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In Defense of Inclusionism

Iron Law of Bu­reau­cracy: the down­wards dele­tion­ism spi­ral dis­cour­ages con­tri­bu­tion and is how Wikipedia will die.

⁠, ⁠, ⁠,

2009-01-15–⁠2018-11-28 finished ⁠certainty: highly likely ⁠importance: 8 ⁠backlinks ⁠similar ⁠bibliography

Eng­lish Wikipedia is in de­cline. As a long-​​​time ed­i­tor & for­mer admin, I was deeply dis­mayed by the process. Here, I dis­cuss UI prin­ci­ples, changes in Wikipedian cul­ture, the large-​​​scale sta­tis­ti­cal ev­i­dence of de­cline, run small-​​​scale ex­per­i­ments demon­strat­ing the harm, and con­clude with part­ing thoughts.

Wikipedia is de­clin­ing, fun­da­men­tally, be­cause of its in­creas­ingly nar­row at­ti­tude as to what are ac­cept­able top­ics and to what depth those top­ics can be ex­plored, com­bined with a nar­rowed at­ti­tude as to what are ac­cept­able sources, where aca­d­e­mic & media cov­er­age trumps any con­sid­er­a­tion of other fac­tors. This dis­cour­ages con­trib­u­tors—the pre­req­ui­site for any con­tent what­so­ever—and cuts off growth; per­versely, the lack of con­trib­u­tors be­comes its own ex­cuse for dis­cour­ag­ing more con­tri­bu­tion (since who will main­tain it?), a self-​​​fulfilling norm (we focus on qual­ity over quan­tity here!) and dri­ves away those with dis­sent­ing views, since un­sur­pris­ingly those who ad­vo­cate more con­tent tend to also con­tribute con­tent and be dri­ven away when their con­tent is. One bad ed­i­tor can de­stroy in sec­onds what took many years to cre­ate. The in­clu­sion­ists founded Wikipedia, but the dele­tion­ists froze it.

I started as an anon, mak­ing oc­ca­sional small edits after I learned of WP from Slash­dot in 2004. I hap­pened to be a con­trib­u­tor to Every­thing2 at the time, and when one of my more en­cy­clo­pe­dic ar­ti­cles was re­jected, I de­cided it might as well go on Wikipedia, so I reg­is­tered an ac­count in 2005 and slowly got more se­ri­ous about edit­ing as I be­came more com­fort­able with WP and ex­cited about its po­ten­tial. Be­fore I wound down my edit­ing ac­tiv­ity, dis­mayed by the cul­tural changes, I had done scores of ar­ti­cles & scores of thou­sands of edits⁠. And old Wikipedia was ex­cit­ing.

You can see this stark dif­fer­ence be­tween old Wikipedia and mod­ern Wikipedia: in the early days you could have things like ar­ti­cles on each chap­ter of Atlas Shrugged or each Poke­mon. Even if you per­son­ally did not like Ob­jec­tivism or Poke­mon, you knew that you could go into just as much de­tail about the top­ics you liked best—Wikipedia was not paper! We talked ide­al­is­ti­cally about how Wikipedia could be­come an en­cy­clo­pe­dia of spe­cial­ist en­cy­clo­pe­dias, the su­per­set of en­cy­clo­pe­dias. “would you ex­pect to see a Bul­basaur ar­ti­cle in a Poke­mon en­cy­clo­pe­dia? yes? then let’s have a Bul­basaur ar­ti­cle”. The po­ten­tial was that Wikipedia would be the sum­mary of the In­ter­net and books/​media. In­stead of punch­ing in a key­word to a search en­gine and get­ting 100 pages deal­ing with tiny frag­ments of the topic (in how­ever much de­tail), you would get a co­her­ent overview sum­ma­riz­ing every­thing worth know­ing about the topic, for al­most all top­ics.

But now Wikipedia’s nar­row­ing focus means, only some of what is worth know­ing, about some top­ics. Re­spectable top­ics. Main­stream top­ics. Unim­peach­ably En­cy­clo­pe­dic top­ics.

These days, that ideal is com­pletely gone. If you try to write niche ar­ti­cles on cer­tain top­ics, peo­ple will tell you to save it for Wikia. I am not ex­cited or in­ter­ested in such a parochial project which ex­cludes so many of my in­ter­ests, which does not want me to go into great depth about even the in­ter­ests it deems mer­i­to­ri­ous—and a great many other peo­ple are not ex­cited ei­ther, es­pe­cially as they begin to re­al­ize that even if you nav­i­gate the cul­ture cor­rectly and get your ma­te­r­ial into Wikipedia, there is far from any guar­an­tee that your con­tri­bu­tions will be re­spected, not deleted, and im­proved. For the am­a­teurs and also ex­perts who wrote wikipedia, why would they want to con­tribute to some place that doesn’t want them?

The Wiki­Me­dia Foun­da­tion (WMF) seems un­able to ad­dress this issue. I read their plans and pro­jec­tions, and I pre­dicted well in ad­vance that they would to­tally fail, as they have. Their ‘so­lu­tions’ were band-​​​aids which didn’t get at what I or oth­ers were di­ag­nos­ing as the un­der­ly­ing prob­lems. The “bar­ri­ers to entry” like the com­plex markup are not the true issue. They are prob­lems, cer­tainly, but not the core prob­lem—if they were re­solved, Wikipedia’s de­cline would con­tinue. WMF seems to think that a lit­tle more lip­stick on the pig will fix every­thing. Bar­ri­ers to entry are a prob­lem for non-​​​technical new users, yes, but it does not ex­plain why tech­ni­cal new users are also not ap­pear­ing. Where are all the young pro­gram­mers? They can eas­ily learn the markup and han­dle the other bar­ri­ers—if those bar­ri­ers were the only bar­ri­ers, Wikipedia should be hav­ing no prob­lems. Plenty of po­ten­tial ed­i­tors in that sea. But if you go to pro­gram­mer hang­outs like Hacker News⁠, you’re not going to find every­one going “I don’t know what peo­ple are com­plain­ing about, edit­ing Wikipedia works just great for me!”, be­cause they’re quite as em­bit­tered and jaded as other groups.

What is to be done? Hard to say. Wikipedia has al­ready ex­iled hun­dreds of subject-​​​area com­mu­ni­ties to Wikia, and I’d say the nar­row­ing began in 2007, so there’s been a good 6 years of in­er­tia and time for the rot to set in. And I haven’t thought much about it be­cause too many peo­ple deny that there is any prob­lem, and when they admit there is a prob­lem, they focus on triv­ial is­sues like the Me­di­aWiki markup. Noth­ing I can do about it, any­way. Once the prob­lem has been di­ag­nosed, time to move on to other ac­tiv­i­ties.

Wikipedia will still exist. The cor­pus is too huge and valu­able to rot eas­ily. A sys­tem can de­cline with­out dying. My­Space still ex­ists, and there is no rea­son Wikipedia can­not be My­Space—use­ful for some pur­poses, a shell of its for­mer glory, a major break­through in its time, but fun­da­men­tally by­passed by other sources of in­for­ma­tion. I don’t know what the Face­book to Wikipedia’s My­Space is, but the In­ter­net sur­vived for decades with­out Wikipedia, we’ll get along with­out a live Wikipedia. Even though it is a huge loss of po­ten­tial.

Friction

A peren­nial lure of tech­nol­ogy is its promise to let us do things that we couldn’t do be­fore, and in ways we wouldn’t be­fore.

An ex­am­ple here would be Wikipedia and wikis in gen­eral: by low­er­ing the ‘cost’ of chang­ing a page, and using soft­ware that makes un­do­ing most van­dal­ism far eas­ier than doing it, the par­tic­i­pa­tion goes through the roof. It’s not the tech­nol­ogy it­self that re­ally mat­ters, but how easy and com­fort­able it is to con­tribute. Ben­jamin Mako Hill has been in­ves­ti­gat­ing why Wikipedia, out of 8 com­pa­ra­ble at­tempts to write an on­line en­cy­clo­pe­dia, suc­ceeded; his con­clu­sion seems to be that Wikipedia suc­ceeded by fo­cus­ing on de­vel­op­ing con­tent and mak­ing con­tri­bu­tion easy. ⁠“The con­tri­bu­tion co­nun­drum: Why did Wikipedia suc­ceed while other en­cy­clo­pe­dias failed?”:

One an­swer, which seems ob­vi­ous only in ret­ro­spect: Wikipedia at­tracted con­trib­u­tors be­cause it was built around a fa­mil­iar prod­uct—the en­cy­clo­pe­dia. En­cy­clo­pe­dias aren’t just ar­ti­facts; they’re also epis­temic frames. They em­ploy a par­tic­u­lar—and, yet, uni­ver­sal—ap­proach to or­ga­niz­ing in­for­ma­tion. Prior to Wikipedia, on­line en­cy­clo­pe­dias tried to do what we tend to think is a good thing when it comes to the web: chal­leng­ing old metaphors, ex­plod­ing ana­log tra­di­tions, in­vent­ing en­tirely new forms…An­other in­trigu­ing find­ing: Wikipedia fo­cused on sub­stan­tive con­tent de­vel­op­ment in­stead of tech­nol­ogy. Wikipedia was the only project in the en­tire sam­ple, Hill noted, that didn’t build its own tech­nol­ogy. (It was, in fact, gen­er­ally seen as tech­no­log­i­cally un­so­phis­ti­cated by other en­cy­clo­pe­dias’ founders, who saw them­selves more as tech­nol­o­gists than as con­tent providers.) GNU­pe­dia⁠, for ex­am­ple, had sev­eral peo­ple ded­i­cated to build­ing its in­fra­struc­ture, but none de­voted to build­ing its ar­ti­cles. It was all very if you build it, they will come…There are two other key con­trib­u­tors to Wikipedia’s suc­cess with at­tract­ing con­trib­u­tors, Hill’s re­search sug­gests: Wikipedia of­fered low trans­ac­tion costs to par­tic­i­pa­tion, and it de-​​​emphasized the so­cial own­er­ship of con­tent. Edit­ing Wikipedia is easy, and in­stant, and vir­tu­ally commitment-​​​free. “You can come along and do a drive-​​​by edit and never make a con­tri­bu­tion again,” Hill pointed out. And the fact that it’s dif­fi­cult to tell who wrote an ar­ti­cle, or who edited it—rather than dis­cour­ag­ing con­tri­bu­tion, as you might as­sume—ac­tu­ally en­cour­aged con­tri­bu­tions, Hill found. “Low tex­tual own­er­ship re­sulted in more col­lab­o­ra­tion,” he put it. And that could well be be­cause Wikipedia’s au­thor­less struc­ture low­ers the pres­sure some might feel to con­tribute some­thing stel­lar. The pull of rep­u­ta­tion can dis­cour­age con­tri­bu­tions even as it can also en­cour­age them. So Wikipedia “took ad­van­tage of mar­ginal con­tri­bu­tions,” Hill noted—a sen­tence here, a graf there—which, added up, turned into ar­ti­cles. Which, added up, turned into an en­cy­clo­pe­dia.

