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HDMI_Cable 2021-01-10 04:48 UTC link

One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because of its scale. Instead of relying on a few posh journal editors like Britannica, anyone could contribute. And while you have edge cases of people trolling and some misinformation, you also have a much larger labour pool of people dedicated to helping, not for a paycheque, but their own personal reasons.

olivermarks 2021-01-10 04:57 UTC link

2017 - 'Researchers found that 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by 1 percent of Wikipedia editors, and they think this is probably for the best.'

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...

neilpanchal 2021-01-10 04:58 UTC link

Take note: The interface hasn't changed much, a good thing.

matthewmorgan 2021-01-10 05:05 UTC link

Plenty of subtle agenda-pushing on Wikipedia if you're paying attention

sharkweek 2021-01-10 05:15 UTC link

Ah good stuff - I love Wikipedia more than almost any other non-living thing that has been created in my lifetime. If you had told me the idea as a pitch 20 years ago I would have assumed you were capital I insane for thinking it would work.

It was pretty fresh when I was in college and I remember my professors all being pretty explicit about not using it as a source. Thought I had figured out the world’s biggest life hack when I started using the sources listed on Wikipedia as my sources for papers.

aerosmile 2021-01-10 05:32 UTC link

I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility.

Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter.

But that was just the start. Wikipedia killed it in SEO when it was easy to do so, but it also did one other thing that most SEO-driven sites (eg: About) didn't do correctly - it cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads (anyone remember Jason Calacanis' articles on how they are leaving $100m on the table? See [1]). So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.

Wikipedia's dominance continues because it's basically impossible to overcome its lead in inbound links and domain authority. Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.

Well done.

[1] https://calacanis.com/2006/10/28/wikipedia-leaves-100m-on-th...

mxcrossb 2021-01-10 05:37 UTC link

I just opened up google maps and zoomed in on a random town: Mt. Pleasant Iowa. If I search it on google, on the top of the page is a snippet from Wikipedia. The top result is a link to Wikipedia. The second is the actual town website.

This is what I find fascinating about the project. We’re more interested in reading a secondary source compiled by random people, than the actual primary source! I think it says a lot about the nice interface it has.

wolverine876 2021-01-10 05:41 UTC link

I was originally enthusiastic about the 'wisdom of the crowds' and its potential. The Internet was a great experiment with unknown possibilities. I edited Wikipedia and talked about its potential.

I was skeptical at the same time - it was an experiment, not a revelation. I used to tell people, 'I don't know how Wikipedia could work, but it seems to'. I'd apply 'The Cathedral and the Bizarre' concept to it, and 'with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow' (even though those ideas were intended for open source software).

The 'wisdom of the crowds' depends on good faith from the members of the crowd. Otherwise you get the manipulation of the crowds and propaganda of the faux crowds. One serious concern I had was that, if economics predicts human behavior to some extent, Wikipedia could be a victim of its own success: The more readers and influence it had, the more likely people would try to use that power. I first saw it happening in 2006, in the page on the Duke University lacrosse team's sexual assault case. Many editors clearly engaged in rewriting history in order to advocate for the lacrosse players; many had names clearly asserting affinity for Duke U., such as 'bluedevil'. That seizure of power was highly disturbing; has Wikipedia developed better means to prevent it now?

Of course, the focus on using the 'wisdom of the crowds' to manipulate has shifted to other platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. I stopped using Wikipedia years ago, other than to lookup basic facts that have little significance to me. I use Britannica (or other expert sources), which IMHO is very good and often very well written. While there is some benefit to 'wisdom of the crowds', I never know if that's what I'm getting at Wikipedia. As for the expert approach,

In matters of science, the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person.

neonate 2021-01-10 05:49 UTC link

libraryofbabel 2021-01-10 05:50 UTC link

Three aphorisms in honor of Wikipedia, greatest encyclopedia in world history, and its 20 years of free knowledge uncorrupted by advertising:

* Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory.

* Wikipedia is the worst source of information, except for all the others.

* Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel a little bit optimistic about human nature.

wintorez 2021-01-10 06:14 UTC link

I think we can't overstate the deep impact Wikipedia had in the past 20 years. The initial idea was so counter-initiative. I thought it would fail due to vandalism. But despite that, it thrived, and somehow it became a great source of knowledge.

moron4hire 2021-01-10 06:24 UTC link

It's funny. We just showed our kids the Pixar movie "Monsters Inc", which I hadn't realized was also 20 years old until the movie ended and the info screen came up. I think of it as a contemporary movie, "not that old".

