There are other factors at play at Wikipedia too. In my native language, Danish, Wikipedia is all but dead. Years ago, I tried contributing within my own field. I researched and spent hours adding relevant information to different topics, only to find out a few days after that all my contributions had been deleted by the administrators.
Here is the Danish site for one of the most beloved Danes: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup
Here is the English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup
It's just one example, but it is true for culture, history and many other areas. If you want to know anything on Danish matters, the English Wikipedia is usually a much better option than the Danish.
One of Wikipedia's power users, [...] Assuming he
doesn't sleep or eat or anything else [...]
that's still one edit every four minutes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plymouth_Brethren...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Raymond_Ramazani_...
This is especially true if the content itself gives authoritative or complete information about something, as Warnock's dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma) described:
""" The problem with no response is that there are five possible interpretations:
* The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There's nothing more to say except "Yeah, what he said."
* The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out.
* No one read the post, for whatever reason.
* No one understood the post, but won't ask for clarification, for whatever reason.
* No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.
— Bryan C. Warnock """
In this way, I think the voting system became popular, not only because it's usable a mechanism to select interesting information, but also gives an important feedback to encourage the poster, same for the "Like" button. However, they has their own problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
While not every topic belongs on Wikipedia, there are a number of other places where your article would be appreciated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
Deleting articles doesn't prevent anyone from participating, since anyone can write/edit articles on any notable subject. The deletion process protects Wikipedia from search engine marketers who try to promote their clients with biased low-quality content. They can go to Quora for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Reas...
1. Must represent a single person, not a company, organization, website, band, partnership, or other group of people
2. Must not be deceptive or impersonate someone else
3. Must not be unreasonably long
4. Must not be inflammatory or imply that you intend to troll
If you create an account that doesn't meet this policy, an administrator will prevent you from editing until you choose a new username, and you can continue afterward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy
You're absolutely right in that Wikipedia needs to improve its user experience to ensure that new editors know what the rules are before they accidentally violate them.
The test is called the "general notability guideline". In short, any topic needs to have at least 2 citations to different sources that meet all of the following requirements:
1. The source provides significant coverage (at least 1-2 sizable paragraphs) of the topic
2. The source is reliable
3. The source is a secondary source that is editorially and financially independent of the subject (and of the other source)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_n...
A manual for the file format would not meet requirement #3, since it's a primary source that was published by the company who developed it.
This rule is in place to prevent companies from publishing information about their own products, and then promoting them on Wikipedia in a biased way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio...
Drafts in AfC will not be deleted for being non-notable, but they will also not be indexed by search engines.
When a draft is ready to be published, a reviewer looks over it and ensures that it is properly cited, before moving it to the encyclopedia proper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Userspace_draft
Userspace drafts also won't be deleted for non-notability, and they can be published whenever the editor feels that they're ready.
Neither of the draft spaces on Wikipedia are indexed by search engines, because these staging areas generally aren't proofread by other editors.
However, it isn't considered an independent source, since it was written by a company with a vested interest in the topic.
To prove that the file type is notable, you'll need at least different 2 sources that meet all 3 requirements: they must provide significant coverage of the topic, be reliable, and be independent of the topic.
You don't have to use these sources to write all of the content in your article, but they do have to be cited as references to pass the notability test.
The three most common kinds of reliable sources are:
- Articles or web pages from a reputable news organization, magazine, or web publisher (with an editorial team)
- Books from a reputable publishing company
- Publications from a peer-reviewed academic journal
Offline and non-English sources are accepted.
If you can't find at least 2 sources that meet these requirements, then the topic doesn't pass the notability test and isn't suitable for Wikipedia. In this case, you're probably better off sharing your article somewhere else, such as Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or your personal blog.
When I said that it "doesn't prevent anyone from participating", I was only considering the editors who are interested in writing about a wider variety of topics.
For better or worse, Wikipedia frowns on editors who are only interested in editing articles on one topic. There's a page for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Single-purpose_accou...
This is because these editors usually have a conflict of interest, and must make an extra effort to keep their writing free of bias.
Policies aimed at improving the quality of articles also tend to reduce participation. It's a trade-off, and I don't know that the optimal balance would be.
1. Mentioning Gab as a possible site to sign up for is "pretty blatantly out of line" and a violation of the Stack Exchange Code of Conduct, and
2. If they discovered that a job candidate had a Gab account, they would throw out the application based upon that fact alone.
So it's not just internet communities; we've got academics openly bragging that even engaging with a community they politically disapprove of, regardless of your individual views, will lead to them barring you from employment in academia.