I’ve often thought that if the ‘bar­ri­ers to entry’ were charted against ‘con­tributed ef­fort’, one would see an ex­po­nen­tially in­verse re­la­tion. An en­tire essay could likely be writ­ten on how the Wikipedia com­mu­nity put up small bar­ri­ers—each in­di­vid­u­ally rea­son­able, and not too oner­ous even in the ag­gre­gate—of ref­er­enc­ing, of ban­ning anony­mous page cre­ation, etc. led to the first sus­tained drop in con­trib­u­tors and con­tri­bu­tion. The ef­fect is non­lin­ear.

New Regimes

More is dif­fer­ent.

Philip War­ren An­der­son

The best rule of thumb here is per­haps the one cited by Stew­art Brand in The Clock of the Long Now:

Ac­cord­ing to a rule of thumb among en­gi­neers, any ten­fold quan­ti­ta­tive change is a qual­i­ta­tive change⁠⁠1⁠, a fun­da­men­tally new sit­u­a­tion rather than a sim­ple ex­trap­o­la­tion.

Clear as mud, eh? Let’s try more quotes, then:

The human long­ing for free­dom of in­for­ma­tion is a ter­ri­ble and won­der­ful thing. It de­lin­eates a piv­otal dif­fer­ence be­tween men­tal eman­ci­pa­tion and slav­ery. It has launched protests, re­bel­lions, and rev­o­lu­tions. Thou­sands have de­voted their lives to it, thou­sands of oth­ers have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by re­quir­ing peo­ple to search for “how to set up proxy” be­fore view­ing their anti-​​​government web­site.

I was re­minded of this re­cently by Eliezer’s ⁠Less Wrong Progress Re­port⁠. He men­tioned how sur­prised he was that so many peo­ple were post­ing so much stuff on ⁠Less Wrong⁠, when very few peo­ple had ever taken ad­van­tage of ⁠Over­com­ing Bias’ pol­icy of ac­cept­ing con­tri­bu­tions if you emailed them to a mod­er­a­tor and the mod­er­a­tor ap­proved. Ap­par­ently all us folk brim­ming with ideas for posts didn’t want to deal with the ag­gra­va­tion.⁠⁠2

We ex­am­ine open ac­cess ar­ti­cles from three jour­nals at the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia School of Law and con­firm that legal schol­ar­ship freely avail­able via open ac­cess im­proves an ar­ti­cle’s re­search im­pact. Open ac­cess legal schol­ar­ship—which today ap­pears to ac­count for al­most half of the out­put of law fac­ul­ties—can ex­pect to re­ceive 50% more ci­ta­tions than non-​​​open ac­cess writ­ings of sim­i­lar age from the same venue.⁠⁠3⁠⁠4

There are tools to just say, “Give me your so­cial se­cu­rity num­ber, give me your ad­dress and your mother’s maiden name, and we send you a phys­i­cal piece of paper and you sign it and send it back to us.” By the time that’s all ac­com­plished, you are a very safe user. But by then you are also not an user, be­cause for every step you have to take, the dropoff rate is prob­a­bly 30%. If you take ten steps, and each time you lose one-​​​third of the users, you’ll have no users by the time you’re done with the fourth step.⁠⁠5

For ex­am­ple, us­abil­ity the­ory holds that if you make a task 10% eas­ier, you dou­ble the num­ber of peo­ple that can ac­com­plish it. I’ve al­ways felt that if you can make it 10% eas­ier to fill in a bug re­port⁠, you’ll get twice as many bug re­ports. (When I re­moved two ques­tions from the Joel On Soft­ware signup page, the rate of new signups went up dra­mat­i­cally).⁠⁠6

Think of these bar­ri­ers as an ob­sta­cle course that peo­ple have to run be­fore you can count them as your cus­tomers. If you start out with a field of 1000 run­ners, about half of them will trip on the tires; half of the sur­vivors won’t be strong enough to jump the wall; half of those sur­vivors will fall off the rope lad­der into the mud, and so on, until only 1 or 2 peo­ple ac­tu­ally over­come all the hur­dles. With 8 or 9 bar­ri­ers, every­body will have one non-​​​negotiable deal killer…By in­ces­sant pound­ing on elim­i­nat­ing bar­ri­ers, [Mi­crosoft] slowly pried some mar­ket share away from Lotus.⁠⁠7

The vast ma­jor­ity of raters were pre­vi­ously only read­ers of Wikipedia. Of the reg­is­tered users that rated an ar­ti­cle, 66% had no prior edit­ing ac­tiv­ity. For these reg­is­tered users, rat­ing an ar­ti­cle rep­re­sents their first par­tic­i­pa­tory ac­tiv­ity on Wikipedia. These ini­tial re­sults show that we are start­ing to en­gage these users be­yond just pas­sive read­ing, and they seem to like it…Once users have suc­cess­fully sub­mit­ted a rat­ing, a ran­domly se­lected sub­set of them are shown an in­vi­ta­tion to edit the page. Of the users that were in­vited to edit, 17% at­tempted to edit the page. 15% of those ended up suc­cess­fully com­plet­ing an edit. These re­sults strongly sug­gest that a feed­back tool could suc­cess­fully con­vert pas­sive read­ers into ac­tive con­trib­u­tors of Wikipedia. A rich text ed­i­tor could make this path to edit­ing even more promis­ing.⁠⁠8

Toeing the Precipice

It may take only a few re­stric­tions be­fore one has inched far enough the ‘bar­ri­ers’ axis that the ‘con­tri­bu­tions’ does in fact fall by ten­fold. One sees Wikipedia slowly adding re­stric­tions:

An important editing contribution

Each of these steps seems harm­less enough, per­haps, be­cause we can’t see the things which do not hap­pen as a re­sult (this is a ver­sion of Frédéric Bas­tiat’s fal­lacy of the in­vis­i­ble). The le­gal­is­tic motto “that which is not ex­plic­itly per­mit­ted is for­bid­den” has the virtue of being easy to apply, at least.

Few ob­jected to the ban­ning of anony­mous page cre­ation by Jimbo Wales dur­ing the Seigen­thaler in­ci­dent (we had to de­stroy the wiki to save it), and most of those were un­prin­ci­pled ones. The ob­jec­tor was all for a tougher War on Drugs—er, I mean Ter­ror, or was that Van­dal­ism? (maybe Poverty)—but they didn’t want to be stam­peded into it by some bad PR. Too, few ob­jected to CAPTCHAs: ‘take that you scum­bag spam­mers!’ The ironic thing is, as a frac­tion of edits, van­dal­ism shrunk from ⁠2003–2008 (re­main­ing roughly sim­i­lar since) and sim­i­larly, users spe­cial­iz­ing in van­dal fight­ing and their work­load of edits ⁠have shrunk⁠; graph­ing new con­tri­bu­tions by size, one finds that for both reg­is­tered and anony­mous users, the apogee was 2007 and van­dal­ism has been de­creas­ing ever since. (A more am­bigu­ous sta­tis­tic is the re­duced num­ber of ac­tions by ⁠new page pa­trollers⁠.)

Falling

Who alive can say,
“Thou art no Poet—may’st not tell thy dreams?”
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath vi­sions, and would speak, if he had loved,
And been well nur­tured in his mother tongue.

John Keats⁠; The Fall of Hy­pe­r­ion: A Dream I 11-5

But by 2007 the water had be­come hot enough to be felt by devo­tees of mod­ern fic­tion (that is, anime & manga fran­chises, video games, nov­els, etc.), and even the great Jimbo could not ex­pect to see his ar­ti­cles go un-​​​AfD’d.

But who re­ally cares about what some nerds like? What mat­ters is No­ta­bil­ity with a cap­i­tal N, and the fact that our feel­ings were hurt by some Wiki­groan­ing! After all, clearly the proper way to re­spond to the ob­ser­va­tion that Lightsaber com­bat was longer than Sabre is to delete its con­tents and have peo­ple read the short, scrawny—but se­ri­ous!—Lightsaber ar­ti­cle in­stead.

If it doesn’t ap­pear in En­carta or En­cy­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­nica, or isn’t treated at the same (pro­por­tional) length, then it must go!

By the Numbers

Imag­ine a world in which every sin­gle per­son on the planet is given free ac­cess to the sum of all human knowl­edge. That’s what we’re doing.

Jimmy Wales⁠, 2004

…in­clu­sion­ism gen­er­ally is toxic. It lets a huge vol­ume of garbage pile up. Dele­tion­ism just takes out the trash. We did it with damn Poke­mon, and we’ll even­tu­ally do it with junk foot­ball ‘bi­ogra­phies’, with ‘foot­ball’ in the sense of Amer­i­can and oth­er­wise. We’ll sooner or later get it done with ‘pop­u­lated places’ and the like too.

Todd Allen⁠, 2019-07-05 (WP ed­i­tor 2004–, admin 2007–, Ar­b­com2014–2016)

Delet­ing based on no­ta­bil­ity, fic­tion ar­ti­cles in par­tic­u­lar, doesn’t merely ill-​​​serve our read­ers (who are nu­mer­ous; note how many of Wikipedia’s most pop­u­lar pages are fiction-​​​related, both now and in 2007 or 2011⁠, or how many In­ter­net searches lead to Wikipedia for cul­tural con­tent⁠⁠9), but it also dam­ages the com­mu­nity.

We can see it in­di­rectly in the global sta­tis­tics. The analy­ses (2007⁠, 2008) show it. We are see­ing fewer new ed­i­tors, few new ar­ti­cles, fewer new im­ages; less of every­thing, ex­cept te­dium & bu­reau­cracy.

Worse, it’s not that the growth of Wikipedia has stopped ac­cel­er­at­ing in im­por­tant met­rics. The rate of in­crease has in some cases not merely stopped in­creas­ing, but started drop­ping!

“…the size of the ac­tive edit­ing com­mu­nity of the Eng­lish Wikipedia peaked in early 2007 and has de­clined some­what since then. Like Wikipedia’s ar­ti­cle count, the num­ber of ac­tive ed­i­tors grew ex­po­nen­tially dur­ing the early years of the project. The ar­ti­cle cre­ation rate (which is tracked at Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia) peaked around Au­gust 2006 at about 2400 net new ar­ti­cles per day and has fallen since then, to around under 1400 in re­cent months. [The graph is mir­rored at An­drew Lih’s ⁠“Wikipedia Plateau?”⁠.]