But I think of Wikipedia as having always existed.

Funny how memory works.

Also, I've lived longer with Wikipedia than without.

I guess I'm getting old.

acidburnNSA 2021-01-10 06:38 UTC link

In grad school back in like 2007 I took a 2-credit class called "The History of Nuclear Enterprise" taught by one of those long white-haired Doc Brown type professors. The final project was for each of us to make Wikipedia pages describing some important topic that wasn't covered yet. I made one on the university's nuclear reactor which had just been shut down. I dug through many linear feet of archived info, scanning photos and collecting various info for the page. It was super rewarding. I was hooked.

Variously since then I have gone deep into some fringe but important-to-some topic and found hard-to-find sources. I've found it effective to collect and present this information in Wikipedia pages.

Like a few months ago I made the page for the Aircraft Reactor Experiment [1], the world's first molten salt-fueled nuclear reactor, built and operated with intent to make nuclear-powered long-range aircraft. I'm pretty proud of the page, and go back to use it somewhat regularly. Having the platform of Wikipedia inspires me to go the slight extra mile in personal research in a way that can be used by everyone.

Thanks Wikipedia, for existing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment

ceilingcorner 2021-01-10 07:19 UTC link

Is there an easy way to browse past versions of Wikipedia? I’m aware of the Wayback Machine, but that only works for a particular article.

I ask because it’s become increasingly obvious that articles are changed to fit the contemporary zeitgeist. Writers that died a century ago are recast into different people, depending on the popular ideology of the day. The choice of acceptable sources is also pretty disappointing. This problem is unique to the internet and doesn’t exist with hardback encyclopedias; one can still buy a hardback set of Britannica circa 1900.

Once 2050 comes around, I’d like to be able to read the 2010 version of Wikipedia, not the one deemed acceptable by the powers that be.

kristopolous 2021-01-10 08:53 UTC link

I remember going first in 2002, a lot of pages were just lists like all the popes or cereals by general mills.

I thought "yeah right, who's going to write an article on like pope pius x and cheerios. nice project but not happening"

It was the second time I had seen a wiki, the first was on vim.org where I changed something in 2001 or so because I just didn't believe the concept was real.

I think I get in on the ground of a bunch of things but I'm just incredulous and not enthusiastic about them. Like all those bitcoins I didn't care about...

It's a problem I should probably work on. I should be more excited about things. Just have to figure out how to get there.

i_love_limes 2021-01-10 12:32 UTC link

I'll add my own anecdote. I have donated to Wikipedia sporadically over the years, and they asked me to take part in a sort of round table interview / qualitative study.

In a room of other Wikipedia donators, maybe 1/3 of the people there didn't know that the information was entirely community driven, and when they learned, a handful of didn't think it was a good idea!

It just shows how much Wikipedia is just taken for granted, when in reality so so much effort goes in to keeping it free, ad free, open, and accessible to everyone.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2021-01-10 15:55 UTC link

Wikipedia is a treasure. Everyone wants free access to information, well here it is. Put your money where your mouth is and donate.

mch82 2021-01-10 17:06 UTC link

Wikipedia is also amazing because the foundation publishes a lot of detail about engineering and technical operations on Wikitech (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). I’ve learned so much about DevOps just reading their docs and publicly released code. They also publish minutes of their Scrum of Scrums and Google Summer of Code projects. And they have historical info about key initiatives & growth. All worth exploring if you’re running a website/startup.

marcod 2021-01-10 17:45 UTC link

I'm sorry, but the intro of the article is wrong.

Not anyone could edit the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ford was researching earth for 15 years and an editor cut his submission down to "mostly harmless"...

> https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Ford_Prefect#Work_on_the...

cabalamat 2021-01-10 18:24 UTC link

I'm surprised that no-one has built an inclusionist alternative to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's emphasis on notability restricts what can be put there.

ignoranceprior 2021-01-10 04:58 UTC link

Wikipedia was originally intended to be a smaller sandbox area for Nupedia, the expert-authored encyclopedia from Bomis (Jimmy Wales's company). Of course, Wikipedia turned out to be much more successful.