Since she is your family member, you're asked to disclose that you have a conflict of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
But the answer is yes.
There are two places where editors can ask for help: the Teahouse (for new editors) and the Help Desk (for anyone).
I almost left during the year of the US primaries as the news was majority political and simply more garbage, so I'm glad that got cleaned up.
Often I don't have anything "more" to say on top of what has been said, so I wont add noise. That may be a common thread with lurkers. When I do have a unique perspective and I feel adds value and not noise I may comment, keyword is "may".
I couldn't care less about karma, popularity, social scores or the like (just more garbage). As long as this site and it's users continue to provide value to me by filtering and aggregating tech news I will continue to use it.
Just another lurker mooching off of non lurkers. Selfish yes, but it works.
Sure, but we should consider which outliers most internet discussions end up encouraging. They're going to encourage people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions. It's going to encourage people who spend less time writing their comments, because if you're spending 15-45 minutes making sure your comment is of high enough quality you're simply not going to be able to make many comments. If you spend a few seconds/a few minutes writing one, you can make a lot. It's going to encourage comments when people are outside of their own areas of expertise or when they don't have much to say (because you're not going to be seeing all the people who refrained from commenting).
You mentioned voting, but the same issue applies. Someone who has fewer time obligations is going to end up upvoting/downvoting a lot more comments than someone with an very active offline life. Someone who votes before reading an entire comment is going to be able to make a lot more votes than someone who does. Someone who upvotes/downvotes everything because of how they feel is going to be giving out more votes than someone who wants to reserve those for truly bad/truly good comments. Someone who checks whether or not a comment is true is going to have less time to vote than someone who doesn't. Someone who has time to refresh a page every 10 minutes throughout the day is going to be voting earlier, affecting what comments/posts even get seen by less active user (people with other things to do miss a post because really active users downvoted it off the front page within 30 minutes).
A lot of people seem to be unaware that this is an issue, and think the internet is representative of society at large. But commenting and voting as much as you want encourages certain kinds of content from certain kinds of people (a small subsection of people[1]), and discourages content from others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you see a lot from students but not as much from working parents, etc.
This might be why online discourse is especially toxic around any subject that actually has to overlap with people out in the real world: The people least in touch with it are best positioned to dominate the conversation. And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects. One of the problems with this has been that it's actually impossible to get a real understanding of what motivates people who disagree with you. Even if you go looking, all you will ever find are the worst representatives of that worldview.
It's definitely true of subjects like politics, but it's also kind of true about things like dating or relationship advice or even restaurant reviews. Even job advice can be spotty. The conversation is always amplifying the voices of people who have strong, poorly thought out opinions. And in cases like politics people aren't even really interested in discussion. John Scalzi characterizes it as "gamified rhetoric" (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1025372965754621953) where the whole rhetorical strategy is to frustrate and exhaust you by nitpicking everything you say. The goal isn't to clarify, synthesize, or understand so much as to "disqualify" you and your perspective from consideration.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-...
We have some of the sexyist media around telling us we should all be sleeping around and yet apparently sex is down too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex...
Are we sure it's any different for other topics?
Also, as for media and marriage I feel like more media is about bad marriages than good ones. A common theme might be falling in love and getting married but a movie about people already married seems rarely about things going well. Or maybe I just have a selective memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
The notion that manufacturing workers are the real America and desk jobs are held by privileged outliers may have been true at one time, but today it is a myth. The right model for “average working stiff” today works in a hospital, restaurant, or government office building.
Stats per BLS: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...
This thought often crosses my mind in particular when I consume media that is more 'psychological' in nature. Much of the time I can't shake the feeling that no matter how convincing the characters and their 'inner life' is presented, we're still ultimately seeing a projection of the writer themselves.
Sometimes I notice how certain characters seem richer than others, and usually these characters are obviously closer to the writer's own life. Perhaps this is why slice-of-life shows seem to do well (Atlanta, Better Things, Louie), because they're just the writers writing about themselves.
Or when I read a Dostoevski novel, I can't help but wonder how much of these character's inner lives are really just thinly-veiled versions of Dostoevski's (and, considering my love for his novels, probably my thoughts are 'compatible' with his).
What makes all this worse or more complicated though is that especially for television as a media, there are all sorts of pretty serious constraints. A show needs cliffhangers, ideally every episode, and at least every season, and unless you're on Netflix, you need mini-cliffhangers before every ad block. I imagine that's got to have some significant effect on the story.
I rather like this article by David Foster Wallace that sort-of goes into all of this: https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf (E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction).