…User:MBisanz has charted the num­ber of new ac­counts reg­is­tered per month, which tells a very sim­i­lar story: March 2007 recorded the largest num­ber of new ac­counts, and the rate of new ac­count cre­ation has fallen sig­nif­i­cantly since then. De­clines in ac­tiv­ity have also been noted, and fret­ted about, at Wikipedia:Re­quests for ad­min­ship…”

This been noted in mul­ti­ple sources, such as Fe­lipe Or­tega’s2009 the­sis, “Wikipedia: A Quan­ti­ta­tive Analy­sis”:

So far, our em­pir­i­cal analy­sis of the top ten Wikipedias has re­vealed that the sta­bi­liza­tion of the num­ber of con­tri­bu­tions from logged au­thors in Wikipedia dur­ing 2007 has in­flu­enced the evo­lu­tion of the project, break­ing down the steady grow­ing rate of pre­vi­ous years…

Un­for­tu­nately, this re­sults raise sev­eral im­por­tant con­cerns for the Wikipedia project. Though we do not have em­pir­i­cal data from 2008, the change in the trend of births and deaths [new & in­ac­tive ed­i­tors] will clearly de­crease the num­ber of avail­able logged au­thors in all lan­guage ver­sions, thus cut­ting out the ca­pac­ity of the project to ef­fec­tively un­der­take re­vi­sions and im­prove con­tents. Even more se­ri­ous is the slightly de­creas­ing trend that is start­ing to ap­pear in the monthly num­ber of births of most ver­sions. The rate of deaths, on the con­trary, does not seem to leave its as­cend­ing ten­dency. Eval­u­at­ing the re­sults for 2008 will be a key as­pect to val­i­date the hy­poth­e­sis that this trend has changed in­deed, and that the Wikipedia project needs to put in prac­tice more ag­gres­sive mea­sures to at­tract new users, if they do not want to see the monthly ef­fort de­crease in due course, as a re­sult of the lack of human au­thors.⁠⁠10

Or­tega notes in­di­ca­tions that this is a pathol­ogy unique to En:

“In the first place, we note the re­mark­able dif­fer­ence be­tween the Eng­lish and the Ger­man lan­guage ver­sions. The first one presents one of the worst sur­vival curves in this se­ries, along with the Por­tuguese Wikipedia, whereas the Ger­man ver­sion shows the best re­sults until ap­prox­i­mately 800 days. From that point on, the Japan­ese lan­guage ver­sion is the best one. In fact, the Ger­man, French, Japan­ese and Pol­ish Wikipedias ex­hibits some of the best sur­vival curves in the set, and only the Eng­lish ver­sion clearly de­vi­ates from this gen­eral trend. The most prob­a­ble ex­pla­na­tion for this dif­fer­ence, tak­ing into ac­count that we are con­sid­er­ing only logged au­thors in this analy­sis, is that the Eng­lish Wikipedia re­ceives too con­tri­bu­tions from too many ca­sual users, who never come back again after per­form­ing just a few re­vi­sions.”⁠⁠11

Erik Moeller of the WMF tried to wave away the re­sults in No­vem­ber 2009 by point­ing out that “The num­ber of peo­ple writ­ing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, de­clined slightly for a brief pe­riod, and has re­mained sta­ble since then”, but he also shoots him­self in the foot by point­ing out that the num­ber of ar­ti­cles keeps grow­ing. That is not a sus­tain­able dis­par­ity. Worse, as the orig­i­nal writ­ers leave, their ar­ti­cles be­come legacy code—on which later ed­i­tors must en­gage in ar­chae­ol­ogy⁠, try­ing to re­trieve the orig­i­nal ref­er­ences or un­der­stand why some­thing was omit­ted, or must sim­ply re­move con­tent be­cause they do not un­der­stand the larger con­text or are ig­no­rant. (I have had con­sid­er­able dif­fi­culty an­swer­ing some straight­for­ward ques­tions about er­rors in ar­ti­cles I re­searched and wrote en­tirely on my own; how well could a later ed­i­tor have han­dled the ques­tions?)

The num­bers have been de­press­ing ever since, from the 2010 in­for­mal & ⁠Foun­da­tion ⁠study⁠⁠12 on ed­i­tor de­mo­graph­ics to ⁠2011 ar­ti­cle con­tri­bu­tions⁠; the WSJ’s sta­tis­ti­cian Carl Bia­lik ⁠wrote in Sep­tem­ber 2011 that “the num­ber of ed­i­tors is dwin­dling. Just 35,844 reg­is­tered ed­i­tors made five or more edits in June, down 34% from the March 2007 peak. Just a small share of Wikipedia ed­i­tors—about 3%—ac­count for 85% of the site’s ac­tiv­ity, a po­ten­tial prob­lem, since par­tic­i­pa­tion by these heavy users has fallen even more sharply.”

Only in 2010 and 2011 has the Foun­da­tion seemed to wake up and see what the num­bers were say­ing all along; while Wales says some of the right things like “A lot of ed­i­to­r­ial guide­lines…are im­pen­e­tra­ble to new users”, he also back-​​​handedly dis­misses it—“We are not re­plen­ish­ing our ranks. It is not a cri­sis, but I con­sider it to be im­por­tant.” By De­cem­ber 2011, Sue Gard­ner seems to re­flect a more re­al­is­tic view in the WMF, call­ing it the “holy-​​​shit slide”; I think she is worth quot­ing at length to em­pha­size the issue. From the 2011-12-19 “The Gard­ner in­ter­view”:

Much of the in­ter­view con­cerned the is­sues she raised in a land­mark ad­dress in No­vem­ber to the board of Wiki­me­dia UK, in which she said the slide show­ing a graph of de­clin­ing ed­i­tor re­ten­tion (below) is what the Foun­da­tion calls “the holy-​​​shit slide”. This is a huge, “re­ally re­ally bad” prob­lem, she told Wiki­me­dia UK, and is worst on the Eng­lish and Ger­man Wikipedias.

A promi­nent issue on the Eng­lish Wikipedia is whether at­tempts to achieve high qual­ity in ar­ti­cles—and per­cep­tions that this is en­tan­gled with un­friendly treat­ment of new­bies by the com­mu­nity—are as­so­ci­ated with low rates of at­tract­ing and re­tain­ing new ed­i­tors. Al­though Gard­ner be­lieves that high qual­ity and at­tract­ing new ed­i­tors are both crit­i­cal goals, her view is that qual­ity has not been the prob­lem, al­though she didn’t de­fine ex­actly what ar­ti­cle qual­ity is. What we didn’t know in 2007, she said, was that “qual­ity was doing fine, whereas par­tic­i­pa­tion was in se­ri­ous trou­ble. The Eng­lish Wikipedia was at the tail end of a sig­nif­i­cant drop in the re­ten­tion of new ed­i­tors: peo­ple were giv­ing up the edit­ing process more quickly than ever be­fore.”

Par­tic­i­pa­tion mat­ters be­cause it dri­ves qual­ity. Peo­ple come and go nat­u­rally, and that means we need to con­tin­u­ally bring in and suc­cess­fully ori­ent new peo­ple. If we don’t, the com­mu­nity will shrink over time and qual­ity will suf­fer. That’s why par­tic­i­pa­tion is our top pri­or­ity right now.

…Dele­tions and re­ver­sions might be dis­taste­ful to new ed­i­tors, but how can we, for in­stance, main­tain strict stan­dards about bi­ogra­phies of liv­ing peo­ple (BLP) with­out re­vert­ing prob­lem­atic edits and delet­ing in­ap­pro­pri­ate ar­ti­cles? Gard­ner re­jected the premise:

I don’t be­lieve that qual­ity and open­ness are in­her­ently op­posed to each other. Open­ness is what en­ables and mo­ti­vates peo­ple to show up in the first place. It also means we’ll get some bad faith con­trib­u­tors and some who don’t have the basic com­pe­tence to con­tribute well. But that’s a rea­son­able price to pay for the over­all ef­fec­tive­ness of an open sys­tem, and it doesn’t in­val­i­date the basic premise of Wikipedia: that open­ness will lead to qual­ity.

…While stak­ing the Foun­da­tion’s claim to the more tech­ni­cal side of the equa­tion, Gard­ner doesn’t shrink from pro­vid­ing ad­vice on how we can fix the cul­tural prob­lem.

If you look at new ed­i­tors’ talk pages, they can be pretty de­press­ing—they’re often an un­in­ter­rupted stream of warn­ings and crit­i­cisms. Ex­pe­ri­enced ed­i­tors put those warn­ings there be­cause they want to make Wikipedia bet­ter: their in­tent is good. But the over­all ef­fect, we know, is that the new ed­i­tors get dis­cour­aged. They feel like they’re mak­ing mis­takes, that they’re get­ting in trou­ble, peo­ple don’t want their help. And so they leave, and who can blame them? We can mit­i­gate some of that by ton­ing down the in­tim­i­da­tion fac­tor of the warn­ings: mak­ing them sim­pler and friend­lier. We can also help by adding some praise and thanks into the mix. When the Foun­da­tion sur­veys cur­rent ed­i­tors, they tell us one of the things they enjoy most about edit­ing Wikipedia is when some­one they re­spect tells them they’re doing a good job. Praise and thanks are pow­er­ful.

…[Around the time of the Seigen­thaler and Es­s­jay con­tro­ver­sies] Jimmy went to Wiki­me­dia and said “qual­ity … we need to do bet­ter”, [and through the dis­tor­tions of the ripple-​​​effect in the projects] there was this moral panic cre­ated around qual­ity … what Jimmy said gave a whole lot of peo­ple the li­cense to be jerks. … Folks are play­ing Wikipedia like it’s a video game and their job is to kill van­dals … every now and again a nun or a tourist wan­ders in front of the AK47 and gets mur­dered …

Many peo­ple have com­plained that Wikipedia pa­trollers and ad­min­is­tra­tors have be­come in­su­lar and taken on a bunker men­tal­ity, dri­ving new con­trib­u­tors away. Do you agree, and if so, how can this at­ti­tude be com­bated with­out alien­at­ing the cur­rent core con­trib­u­tors?

I wouldn’t char­ac­ter­ize it as bunker men­tal­ity at all. It’s just a sys­tem that’s cur­rently op­ti­mized for com­bat­ing bad edits, while being in­suf­fi­ciently con­cerned with the well-​​​being of new ed­i­tors who are, in good faith, try­ing to help the projects. That’s un­der­stand­able, be­cause it’s a lot eas­ier to op­ti­mize for one thing (no bad edit should sur­vive for very long) than for many things (good edits should be pre­served and built upon, new ed­i­tors should be wel­comed and coached, etc.). So I don’t think it’s an at­ti­tu­di­nal prob­lem, but more an issue of fo­cus­ing en­ergy now on re-​​​balancing to en­sure our processes for pa­trolling edits, delet­ing con­tent, etc. are also de­signed to be en­cour­ag­ing and sup­port­ive of new peo­ple.