But there were other collaborative Internet encyclopedia projects that didn't do so well. Benjamin Mako Hill has a paper exploring what made Wikipedia succeed while the rest failed:

https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf

eruleman 2021-01-10 04:59 UTC link

It's because lots of people are using Wikiwand extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikiwand-wikipedia...).

op03 2021-01-10 05:11 UTC link

Most importantly it hasnt adopted the Like/Follower count based Reward system that lot of people in the tech world have mindlessly included all over the place.

Try running any org with a Like and Follower count based reward system and check what surfaces and who pays a prices.

ignoranceprior 2021-01-10 05:12 UTC link

The main changes were the switch from UseModWiki to MediaWiki (using the Monobook skin), and from Monobook to Vector.

https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/?useskin=monobook

whym 2021-01-10 05:16 UTC link

Not to disagree, but the mobile web site brought a significantly different user experience (for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Ocean), and the mobile readership has been at least as large as the desktop for a long time. [1]

[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/reading/total...

zozbot234 2021-01-10 05:20 UTC link

Agenda-pushing is quite common on Wiki, especially around controversial areas. You can read all about it on the Talk page for each article. The hope is that it all balances out in the end, but this does become harder to guarantee as high-quality, reliable sources for some points of view are getting increasingly thin and hard to find, both online and offline. (I'm aware that Larry Sanger among others has complained about this development, but it is a genuinely hard problem to solve as we can't just get rid of all sourcing standards in the service of less-represented viewpoints.)

Acrobatic_Road 2021-01-10 05:23 UTC link

Oh, it's not even subtle. Here's a game you can play: compare an article with the same article in another language. If you don't speak another language then use google translate. You'll see where the agenda pushing is.

Oh, and always read talk pages.

IfOnlyYouKnew 2021-01-10 05:28 UTC link

> One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because of its scale.

I've carefully studied all three definitions of "scale" my dictionary offers up, and come to the conclusion that this sentence either means absolutely nothing ("It is big because it is big"), or something really strange ("Wikipedia grew because of its plate-like skin coverings").

sien 2021-01-10 05:31 UTC link

Here is an example for people asking for one.

As an experiment I tried to get some fairly innocuous numbers into participation in Australia sport.

There is a big survey done in Australia, the Ausplay survey:

https://www.clearinghouseforsport.gov.au/

They have extensive tables on adult participation.

Two editors would not let this data into the sport in Australia article. The reason was fairly obvious, it shows that soccer/football is the most played team sport in Australia. Roy Morgan, a statistical agency also had similar figures. Some Australians don't like the fact that soccer/football is by far the most played team sport in Australia according to to the Ausplay Survey and Roy Morgan.

There was much time spent in the talk pages spent asking these two what would be acceptable for quoting these sporting statistics. The answer was nothing.

If you can't get fairly unobjectionable material like that into wikipedia what else is being blocked?

creato 2021-01-10 06:04 UTC link

It is somehow sad that "caring about content quality" is considered SEO and not just making a good website.

I think more than half the things you mentioned are only good SEO because search engines want to send people to websites they will like reading. I think when that is the case, we should be crediting people for making good websites, not good SEO.

Vanit 2021-01-10 06:11 UTC link

Same here, Wikipedia sources were a great life hack for uni on easy mode.

sq_ 2021-01-10 06:16 UTC link

The popup cards when you mouse over an internal link that they added semi-recently are an awesome addition, though. Great melding of the old interface with a highly useful newer feature, in my opinion.

jessriedel 2021-01-10 06:35 UTC link

Having looked into it a bit, I've been severely disappointed that we have no good theory of why Wikipedia works. There are lots of putative explanations, but they all predict the successful existence of all sorts of collaborative projects that we don't actually see. Wikipedia is such a treasure, and it would be extremely valuable to know more about how it works so we can replicate aspects of it for other projects.

shepherdjerred 2021-01-10 06:44 UTC link

Wikipedia is incredible. I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted.

Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off

elliotec 2021-01-10 06:49 UTC link

You're not alone. What a strange feeling.

chrisbolt 2021-01-10 06:55 UTC link

> So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.

For context, this is the type of content that Mahalo was producing to try to game SEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdNk1xmDpxo

teloli 2021-01-10 07:02 UTC link

Not even that subtle. For instance, declaring that Taiwan is a country despite the fact that it isn’t recognized as such by most of the world. That was such a big deal that it was met with triumph by Taiwanese media: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3948149

Don’t get me wrong, I support the cause of Taiwanese independence, but facts are facts. I also think that the Basque Country should be independent, and yet it would be factually incorrect to claim that it’s a country.