This is actually why disinformation works so well. Many people are consumers. A handful of people create content. Everyone has an expected behavior in a rather fragile system. If an organized group comes in and acts in a way that is outside of the system norms, they can very much control the dialog.
I did a project on this during my Masters. [1] Reddit has an option to display your upvotes and downvotes publicly. About 2% of users have this option enabled. I scraped a random sample that I found from the torrent of all Reddit posts and comments. I looked at pairs from that set that shared common votes and the highest pair was from /r/the_donald. This behavior is what allowed it dominate the front page for so long. When most users are just voting on 1 or 2 things per page, and someone else comes along and votes for every post they see, it can greatly affect what is displayed.
When you have a small set of people controlling a conversation, they can manipulate what a huge number of people consume. Social media is an incredibly effective propaganda machine!
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/82ylpv/_/d...
It also helps that she wrote a #1 NY Times best-seller that everyone is talking about[0]. Maybe if you read it you will understand what makes her so special.
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⁰ https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Michelle-Obama-ebook/dp/B079...
That's what I did for Wikipedia's article on software synthesizers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_synthesizer), which in 2014 was rather out of date, particularly on its "typical" examples and other elements.
The article does look a fair bit better now. It does seem to still carry a little awkwardness (eg statements like "a software instrument is akin to a soundfont" which is not really correct) and a few out-of-date moments (eg why mention Csound and Nyquist as music programming language examples but not mention more common examples these days such as Max/MSP or PureData?) and some other quibbles I have. But it is better. Maybe I'll have to make a few more talk points someday. :)
Personally, I do think Wikipedia for the casual contributor is unfortunately broken. But given the amount of trolls and agenda-oriented people out there, I actually can understand why there is a high barrier to entry. It's just a bit unfortunate because it also restricts the diversity of the contribution ecosystem. I'm not sure how to reconcile the two personally...
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Burns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Brewer
The article needs independent sources (as in, secondary sources that are financially and editorially independent of the company who develops the .mix file type) to show that the topic warrants an article.
If an article has enough sources cited to show notability, primary sources like documentation pages can be used. If notability is not shown, then the topic doesn't meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria and the content of the article is moot.
Without this requirement, any company would be able to publish promotional articles on all of its products, and exclusively use its own web pages as citations. Wikipedia's notability guidelines are in place to prevent spam and to ensure that topics only get articles if they can be written about in a neutral way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
You're right about fan sites. It's harder for people outside of the fan community to evaluate whether a fan site is reliable, and that contributes to the skepticism you see.
"Australian author Phillip Strang has gained his platform as an adventure writer through his career installing telecommunications networks in many remote and exotic parts of the globe, including time spent in Afghanistan and Pakistan - an experience that allowed him to gain direct insights in to the ongoing conflicts there. He has also spent considerable time in Africa including Liberia, Nigeria, and Guinea. It is this direct contact with troubled countries that gives his books intense credibility: he has first hand contact with the events he shares in his books such as DCI Cook Thriller Series (MURDER IS A TRICKY BUSINESS, MURDER HOUSE, MURDER WITHOUT REASON, MURDER IS ONLY A NUMBER, MURDER IN LITTLE VENICE, MURDER IN NOTTING HILL, MURDER IN ROOM 346, MURDER OF A SILENT MAN, MURDER HAS NO GUILE and now MURDER IN HYDE PARK.
We know the main characters and the genteel writing style of Phillip Strang so all that is left is a brief summation of the plot and the story is distilled well in Phillip’s synopsis: ‘An early-morning jogger is murdered in Hyde Park. It's the centre of London, but no one saw him enter the park, no one saw him die. He carries no identification, only a waterlogged phone. As the pieces unravel, it's clear that the dead man had a history of deception. Is the murderer one of those that loved him? Or was it someone with a vengeance? It's proving difficult for DCI Isaac Cook and his team at Challis Street Homicide to find the guilty person - not that they'll cease to search for the truth, not even after one suspect confesses.
Elegant writing and a keen sense of suspense – this is another Phillip Strang winner! Grady Harp, January 19"
There's no personal opinion about the book except the "another winner" at the very end. The first paragraph is author's flattering autobiography, the second paragraph is literally copy/paste of the author's synopsis and perhaps the very last sentence is actually what Grady Harp wrote. Sorry to ruin the illusion but this is a promotional account that simply posts whatever message the authors send in. Also I noted Grady Harp consistently rates books with 5 stars, which is again a sign of promotional account, as anything below that might as well be 1 star.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGZV527R2U6A...
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-018-07683-5/index.ht...