How can a cul­ture that has a heavy sta­tus quo bias be changed? How can the com­mu­nity be per­suaded to be­come less risk-​​​averse?

My hope is that the com­mu­nity will be­come less risk-​​​averse as the Foun­da­tion makes suc­cess­ful, use­ful in­ter­ven­tions. I be­lieve the Vec­tor us­abil­ity im­prove­ments are gen­er­ally seen as suc­cess­ful, al­though they of course haven’t gone far enough yet. Wik­ilove is a small fea­ture, but it’s been adopted by 13 Wikipedia language-​​​versions, plus Com­mons. The ar­ti­cle feed­back tool is on the Eng­lish Wikipedia and is cur­rently being used in seven other projects. The new-​​​editor feed­back dash­board is live on the Eng­lish and Dutch Wikipedias. New warn­ing tem­plates are being tested on the Eng­lish and Por­tuguese Wikipedias. And the first opt-​​​in user-​​​facing pro­to­type of the vi­sual ed­i­tor will be avail­able within a few weeks. My hope is all this will cre­ate a vir­tu­ous cir­cle: sup­port for open­ness will begin to in­crease open­ness, which will begin to in­crease new ed­i­tor re­ten­tion, which will begin to re­lieve the work­load of ex­pe­ri­enced ed­i­tors, which will en­able every­one to relax a lit­tle and allow for more ex­per­i­men­ta­tion and play­ful­ness.

Re­gain­ing our sense of open­ness will be hard work: it flies in the face of some of our strongest and least healthy in­stincts as human be­ings. Peo­ple find it dif­fi­cult to as­sume good faith and to de­volve power. We nat­u­rally put up walls and our brains fall into us-​​​versus-them pat­terns. That’s nor­mal. But we need to re­sist it. The Wiki­me­dia projects are a tri­umph of human achieve­ment, and they’re built on a be­lief that human be­ings are gen­er­ally well-​​​intentioned and want to help. We need to re­mem­ber that and to be­have con­sis­tently with it.

I am skep­ti­cal that Gard­ner’s ini­tia­tives will change the curves (al­though they are not bad ideas); my gen­eral be­lief is that delet­ing pages, and the om­nipresent threat of dele­tion, are far more harm­ful than com­plex markup. (I should note that Gard­ner has read and praised this essay, but also that much of this essay is based on my feel­ings and may not gen­er­al­ize.)

Re­gard­less of whether the WMF re­ally un­der­stands the issue, it is al­most un­in­ten­tion­ally hi­lar­i­ous to look at the pro­posed so­lu­tions—for ex­am­ple, one amounts to restor­ing early Wikipedia cul­ture & prac­tices in pri­vate sand­boxes, pro­tected from the reg­u­lars & their guide­lines! Band-​​​aids like ⁠Wik­ilove or ⁠ar­ti­cle rat­ing but­tons are not get­ting at the core of the prob­lem; a com­mu­nity does not live on high-​​​quality rat­ing tools (Every­thing2) or die on poor ones (YouTube). The Foun­da­tion/​developers some­times do the right thing, like strik­ing down an Eng­lish Wikipedia ‘con­sen­sus’ to re­strict ar­ti­cle cre­ation even fur­ther, but will it be enough? To quote Carl Bia­lik again:

Adding more ed­i­tors “is one of our top pri­or­i­ties for the year,” says Howie Fung, se­nior prod­uct man­ager for the Wiki­me­dia Foun­da­tion, which aims to in­crease the num­ber of ed­i­tors across all lan­guages of Wikipedia to 95,000 from 81,450 by June of next year.

The sub­se­quent re­search has in some re­spects vin­di­cated my views: some have tried to argue that the de­clines are due to pick­ing all the low-​​​hanging fruit in ar­ti­cles or in avail­able ed­i­tors, that lower qual­ity ed­i­tors mer­ited ad­di­tional pro­ce­dures. But what we see is not that new ed­i­tors are worse or lower-​​​quality, but that they are as high-​​​quality and use­ful as they have been since 2006; nor is this due to a de­clin­ing sup­ply of new ed­i­tors plus bet­ter pro­ce­dures for win­now­ing them out, from ⁠“Kids these days: the qual­ity of new Wikipedia ed­i­tors over time” (⁠“Re­search:New­comer qual­ity”):

What we found was en­cour­ag­ing: the qual­ity of new ed­i­tors has not sub­stan­tially changed since 2006. More­over, both in the early days of Wikipedia and now, the ma­jor­ity of new ed­i­tors are not out to ob­vi­ously harm the en­cy­clo­pe­dia (~80%), and many of them are leav­ing valu­able con­tri­bu­tions to the project in their first edit­ing ses­sion (~40%). How­ever, the rate of re­jec­tion of all good-​​​faith new ed­i­tors’ first con­tri­bu­tions has been ris­ing steadily, and, ac­cord­ingly, re­ten­tion rates have fallen. What this means is that while just as many pro­duc­tive con­trib­u­tors enter the project today as in 2006, they are en­ter­ing an en­vi­ron­ment that is in­creas­ingly chal­leng­ing, crit­i­cal, and/​or hos­tile to their work. These lat­ter find­ings have also been con­firmed through pre­vi­ous re­search.

(I am struck by the fall in new­bie sur­vival rates for the highest-​​​quality—‘golden’—ed­i­tors in ⁠2006–2007⁠. The Seigen­thaler af­fair was, rec­ol­lect, No­vem­ber–De­cem­ber 2005.)

I sus­pected that Fung’s ob­jec­tive would not be reached, as in­deed it was not⁠⁠13⁠.

Re­mem­ber, most mea­sures are di­rected against ca­sual users. Power users can nav­i­gate the end­less processes, or call in pow­er­ful friends, or sim­ply wait a few years⁠⁠14 The most pow­er­ful pre­dic­tor of whether an ed­i­tor will stop edit­ing is… how much they are edit­ing.⁠⁠15 User:Res­i­dent Mario (joined 2008) points in his De­cem­ber 2011 essay “Open­ness ver­sus qual­ity: why we’re doing it wrong, and how to fix it”⁠⁠16 to a dra­matic graph of ed­i­tor counts⁠⁠17:

Active Wikipedians: Actual versus Strategy

And it’s ca­sual users who mat­ter. We lost the cre­den­tialed ex­perts years ago, if we ever had them. Sur­veys ask­ing why are al­most otiose; they will do so if they are ex­cep­tional or if they are man­ag­ing PR around a dis­cov­ery. But Wikipedia is not ⁠Long Con­tent⁠; why would they con­tribute if they can get the traf­fic they de­sire just by ⁠in­sert­ing links⁠⁠18? Why would they build their in­tel­lec­tual houses on sand?⁠⁠19 They get the best of both worlds—gain­ing traf­fic and avoid­ing the toxic dele­tion­ists.

And we can see this quite di­rectly: when the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion of ed­i­tors get so­licited to con­tribute to AfD, their !votes are dif­fer­ent from the AfD reg­u­lars, and in par­tic­u­lar, when keep !vot­ers spread the word about an AfD, their re­cruits are much more likely to !vote keep a well, while would-​​​be deleters do their cause no favor with pub­lic­ity⁠⁠20⁠. Can there be any more con­vinc­ing proof that dele­tion­ism and its man­i­fes­ta­tions are a can­cer on the Wikipedia cor­pus?

The Editing Community Is Dead; Who Killed It?

Hav­ing dis­cussed the broad trend of dele­tion­ism and prob­lems with ed­i­tors, let’s look at one spe­cific dele­tion­ist prac­tice which has, as far as I know, never been ex­am­ined be­fore, de­spite being a clas­sic dele­tion­ist prac­tice and, like most dele­tion­ist prac­tices, one that by the num­bers turns out to badly mis­serve both ed­i­tors and read­ers: the prac­tice of mov­ing links from Ex­ter­nal Links to the Talk page.

The rea­son for my in­ter­est in this minor dele­tion­ist prac­tice is that I no longer edit as much as I used to, and so fre­quently when I find an ex­cel­lent ci­ta­tion (ar­ti­cle, re­view, in­ter­view etc.) I will often just copy it into the Ex­ter­nal Links sec­tion or (if I am feel­ing es­pe­cially en­er­getic) I will ex­cerpt the im­por­tant bits onto the ar­ti­cle’s Talk page. I re­al­ized that this con­sti­tutes what one might call a “nat­ural ex­per­i­ment”: I could go back and see how often the ex­cerpts were copied by an­other ed­i­tor into the ar­ti­cle. This is bet­ter than just look­ing at “how often anime ed­i­tors edit” or “how often anime ar­ti­cles are edited” be­cause it is less re­lated to out­side events—per­haps anime news was sim­ply bor­ing over that pe­riod or per­haps some new bots or scripts were rolled out. Whereas if there are no anime ed­i­tors who will edit even when pre­sented with gift-​​​wrapped RSs (links & ex­cerpts specif­i­cally called out for their at­ten­tion, and triv­ially copy-​​​pasted into the ar­ti­cle), then that’s pretty con­vinc­ing ev­i­dence that there is no longer a ‘there’ there—that the ed­i­tors are no longer ac­tive.

Sins of Omission: Experiment 1

On at least two ar­ti­cles (Talk:Gur­ren La­gann#In­ter­views & Talk:Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise#Sources), I have been stren­u­ously op­posed by ed­i­tors who ob­ject to hav­ing more than a hand­ful of links in the des­ig­nated Ex­ter­nal Links sec­tion; they ac­knowl­edged the links were (mostly) all un­doubted RSs and rel­e­vant to the ar­ti­cle—but they re­fused to in­cor­po­rate the links into the ar­ti­cle. This is bad from every angle, yet few other ed­i­tors were in­ter­ested in help­ing me.

So I’ve begun going through my old main­space Talk edits using Special:Contributions, start­ing all the way back in April 2007 (>4 years ago, more than enough time for ed­i­tors to have made use of my gifts!), look­ing for cases where I’ve dumped such ref­er­ences. I com­piled two lists, of ⁠146 anime-​​​related edits⁠, and ⁠102 non-​​​anime-related edits⁠.

Be­fore going any fur­ther, it’s worth ask­ing—to avoid hind­sight bias and post hoc ra­tio­nal­iza­tion—what you ex­pect my re­sults to be.