Kim_Bruning 2021-01-10 07:02 UTC link

There's a strong long-tail effect.

Here's a 2015 essay that sets out to debunk the above 2017 source.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Kim_Bruning 2021-01-10 07:15 UTC link

Interesting question, how did the article end up?

In general Wikipedia does have mechanisms to deal with this sort of thing, but admins don't always catch on early enough.

nsajko 2021-01-10 07:28 UTC link

Here, I'll fix that for you:

* Wikipedia works in theory, but not in practice (as soon as you scratch the surface). - The problem is that there are many good pages, but that just lulls one out of the necessary skepticism.

* Try the Wikipedia sources that are hopefully on the bottom of each page instead. Also search on Stack Exchange and Reddit for book recommendations.

* Wikipedia: the Internet’s greatest reason to feel pessimistic about the state of disinformation and propaganda

EDIT: my comment is definitely more substantive and thoughtful than the one it is responding to, so I would appreciate if the downvoters could likewise reply to this comment, in addition to down-voting it.

nsajko 2021-01-10 07:32 UTC link

Every Wikipedia page has its history accessible through "View history".

nsajko 2021-01-10 07:40 UTC link

An issue is that most well-meaning contributors very soon learn to keep off controversial pages, because it's simply not enjoyable to constantly fight over the content. The fact is: resolving disputes takes much time and usually the party with more time on their hands and more "meat-puppets" and allies wins. Also, making enemies from among the "editors" is both unpleasant and inconvenient for possible future efforts on Wikipedia.

bawolff 2021-01-10 08:52 UTC link

I dont think they did any of those things because of SEO, but because it was the obvious way to do it.

Deep interlinking - originally it used software called UseModWiki, which would automatically make a link if a page name existed for the word you just used.

subdomains - if you want to make a separate site for each language, that is the onvious way to do it

good content- why would anyone intentionally want to make a site with shitty content unless you are making $$$ off it (and wikipedia wasnt)

4ggr0 2021-01-10 09:32 UTC link

Thanks, acidburnNSA, for existing :)

We need (more) people like you.

jayflux 2021-01-10 09:34 UTC link

I remember there was definitely a lot more vandalism back then, it just so happened that the number of volunteers started to outweigh the abusers by quite a bit.

I think moderation tooling got better over the years: being able to revert edits quickly, tracking users/IPs known for vandalism, locking articles, reporting someone etc.

nt2h9uh238h 2021-01-10 09:36 UTC link

Wikipedia is especially great for elderly as contributors IMHO: lots of experience, knowledge and time. Often they even are bored or lack a "sense of purpose" and community (social connections are the rarer the older we get). Wikipedia adds all that. If Wikipedia would tech-ipo as the likes of WeWork, it would probably be "The Purpose Company". Thank you.

I'm from Germany (2nd biggest Wikipedia) and proud to say 50%+ of my school and university education would not have been possible with excellent articles in BOTH english and german language. Often the english one was great, but the german one better (think WWII topics, german cars, ...) and vice versa (most of the cases hehe). And: it might be a good pointer for learning a language as well, reading about stuff you deeply care about.

wodenokoto 2021-01-10 09:57 UTC link

How do you handle the notability requirement? Or are your topics too obscure for anyone to care?

ricardo81 2021-01-10 10:08 UTC link

Indeed. As great as wiki is (and it is, I use their data dumps), it's content at scale just like G is search and FB is for social. Scaled content. There has been a few occasions in search where I would've expected the local/primary sources to be favoured. Think if you said to someone 'give me a website where I could read more about X', wiki can be the lazy and probably correct answer.

canofbars 2021-01-10 10:28 UTC link

I have never been able to find a wikipedia topic I could contribute to. The problem is the topics which don't have pages on wikipedia also don't tend to have a lot of referencable information on the internet.

canofbars 2021-01-10 10:32 UTC link

I took a look at those two pages and they are not equivalent. Wikipedia lists out a bunch of facts, demographics, and important details on the area. The towns own site is not to focused on collecting facts but more on directing people in the area to info they would need like where to pay a parking ticket or what events are on. I couldn't even find most of the info on the wikipedia page on the towns own site.

Epistemic Quality

Propaganda Flags

0 techniques detected

Solution Orientation

Emotional Tone

Stakeholder Voice

Temporal Framing

Geographic Scope

Complexity

Transparency