when others got really pissy with me when I said that just having a newspaper mention a restaurant did not make the restaurant notable.
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