When ask­ing your­self, re­mem­ber that these edits, and a larger set of edit we’ll soon ex­am­ine, are se­lected edits; they are high-​​​quality edits, ones where I thought the rel­e­vant ar­ti­cle must cover it. They are not low-​​​quality dumps of text or links by a pass­ing anony­mous ed­i­tor or done out of idle amuse­ment. What per­cent­age would you ex­pect to have been used after a week, enough time that most article-​​​watchlisting ed­i­tors will have seen the diff and had leisure to deal with task more com­plex than re­vert­ing van­dal­ism? 50% doesn’t seem like a bad start­ing point. How about after a year? Or two? Maybe 70% or 90%? After that, if it hasn’t been dealt with, it’s prob­a­bly not ever going to be dealt with (even as­sum­ing the sec­tion hasn’t been stuffed in an archive page). Hold onto your es­ti­mate.

Once the lists were com­piled and weeded, I wrote ⁠a Haskell pro­gram to do the analy­sis. The pro­gram loads the spec­i­fied Talk page URLs and ex­tracts all URLs from the Talk diff so it can check whether any of them were linked in the Ar­ti­cle (which, in­ci­den­tally, leads to false pos­i­tives and an overes­ti­ma­tion⁠⁠21).

Results

The re­sults for my edits when run on the two lists:

  • anime: of 146 edits, 11 were used, or <8%
  • non-anime: 102 edits, 3 used, or <3%

For com­par­i­son, we can look at an ed­i­tor who has de­voted much of her time to find­ing ref­er­ences for anime ar­ti­cles—but made the colos­sal mis­take of be­liev­ing the EL par­ti­sans when they said ex­ter­nal links should ei­ther be in­cor­po­rated into ar­ti­cle text or listed on the talk page. User:Kreb­Markt has made per­haps thou­sands of such edits from im­pec­ca­ble RSs; it is pos­si­ble that my own con­tri­bu­tions are skewed down­wards, say, by a con­gen­i­tal in­abil­ity to se­lect good ref­er­ences. Hence, look­ing at her reference-​​​edits will pro­vide a cross-​​​check.

I com­piled her most re­cent 1000 edits to the ar­ti­cle talk space with a quick down­load: elinks -dump 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&contribs=user&target=KrebMarkt&namespace=1' 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20110227162151&limit=500&contribs=user&target=KrebMarkt&namespace=1' | grep '&diff='. Then I man­u­ally re­moved edits which were minor or did not seem to be her usual reference-​​​edits, re­sult­ing in the fol­low­ing list of ⁠958 edits from De­cem­ber 2010 to De­cem­ber 2011. (Kreb­Markt al­most ex­clu­sively adds anime-​​​related ref­er­ences, so I did not pre­pare a non-​​​anime list.) The re­sults:

  • Of the 958 edits adding references, 36 were used in the article, or <4%
  • Combining my anime & non-anime with KrebMarkt’s edits, we have 1206 edits adding references, of which less than 50 were used in the article, or <4.15%

Be­sides it being sur­pris­ing that Kreb­Markt (not a par­tic­u­larly com­mit­ted in­clu­sion­ist, if she be an in­clu­sion­ist at all) had a suc­cess rate half mine, <4.15% is shock­ingly low.

1156 ig­nored edits rep­re­sents a stag­ger­ing waste of editor-​​​time⁠⁠22⁠. This can­not be ex­plained as our faults: we are both ex­pe­ri­enced ed­i­tors (I began edit­ing in 2004, and Kreb­Markt in 2008), who know what good RSs are. And all of the edits con­tain good RSs. (The reader is in­vited to check edits and see for him­self whether they are solid and valu­able RSs, like re­views by the Anime News Net­work⁠.) That per­haps 1⁄10 of our sug­gested ref­er­ences are in­cluded is due solely to the ap­a­thy or nonex­is­tence of other ed­i­tors. (If such a rate is a ‘suc­cess’, may the Almighty pre­serve us from a fail­ure!)

Since that will not soon change for the bet­ter, this leads to one con­clu­sion: the idea that ref­er­ences hid­den on Talk pages will one day be used is false.

Sins of Omission: Experiment 2

Some­body re­marked: ‘I can tell by my own re­ac­tion to it that this book is harm­ful.’ But let him only wait and per­haps one day he will admit to him­self that this same book has done him a great ser­vice by bring­ing out the hid­den sick­ness of his heart and mak­ing it vis­i­ble.

Friedrich Ni­et­zsche⁠, §58 As­sorted Opin­ions and Max­ims

We have looked at what sug­gest­ing ad­di­tions re­sults in: ab­ject fail­ure. The Wikipedia com­mu­nity is fail­ing at in­cor­po­rat­ing new links. Some at­tempted to jus­tify my ex­per­i­ment above: it’s OK be­cause at least the ex­ist­ing Ex­ter­nal Links sec­tions are qual­ity sec­tions. This is des­per­ate spe­cial plead­ing, but we should test it. How is the edit­ing com­mu­nity at the flip side of the coin—re­tain­ing old links? If in­clu­sion­ists’ sug­ges­tions are being ig­nored, is this at least fairly ap­plied, with dele­tion­ists’ edits also fu­tile?

Un­for­tu­nately, test­ing this re­quires de­struc­tive edit­ing. (We can’t sim­ply sug­gest on talk pages that ex­ter­nal links be re­moved be­cause that is both not how dele­tion­ists op­er­ate and likely will re­sult in no changes, per the pre­vi­ous ex­per­i­ment demon­strat­ing in­ac­tion on the part of ed­i­tors.)

The pro­ce­dure: re­move ran­dom links and record whether they are re­stored to ob­tain a restora­tion rate.

  • Ed­i­tors might defer to other ed­i­tors, so I will re­move links as an anony­mous IP user from mul­ti­ple prox­ies; the restora­tion rate will nat­u­rally be an underes­ti­mate of what a reg­is­tered ed­i­tor would be able to com­mit, much less a ten­den­tious dele­tion­ist.

  • To avoid is­sues with cherry-​​​picking or bi­ased se­lec­tion of links⁠⁠23⁠, I will re­move only the final ex­ter­nal link on pages se­lected by Special:Random#External_links which have at least 2 ex­ter­nal links in an ‘Ex­ter­nal links’ sec­tion, and where the final ex­ter­nal link is nei­ther an ‘of­fi­cial’ link nor template-​​​generated. (This avoids is­sues where pages might have 5 or 10 ‘of­fi­cial’ ex­ter­nal links to var­i­ous ver­sions or lo­cal­iza­tions, all of which an ed­i­tor could con­fi­dently and blindly re­vert the re­moval of; template-​​​generated links also carry im­pri­maturs of au­thor­ity.)

  • The edit sum­mary for each edit will be rm external link per [[WP:EL]]—which has the nice prop­erty of being mean­ing­less to any­one ca­pa­ble of crit­i­cal thought (by de­f­i­n­i­tion, a link re­moval should be per one of WP:EL’s cri­te­ri­ons—but which cri­te­rion?) but also official-​​​looking like many dele­tion­ist edit-​​​summaries.

    This point is very im­por­tant. We are not in­ter­ested in “van­dal­ism in gen­eral”, nor “all pos­si­ble forms of ex­ter­nal link van­dal­ism” (like adding spam links, in­sert­ing gib­ber­ish, break­ing syn­tax), but in bad edits which mimic how a dele­tion­ist would edit. A dele­tion­ist would avoid cer­tain links, and would be sure to make some al­lu­sion to pol­icy. (Shades of Poe’s law: it is im­pos­si­ble to dis­tin­guish an ac­tual dele­tion­ist’s edits from ran­dom dele­tions ac­com­pa­nied by repet­i­tive jar­gon.) If our ex­per­i­ment does not mimic these traits, our final mea­sure­ment of bad-​​​edit re­ver­sion rate will sim­ply not be mea­sur­ing what we hoped to mea­sure.

  • To avoid flood­ing is­sues and be less no­tice­able, no more than 5 or 10 links a day will be re­moved with at least 1 minute be­tween each edit.

  • To avoid build­ing up cred­i­bil­ity, I will not make any real edits with the anony­mous IPs

  • After the last of the 100 links have been re­moved, I will wait 1 month (long enough for the edit to drop off all watch­lists and re­ver­sion rates be­come close to nonex­is­tent⁠⁠24) and re­store all links. I pre­dict at least half will not be re­stored and cer­tainly not more than 90%⁠.

The full list of URL diffs is ⁠avail­able as an ap­pen­dix⁠.

After fin­ish­ing the link re­movals, I briefly looked over the edits con­tri­bu­tion pages for (top), which spec­i­fies whether an edit is still the lat­est edit for that page (all re­verted re­movals will by de­f­i­n­i­tion not still be the lat­est edit, but some non-​​​reverted edits will have un­re­lated edits steal­ing the sta­tus, so the num­ber gives an upper bound on how many re­movals were re­verted). It looked like <10%.

I was also struck dur­ing the process of going through Special:Random by how many ‘Ex­ter­nal Links’ sec­tions have been, in wretched sub­terfuges, re­named ‘Sources’, ‘Ref­er­ences’, ‘Fur­ther read­ing’, or the ar­ti­cle has a long Ref­er­ences sec­tion stuffed with ex­ter­nal links which are used once; per­haps ed­i­tors col­lec­tively know that putting a link into a sec­tion named ‘Ex­ter­nal Links’ is paint­ing a cross-​​​hair on its fore­head. Too, I was struck by the gen­eral qual­ity of the links: of the 100, I would have as­sented to the re­moval of no more than 5 (10 at the most). In gen­eral, ar­ti­cles err far on the side of in­clud­ing too few ex­ter­nal links rather than too many.

How many read­ers were af­fected by my ex­per­i­ment over the course of the month of wait­ing? Feel free to es­ti­mate or give a range—1,000 or 10,000 or maybe 100,000 read­ers? The ar­ti­cles are ran­domly picked, so it seems highly un­likely that there is sig­nif­i­cant over­lap. But my best es­ti­mate, based on stats.grok.se data for the 100 ar­ti­cles’ traf­fic in March 2012, is that some­where around >~335,000 read­ers were af­fected⁠⁠25⁠.

How many ed­i­tors were af­fected? The 100 ar­ti­cles edited were watch­listed by a me­dian of 5 ed­i­tors each; un­for­tu­nately, in lieu of tech­nolo­gies like Pa­trolled Re­vi­sions, we can­not es­ti­mate how many times each edit was checked by a human (as many of those ed­i­tors no doubt are in­ac­tive or do not mon­i­tor their watch­list closely).

What was the early re­ac­tion when I men­tioned this ex­per­i­ment? Ian Wool­lard said

…if you’d have picked some­thing other than ex­ter­nal links, that might, or might not have been a good test.

