Wikipedia loses 49,000 contributors

Any wonder, really?

Here in the UK, people have been prosecuted and given jail sentences for posting incorrect information on Wikipedia.

Is it any wonder that Wikipedia is losing contributors?

It's not the sites fault; it's because those who write the truth are often persecuted.

By shoby on 26 Nov 2009

I think that it probably has more to do with the fact that a hard core of very aggressive editors have "taken ownership" of a lot of pages and are deleting anything and everything that other people put up if it doesn't match up to their own personal views, and the loose knit nature of the administration system means that sanctions are rarely levied on them (It's also pretty hard for a beginner to even find out how to complain about on-line bullying of this kind).

I used to edit quite a lot but I left after coming across a core of such people. Just as an example, on one page they kept removing all references to the fact that a particular person was an trained electrical engineer because they disagreed with a conclusion that the man came to on a published research paper.

After 6 months of having pretty much everything that I put up deleted I gave up. They even tried to have pages from my online sandbox deleted by the admins claiming that my half finished page that was filed under my own user account might fool people into thinking that it was a finished article.

Oh, and you just try listing any books or notable people who've spoken out against scientology, or evolution, or any one of a number of things (The page about the Michelle Obama picture is probably a warzone by now).

The lunatics quickly come out of the woodwork and make it impossible to do anything, and the sites administrators do nothing. You can literally have pages where every single edit is reverted by 2 or three people working in shifts to ensure that they don't break the rule against deleting content more than 3 times in 24 hours.

What Wikipedia needs is a more robust mechanism for dealing with these editors and their agendas.

By Perfectblue97 on 26 Nov 2009

@shoby. Your post contradicts itself. First you say people have been prosecuted for writing incorrect information. Then you say people have been persecuted for writing the truth. Which is it to be?

Personally, I feel that far too much editor time on Wikipedia is spent in arbitration committees, etc. No-one has a "right" to contribute - if someone is not proving beneficial to the project then their editing privileges should be quickly withdrawn. Currently far more time is being spent on dealing with some poor "contributors" than they actually spend themselves improving the project. It's also obvious that some editors are just there to formulate and enforce rules and forget that although Wikipedia is a community, first and foremost it is an encyclopedia.

By halsteadk on 26 Nov 2009

Wikimania

@Halstead; of course, both scenarios that shoby describes can be true at the same time - Wikipedia is a big place. No contradiction at all. My Wikipedia experiences mirror those of Mr Pountain, when he wrote about his attempts to set the record straight on some obscure entries he actually had some direct involvement in: they were crushed, because of the trap whereby Wikipedia encourages contribution, and then knocks people back for breaking rules not made clear during the contributory process. So the version of the truth that persists, about Dick's real-life experiences, and mine, is the "received truth" which has already appeared, often in sources that are less well checked than Wikipedia is itself. That doesn't matter: a source is a source, to Wikipedia. Except when it's the actual person, of course.

By Steve_Cassidy on 26 Nov 2009