Summary: Wikipedia keeps deleting my anime cruft. Waah!
Of course Wikipedia editorship is declining. Most of the important articles were written years ago. Encyclopedias, over time, move to maintenance mode, which requires far less work than original creation.
There's also a growing self-promotion problem. Self-promotion used to be mostly from garage bands. Now, it's businessmen. There are at least four rich ex-cons with paid Wikipedia editors. Businesses trying to make some big legal mess disappear are the worst. Magnetix and Banc De Binary were huge headaches. Volunteers have to push back against that, or Wikipedia becomes PR Newswire.
Speaking for myself, I stopped editing because I was tired of editors being jerks to each other, not because I was running out of things to contribute.
The entire Internet is going this way. I overestimated its inherent resistance to gaming/doctoring.
For example, product reviews are increasingly unreliable. Even on platforms that require purchase, like Amazon. Meanwhile specialist sites like tomshardware and anandtech seem overwhelmed.
Spamming social to get higher search rankings is easy, cheap, and hurts both search and social, as blogs, forums, and discussions fill up with promotional crap no one wants to read. I work on web spam and bogus ad detection, which means I'm painfully aware of the ocean of promotional crap out there. I'd like to see Wikipedia not go that way.
Comments
Summary: Wikipedia keeps deleting my anime cruft. Waah!
Of course Wikipedia editorship is declining. Most of the important articles were written years ago. Encyclopedias, over time, move to maintenance mode, which requires far less work than original creation.
There's also a growing self-promotion problem. Self-promotion used to be mostly from garage bands. Now, it's businessmen. There are at least four rich ex-cons with paid Wikipedia editors. Businesses trying to make some big legal mess disappear are the worst. Magnetix and Banc De Binary were huge headaches. Volunteers have to push back against that, or Wikipedia becomes PR Newswire.
That's not remotely accurate. The problems are across all subject areas; consider my link deletion experiments.
Speaking for myself, I stopped editing because I was tired of editors being jerks to each other, not because I was running out of things to contribute.
The entire Internet is going this way. I overestimated its inherent resistance to gaming/doctoring.
For example, product reviews are increasingly unreliable. Even on platforms that require purchase, like Amazon. Meanwhile specialist sites like tomshardware and anandtech seem overwhelmed.
I know, I know. I wrote "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" on that subject back in 2011.
http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf
Spamming social to get higher search rankings is easy, cheap, and hurts both search and social, as blogs, forums, and discussions fill up with promotional crap no one wants to read. I work on web spam and bogus ad detection, which means I'm painfully aware of the ocean of promotional crap out there. I'd like to see Wikipedia not go that way.