Last time I checked (which ad­mit­tedly was a while ago) Wikipedia had a no­tice­board whose en­tire pur­pose, was es­sen­tially to delete as many ex­ter­nal links as pos­si­ble, they’d even added a pol­icy that said they could do that in every sin­gle case un­less you could get a ma­jor­ity in a poll to keep in­di­vid­ual links; oh and in prac­tice they pretty much !vote-​​​stuffed those polls too by an­nounc­ing the polls on the no­tice­board, so the chances of a clear ma­jor­ity was low. Oh, and there was a bunch of shady anony­mous IPs in­volved as well that swing around after the fact to edit war them away any­way if an ex­ter­nal link they didn’t favor gets through all that.

Ba­si­cally, ex­ter­nal links are one of the most hated parts of Wikipedia, and if hardly any of them got fixed it wouldn’t sur­prise me, and wouldn’t prove any­thing very much.

Ex­ag­ger­a­tion? Well, con­sider what the ac­tive ad­min­is­tra­tor User:Fu­ture Per­fect at Sun­rise wrote in the WP:AN/​I dis­cus­sion:

Hmm, strange ex­per­i­ment. Given the huge num­ber of in­ap­pro­pri­ate ex­ter­nal links we have, I re­ally won­der: wouldn’t a ran­dom re­moval of a hun­dred links catch so many bad links ob­jec­tively wor­thy of re­moval that the net ef­fect of the “van­dal­ism” might be more ben­e­fit than harm? If the ex­per­i­ment is meant to mea­sure how good the com­mu­nity is at re­vert­ing van­dal­ism, I can’t see how they can do that with­out hav­ing a mea­sure for these ran­dom ben­e­fi­cial hits.

None of the com­menters rose to my chal­lenge to es­ti­mate what the re­vi­sion rate should be, with the ex­cep­tion of the ad­min­is­tra­tor User:Horologium (who iden­ti­fies as an transwiki-​​​ing ex­clu­sion­ist⁠⁠26⁠, which in prac­tice means dele­tion­ism) who looked at 19 ar­ti­cles and es­ti­mated that ~30% of ELs were bad by his stan­dards (so we can infer that a re­ver­sion rate of any­thing but 70% will highly likely ei­ther be al­low­ing good links to be deleted or de­fend­ing bad links by his stan­dards).

Results

  1. nei­ther IP ad­dress was con­tacted at any point in the ex­per­i­ment, blocked, or banned

  2. One ar­ti­cle was deleted; my edit was not re­verted be­fore dele­tion (ac­cord­ing to the admin Toby Bar­tel)

  3. Of the 100 edits, 3 were re­verted:

3% is far worse than I had pre­dicted, and sta­tis­ti­cally sug­gests that the true rate is no higher than 7%⁠⁠27⁠. This leads to one con­clu­sion: ex­ter­nal links are highly vul­ner­a­ble to dele­tion­ism.

Followup

A month after this ex­per­i­ment, I resur­veyed the 100 edits to see how many restora­tions had been re­verted. 4 had been re­verted:

  1. Castell Dinas Bran
  2. Protector (2009 film) (no explanation)
  3. Osprey Publishing (part of a wholesale deletion of links)
  4. Marilyn vos Savant (this one is questionable as well; linking to the Parade homepage seems distinctly less useful to the reader than linking to Parade’s back-archives where vos Savant’s columns are…)

Those who think that 3% was the cor­rect re­ver­sion rate for the re­movals are in­vited to ex­plain how 4% could be the cor­rect re­ver­sion rate for the re-​​​adding of the same links—if it was ac­cept­able for 97% to be re­moved in the first place, how could it also be ac­cept­able for 94% to then be re­stored?

Tallying the Damage

Ignoti, Sed Non Occulti

One might try to de­fend this waste­ful prac­tice by claim­ing that some ed­i­tors and read­ers will go to the Talk page and there might no­tice and visit the deleted links. This could only ame­lio­rate the prob­lem slightly, but it’s worth in­ves­ti­gat­ing just how rarely Talk pages are vis­ited so we can ex­plode this par­tic­u­lar in­stance of the ‘fal­lacy of the in­vis­i­ble’. How many of our read­ers ac­tu­ally look at the talk page as well? (Do a quick es­ti­mate, as be­fore, so you can know if you were right or wrong, and by how much.) I know some writ­ers writ­ing ar­ti­cles on Wikipedia have men­tioned or rhap­sodized at length on the in­ter­est of the talk pages for ar­ti­cles, but they are rare birds and sta­tis­ti­cally ir­rel­e­vant.

It might be enough sim­ply to know how much traf­fic to talk pages there is pe­riod. I doubt ed­i­tors make up much of Wikipedia’s traf­fic, with the shriv­el­ing of the edit­ing pop­u­la­tion, which never kept pace with the growth into a top 10/​20 web­site, so that would give a good upper bound. It would seem to be very small; there’s not a sin­gle Talk page in the top 1000 on stats.grok.se’s top ar­ti­cles⁠. We can look at in­di­vid­ual ar­ti­cles; Talk:Anime has 273 hits over one month while the ar­ti­cle Anime has 128,657 hits (a fac­tor of 471); or Talk:Barack Obama with 1800 over that month com­pared to Barack Obama with its 504,827 hits (a fac­tor of 280).

The raw stats used by stats.grok.se are ⁠avail­able for down­load, so we can look at all page hits, sum all ar­ti­cle and all Talk hits and see what the ratio is for the en­tire Eng­lish Wikipedia is on one day. (each file seems to be an hour of the day so I down­loaded 24 and gunzipped them all.) We do some quick shell script­ing. To find the ag­gre­gate hits for just talk pages:

grep -e '^en Talk:' -e '^en talk:' pagecounts-* | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | paste -sd + | bc
582771

To find ag­gre­gate hits for non-​​​talk pages:

grep -e '^en ' pagecounts-* | grep -v -e '^en Talk:' -e '^en talk:' | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | paste -sd + | bc
202680742

The num­bers look sane—58,2771 for all talk page hits ver­sus 2,0268,0742 for all non-​​​talk page hits. A fac­tor of 347 is pretty much around where I was ex­pect­ing based on those pre­vi­ous 2 pages. The traf­fic data de­vel­oper, Domas, says the sta­tis­tics ex­clude API hits but in­cludes logged-​​​in ed­i­tor hits, so we can safely say that anony­mous users made far fewer than 58k page views that day and hence the true ra­tios are worse than our pre­vi­ous ra­tios of 471/​280/​347. To put the rel­a­tive num­bers into proper per­spec­tive, we can con­vert into per­cent­ages:

  • If we take the absolutely most favorable ratio, Obama’s at 280, and then further assume it was looked at by 0 logged-in users (yeah right), then that implies something posted on its talk page will be seen by <0.35% of interested readers ().
  • If we use the aggregate statistic and say, generously, that registered users make up only 90% of the page views, then something on the talk page will be seen by <0.028% of interested readers ().
Measuring Talk Page Clicks: Dual N-back Experiment

Page views don’t tell us the most in­ter­est­ing thing, how many peo­ple would have clicked on the link if it had been on the ar­ti­cle and not the Talk page. It’s im­pos­si­ble to an­swer this ques­tion in gen­eral, un­for­tu­nately, since Wikipedia does not track clicks.

How­ever, I have ap­prox­i­mated the ratio for at least one ar­ti­cle: the dual n-back ar­ti­cle links to my DNB FAQ⁠. There are a few dozen vis­i­tors each day from Wikipedia, Google An­a­lyt­ics tells me. What will hap­pen if the link is re­moved to the Talk page? The ar­ti­cle and gen­eral in­ter­est in n-​​​back haven’t changed—those vari­ables are still the same. The same sort of peo­ple will be vis­it­ing the ar­ti­cle and (not) vis­it­ing the Talk page. The vis­i­tor count will dra­mat­i­cally fall, prob­a­bly to less than 1 a day. The link was in the ar­ti­cle for per­haps half a year, since ~2011-07-14; on 2012-02-09, I shifted it to the Talk page with a fake mes­sage prais­ing the con­tents, to mimic how an ed­i­tor might gen­uinely post the link on the Talk page (ask­ing the for­bear­ance & co­op­er­a­tion of my fel­low ed­i­tors in hid­den com­ments). I then sched­uled a fol­lowup for 100 days: 2012-05-19.

It ought to be triv­ial and point­less—every­one should ac­knowl­edge that es­sen­tially no read­ers also read Talk pages, but it’s still worth pre­com­mit­ting: I pre­dict that Talk click-​​​throughs will av­er­age <5% of Ar­ti­cle click-​​​throughs, and the dif­fer­ence be­tween the 2 datasets will be statistically-​​​significant at p < 0.05.

As promised, on 2012-05-20 I re­stored my FAQ link and began analy­sis:

  1. Be­fore:

    Be­tween 2011-07-14 and 2012-02-08 (a longer pe­riod), the to­tals were 31,454/​23,538 (pageview/​unique pageview), with 1,910/​1,412 from the Eng­lish Wikipedia and as one would ex­pect, a lesser 740/​618 from the Ger­man Wikipedia⁠⁠28⁠. n = 209, so the daily av­er­age click from the Eng­lish Wikipedia is

    PDF overview⁠, ⁠Eng­lish hits CSV

  2. After:

    Be­tween 10 Feb­ru­ary and 12:50 PM 2012-05-20, my DNB FAQ re­ceived from all sources 21,803/​16,899 page views (raw/​unique). 327/​164 page views were from the Ger­man Wikipedia, and there were 161/​155 page views from the Eng­lish Wikipedia. n = 100, so the daily av­er­age is .

    PDF overview⁠, ⁠Eng­lish hits CSV

Di­vid­ing the two av­er­ages shows that the av­er­age clicks in this pe­riod were ~17.6%, not <5% as I had pre­dicted. This dif­fer­ence be­tween the two groups is statistically-​​​significant at p < 0.001, need­less to say⁠⁠29⁠.

So, Talk page click-​​​throughs are in­deed lower than Ar­ti­cle click-​​​throughs, but al­most 3 times larger than I ex­pected. What hap­pened? We know this can’t be the gen­eral case from look­ing at the states.grok.se data—there just isn’t enough traf­fic to Talk pages for any rea­son.

My best guess is that the dual n-back ar­ti­cle is sim­ply a bad ex­am­ple. If we look at the April 2012 data as an ex­am­ple, we see that it gets some­thing like 15 page views a day with oc­ca­sional spikes and throughs, 568 vis­its over 30 days av­er­ag­ing 19 vis­its a day. There were 9 click-​​​throughs on av­er­age dur­ing the pre­vi­ous sam­ple—sug­gest­ing that some­thing like half the read­ers are click­ing through to one ex­ter­nal link! This does not sound like “nor­mal” ar­ti­cle be­hav­ior, and sug­gests to me that the very short and in­com­plete na­ture of the dual n-back Wikipedia ar­ti­cle is caus­ing read­ers to look for fur­ther bet­ter in­for­ma­tion like my FAQ, which might cause read­ers to also re­sort to check­ing the talk page for in­for­ma­tion (where they would run into my glow­ing fake blurb vis­i­ble on the first screen). Un­for­tu­nately, I can­not check this the­ory be­cause cur­rently only one ar­ti­cle links to my site where I can gather Google An­a­lyt­ics in­for­ma­tion.

The Forgotten Reader

More in­struc­tive is es­ti­mat­ing how many read­ers have been de­prived of the chance to use the ref­er­ences for just the sub­set of 1206 edits we have al­ready looked at above. We can reuse stats.grok.se with ⁠a lit­tle more pro­gram­ming⁠; we will ask it how many hits/​page-​​​views, in total, there were in No­vem­ber 2011 of the 472 unique ar­ti­cles cov­ered by those 1206 edits.

The total: 8,480,394.

Ex­trap­o­lat­ing back­wards to 2007/​2008 is left as an ex­er­cise for the reader.

When we con­sider how false the idea that this prac­tice serves the ed­i­tor, and when we con­sider how many read­ers are ill-​​​served, they sug­gest that the com­mon prac­tice of ‘mov­ing ref­er­ence/​link to the Talk page’ be named for what it is: a sub­tle form of dele­tion.

It would be a ser­vice to our read­ers to end this prac­tice en­tirely: if a link is good enough to be hid­den on a Talk page (sup­pos­edly in the in­ter­ests of in­cor­po­rat­ing it in the fu­ture, which we have seen is an empty promis­sory note), then it is good enough to put at the end of Ex­ter­nal Links or a Fur­ther Read­ing sec­tion, and the lit­er­ally mil­lions of af­fected read­ers will not be de­prived of the chance to make use of them.

I fully ex­pect to see this prac­tice for years to come.

No Club That Would Have Me

Elab­o­rate eu­phemisms may con­ceal your in­tent to kill, but be­hind any use of power over an­other the ul­ti­mate as­sump­tion re­mains: ‘I feed on your en­ergy.’

Frank Her­bert’s Dune Mes­siah (“Ad­denda to Or­ders in Coun­cil—The Em­peror Paul Muad’dib”)

This re­sult will come as no sur­prise to long­time ⁠in­clu­sion­ists⁠. The dele­tion process deletes most ar­ti­cles which enter it, and has long been com­plained about by out­siders. En­tire com­mu­ni­ties (such as the web comics⁠⁠30 or MUD on­line com­mu­ni­ties⁠⁠31) have been alien­ated by purges of ar­ti­cles—purges which not in­fre­quently re­sult in abuse of process, much new­bie bit­ing⁠, and com­i­cal spec­ta­cles like AfD reg­u­lars (usu­ally dele­tion­ists) in­sist­ing a given ar­ti­cle is ab­solutely non-​​​notable and ex­perts in the rel­e­vant field de­mur­ring; a par­tic­u­larly good AfD may see state­ments of ex­perts dis­missed on spe­ciously pro­ce­dural grounds such as hav­ing been made in the ex­pert’s blog (and so fail­ing WP:RS⁠, or per­haps sim­ply being dis­missed as WP:OR) and not a tra­di­tional medium (de­spite the ac­cel­er­at­ing aban­don­ment of ‘tra­di­tional’ RSs by ex­perts in many fields⁠⁠32). The trend has been clear. An­drew Lih⁠, who has been edit­ing Wikipedia even longer than my­self (since 2003) and who wrote a book on Wikipedia, writes in ⁠“Un­wanted: New ar­ti­cles in Wikipedia”:

’It’s in­cred­i­ble to me that the com­mu­nity in Wikipedia has come to this, that ar­ti­cles so ob­vi­ously “keep” just a year ago, are being chal­lenged and locked out. When I was ac­tive back on the mail­ing lists in 2004, I was a well known dele­tion­ist. “Wiki isn’t paper, but it isn’t an attic,” I would say. Se­lec­tiv­ity mat­ters for a qual­ity en­cy­clo­pe­dia. But it’s a whole dif­fer­ent mood in 2007. Today, I’d be la­beled a wild eyed in­clu­sion­ist. I sus­pect most vet­eran Wikipedi­ans would be la­beled a bleed­ing heart in­clu­sion­ist too. How did we raise a new gen­er­a­tion of folks who want to wipe out so much, who would shoot first, and not ask ques­tions what­so­ever? [If Lih can write this in 2007, you can imag­ine how peo­ple who iden­ti­fied as in­clu­sion­ists in 2004, such as my­self or The Cunc­ta­tor⁠, look to Wikipedi­ans who re­cently joined.]

It’s as if there is a Soup Nazi cul­ture now in Wikipedia. There are throngs of dele­tion happy users, like grumpy old gate­keep­ers, toss­ing out cus­tomers and ar­ti­cles if they don’t com­ply to some new prickly hard-​​​nosed stan­dard. It used to be if an ar­ti­cle was short, some­one would add to it. If there was spam, some­one would re­move it. If facts were ques­tion­able, some­one would re­search it. The beauty of Wikipedia was the human fac­tor—rea­son­able peo­ple in­ter­act­ing and col­lab­o­rat­ing, build­ing off each other’s work. It was im­por­tant to start stuff, even if it wasn’t com­plete. As­sume good faith, neu­tral point of view and if it’s not right, {{sofixit}}. Things would grow.’

I was par­tic­u­larly de­pressed to read ⁠in the com­ments things from ad­min­is­tra­tors whose names I rec­og­nize due to their long tenure on Wikipedia, like Lly­wrch (joined 2002):

“I’m sorry that you en­coun­tered that, An­drew—but not sur­prised. I had my own en­counter with the new gen­er­a­tion of”quote pol­icy, not rea­son­ing” dele­tion­ists; I feel as if I en­coun­tered (to quote from the song) “the forces of evil from a bozo night­mare.” No one—in­clud­ing me—looked good after that ex­change. (I keep think­ing that I should have said some­thing dif­fer­ent, but the sur­re­al­ism of the sit­u­a­tion mul­ti­plied with the square of my frus­tra­tion kept me from my best.)”

Or ⁠St­bal­bach:

“I’m a long time ed­i­tor, since 2003, ranked in the top 300 by num­ber of edits (most in ar­ti­cle space). On May 11th 2007 I mostly gave up on Wikipedia—there is some­thing wrong with the com­mu­nity, in par­tic­u­lar peo­ple delet­ing con­tent. I’d never seen any­thing like it prior to late 2006 and 2007. Fur­ther, the use of”nag tags” at the top of ar­ti­cles is out of hand. It’s eas­ier to nag and delete than it is to re­search and fix. Too many know-​​​nothings who want to “help” have found a pow­er­ful niche by nag­ging and delet­ing with­out en­gag­ing in di­a­log and sim­ply cit­ing 3 let­ter rules. If an user is un­will­ing or in­ca­pable of work­ing to im­prove an ar­ti­cle they should not be plac­ing nag tags or delet­ing con­tent.”

Also in­ter­est­ing is ⁠Ta bu shi da yu’s com­ment, inas­much as Ta bu in­vented the in­fa­mous {{fact}}:

“I have also seen this hap­pen­ing. It’s in­cred­i­ble that those who are so in­cred­i­bly stu­pid can get away with mis­us­ing the speedy dele­tion tag! As for DRV… don’t make me laugh. It seems to be slanted to keep ar­ti­cles deleted. I can’t agree more with your sen­ti­ments that if you know all the codes to WP:AFD, then you are a men­ace to Wikipedia.”

Why is this cul­ture chang­ing? In part be­cause ar­ti­cle writ­ing seems to get no more re­spect. A re­view ar­ti­cle sum­ma­rizes the find­ings of Burke and Kraut2008⁠⁠33:

…it is prov­ing in­creas­ingly hard to be­come a Wikipedia ad­min­is­tra­tor: 2,700 can­di­dates were nom­i­nated be­tween 2001 and 2008, with a suc­cess rate of 53%. The rate has dropped from 75.5% until 2005 to 42% in 2006 and 2007. Ar­ti­cle con­tri­bu­tion was not a strong pre­dic­tor of suc­cess. The most suc­cess­ful can­di­dates were those who edited the Wikipedia pol­icy or project space; such an edit is worth ten ar­ti­cle edits.

What sort of ed­i­tor, with a uni­verse of fas­ci­nat­ing top­ics to write upon, would choose to spend most of his time on the pol­icy name­space? What sort of ed­i­tor would choose to stop writ­ing ar­ti­cles?⁠⁠34 Ad­min­is­tra­tors with min­i­mal ex­pe­ri­ence in cre­at­ing con­tent—and much ex­pe­ri­ence in de­stroy­ing it and rewrit­ing the rules to per­mit the de­struc­tion of even more. Is this not al­most the op­po­site of what one wants? And imag­ine how the au­thors must feel! An ar­ti­cle is not a triv­ial un­der­tak­ing; some­time sit down, se­lect a ran­dom sub­ject, and try to write a well-​​​organized, flu­ent, com­pre­hen­sive, and ac­cu­rate en­cy­clo­pe­dia ar­ti­cle on it. It’s not as easy as it looks, and it’s even harder to write a well-​​​referenced and cor­rectly for­mat­ted one. To have an ar­ti­cle deleted is bad enough; I can’t imag­ine any neo­phyte ed­i­tors want­ing to have any­thing to do with Wikipedia if an ar­ti­cle of theirs got rail­roaded through AfD. It is eas­ier to de­stroy than to cre­ate, and de­struc­tion is in­fec­tious. (In the study Thurneret al2012 of 3.3 years of the on­line SF game Par­dus⁠, play­ers were found to ‘pay it for­ward’ when the sub­ject of neg­a­tive ac­tions; the com­mu­nity was only saved from an epi­demic of at­tacks by the high mor­tal­ity & quit­ting rate of neg­a­tive ed­i­tors—I mean, neg­a­tive play­ers⁠⁠35⁠.)

Delet­ing ar­ti­cles and pil­ing on pol­icy after guide­line after pol­icy are both di­rectly op­posed to why Wikipedi­ans con­tribute! When sur­veyed in 2011:

The two most fre­quently se­lected rea­sons for con­tin­u­ing to edit Wikipedia were “I like the idea of vol­un­teer­ing to share knowl­edge” (71%) and “I be­lieve that in­for­ma­tion should be freely avail­able to every­one” (69%), fol­lowed by “I like to con­tribute to sub­ject mat­ters in which I have ex­per­tise” (63%) and “It’s fun” (60%).

And iron­i­cally, the more ef­fort an ed­i­tor pours into a topic and the longer & more de­tailed the ar­ti­cle be­comes, the more blind ha­tred it in­spires in dele­tion­ists. If you look at AfDs for small ar­ti­cles or stubs, the dele­tion­ists seem pos­i­tively lucid & ra­tio­nal; but make the ar­ti­cle 50kB long, and watch the rhetoric fly. I call this the fan­cruft ef­fect: dele­tion­ists are men­tally al­ler­gic to in­for­ma­tion they do not care about or like.

If a dele­tion­ist sees an ar­ti­cle on “Lightsaber com­bat”⁠⁠36 and it’s just a page long, then he has lit­tle prob­lem with it. It may strike him as too big, but rea­son­able. But if the ar­ti­cle dares to be com­pre­hen­sive, if it is clearly the prod­uct of many hours’ labor on the part of mul­ti­ple ed­i­tors, if there are touches like ref­er­ences and quotes—then some­thing is wrong on the In­ter­net⁠, the very uni­verse is out of joint that this ar­ti­cle has been so well-​​​developed when so many more de­serv­ing top­ics lan­guish, it is a cos­mic in­jus­tice. A dirty beg­gar is parad­ing around act­ing like an em­peror. The ar­ti­cle does not know its place. It needs to be smacked down and hard. And who bet­ter than the dele­tion­ist?

What is the ul­ti­mate status-​​​lowering ac­tion which one can do to an ed­i­tor, short of ac­tu­ally ban­ning or block­ing them? Delet­ing their ar­ti­cles.

In a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject area, who is most likely to work on ob­scurer ar­ti­cles? The ex­perts and high-​​​value ed­i­tors—they have the re­sources, they have the in­ter­est, they have the com­pe­tency. Any­one who grew up in Amer­ica post-1980 can work on [[Darth Vader]]; many fewer can work on [[Grand Admiral Thrawn]]. Any­one can work on [[Basho]]; few can work on [[Fujiwara no Teika]].

What has Wikipedia been most likely to delete in its shift dele­tion­ist over the years? Those ob­scurer ar­ti­cles.

The proof is in the pud­ding: all the high-​​​value/​status Star Wars ed­i­tors have de­camped for some­where they are val­ued; all the high-​​​value/​status Star Trek ed­i­tors, the Lost ed­i­tors… the list goes on. They left for a com­mu­nity that re­spected them and their work more; these spe­cific ex­am­ples are strik­ing be­cause the ed­i­tors had to make a com­mu­nity, but one should not sup­pose such de­par­tures are lim­ited to fiction-​​​related ar­ti­cles. There may be ⁠evap­o­ra­tive cool­ing of the com­mu­nity but it’s not to­wards the ob­ses­sive fans.

The great­est plea­sure is to van­quish your en­e­mies and chase them be­fore you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daugh­ters.

At­trib­uted to Genghis Khan

Out­siders! I re­al­ize it might sound like a stretch that any­one en­joys the power of nom­i­nat­ing ar­ti­cles, that being a dele­tion­ist could be a joy­ful role. You say you un­der­stand how ad­min­is­tra­tors (with their abil­ity to di­rectly delete, to ban, to roll­back etc.) could grow drunk on power, but how could AfD nom­i­na­tions lead to such a feel­ing?

But I know from per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence that there is power ex­er­cised in nom­i­nat­ing for dele­tion. Well do I know the dark arts of gam­ing the sys­tem: of the clever use of tem­plates, of the process of delet­ing the ar­ti­cle by care­fully chal­leng­ing and re­mov­ing piece after piece, of in­vok­ing the ap­pro­pri­ate guide­lines and poli­cies to de­mol­ish ar­gu­ments and ref­er­ences.

I have seen the wails and groans in the edit sum­maries & com­ments of my op­po­nents, and ex­ulted in their de­feat. It’s very real, the temp­ta­tion of ex­er­cis­ing this power. It’s easy to con­vince your­self that you are doing the right thing, and merely en­forc­ing the poli­cies/​guidelines as the larger com­mu­nity set them down. (Were all my nom­i­na­tions just? No, but I have suc­ceeded in fool­ing my­self so well that I can no longer tell which ones truly did de­serve dele­tion and which ones were deleted just be­cause I dis­liked them or their au­thors.)

Who can say how many au­thors take it per­son­ally? The dele­tion process is in­her­ently in­sult­ing: “Out of 2.5 mil­lion ar­ti­cles, yours stands out as suck­ing so badly that it is ir­re­deemable and must be oblit­er­ated.” And it is ul­ti­mately sad⁠⁠37—life is short but must that be true of ar­ti­cles as well as men?

A Personal Look Back

Once more and they think to thank you.

Gertrude Stein⁠, A Novel of Thank You

As men­tioned I have ~100k edits on the Eng­lish Wikipedia⁠, so I think I can speak from first-​​​hand ex­pe­ri­ence here.

The prob­lem with de­vot­ing this much ef­fort to Wikipedia is not that your time is wasted. If you get this far, you’ve ab­sorbed enough that you know how to make edits that will last and how to de­fend your ma­te­r­ial, and this guy in par­tic­u­lar is mak­ing edits in areas par­tic­u­larly aca­d­e­mic and safe from dele­tion­ists; and your ar­ti­cles will re­ceives hun­dreds or thou­sands of vis­its a month (see stats.grok.se—I was a lit­tle shocked at how many page hits my ar­ti­cles col­lec­tively rep­re­sent a month).

The prob­lem is that the ben­e­fits are going en­tirely to your read­ers. It’s a case-​​​study in pos­i­tive ex­ter­nal­i­ties⁠. Un­like FLOSS or other forms of cre­ation which build a port­fo­lio⁠, you don’t even get in­tan­gi­bles like rep­u­ta­tion—to the ex­tent any reader thinks about it, they’ll just men­tally thank the Wikipedia col­lec­tive. When you make 10,000 edits to your per­sonal wiki, you will prob­a­bly have writ­ten some pretty de­cent stuff, you will have es­tab­lished a per­sonal brand, etc. Maybe it’ll turn out great, maybe it’ll turn out to be worth noth­ing. But when you make 10,000 edits to Wikipedia, you are guar­an­teed to get noth­ing.

No doubt one can point to the oc­ca­sional Wikipedia ed­i­tor who has ben­e­fited with a book con­tract or a job or some­thing. But what about all the other ed­i­tors in Wikipedia:List of Wikipedi­ans by num­ber of edits?

To again turn to my­self; when I was pour­ing much of my free en­ergy and re­search in­ter­est into im­prov­ing Wikipedia, I got noth­ing back ex­cept sat­is­fac­tion and being able to point peo­ple at bet­ter ar­ti­cles dur­ing dis­cus­sions. I began writ­ing things that didn’t fit on Wikipedia and got a per­sonal web­site be­cause I didn’t want to use some flaky free ser­vice, and the world didn’t end. I now have an ac­tual rep­u­ta­tion among some peo­ple; on oc­ca­sion, peo­ple even email me with job of­fers to write things, hav­ing learned of me from my web­site. I owe my cur­rent (very mod­est) liv­ing to my writ­ings being clearly mine, and not “ran­dom stuff on Wikipedia”. I’m not say­ing any of this is very im­pres­sive, but I am say­ing that these are all ben­e­fits I would not have re­ceived had I con­tin­ued my edit­ing on Wikipedia. Now I oc­ca­sion­ally add ex­ter­nal links, and I try to de­fend ar­ti­cles I pre­vi­ously wrote. Once in a blue moon I post some highly tech­ni­cal or fac­tual ma­te­r­ial I be­lieve will be safe against even hard­core dele­tion­ists. But my glory days are long over. The game is no longer worth the can­dle.

Wikipedia is won­der­ful, but it’s sad to see peo­ple sac­ri­fic­ing so much of them­selves for it.

What Is To Be Done?

Wikipedia was en­abled by soft­ware. It en­abled a com­mu­nity to form. This com­mu­nity did truly great work; it’s often said Wikipedia is his­toric, but I think most peo­ple have lost sight of how his­toric Wikipedia is as it fades into the back­ground of mod­ern life; per­haps only schol­ars of the fu­ture have enough per­spec­tive on this leviathan, in the same way that Diderot’s en­cy­clo­pe­dia was—for all the con­tro­versy and ban­ning—not given its full due at pub­li­ca­tion. (But how could it? En­cy­clo­pe­dias are more processes than fin­ished works, and of no en­cy­clo­pe­dia is this more true than Wikipedia.)

That com­mu­nity did great work, as­ton­ish­ing in breadth and depth, I said. But that com­mu­nity is also re­spon­si­ble for mis­us­ing the tools. If van­dal­ism is eas­ier to re­move than cre­ate, then it will tend to dis­ap­pear. But AfD is not van­dal­ism. There are no tech­ni­cal fixes for dele­tion­ist ed­i­tors. As long as most ed­i­tors have weak views, are will­ing to stand by while ‘nerdy’ top­ics feel the ax, who think ‘dele­tion­ists mostly get it cor­rect’, then the sit­u­a­tion will not change.

Could dele­tion be a pos­i­tive feed­back cycle? Will the waves of dele­tion con­tinue to en­cour­age ed­i­tors to leave, to not sign up, to let the dele­tion­ists con­tinue their grisly work un­op­posed, until Wikipedia is a shell of what it was?

Like the cool­ing dwarf star left by a su­per­nova—its lost bril­liance trav­el­ing on­wards to eter­nity.

See Also

Appendices

Analysis Script

The fol­low­ing Haskell pro­gram re­quires the Haskell base li­braries and the Tag­Soup li­brary (cabal install tagsoup). The script is par­al­lel. One can com­pile it like ghc -threaded -rtsopts -O2 script.hs; to run it one pipes in a list of newline-​​​delimited Talk page edits, like ./script +RTS -N4 -RTS < urls.txt⁠⁠38 which will then print out a sum­mary like

Checked 1024 edits
112 were used

The fol­low­ing sec­tions pro­vide 3 lists of se­lected edits which one could input.

import Control.Concurrent (forkIO, newEmptyMVar, putMVar, takeMVar, MVar)
import Control.Monad (liftM, void)
import Data.List (elemIndices, intersect, isPrefixOf, nub, sort)
import Network.HTTP (getRequest, rspBody, simpleHTTP)
import Text.HTML.TagSoup (parseTags, Tag(TagOpen, TagText))

main :: IO ()
main = do args <- liftM lines getContents

          results <- mapM parallel args
          results' <- mapM takeMVar results
          count <- liftM (length . filter id) $ sequence results'

          putStrLn $ "Checked " ++ show (length args) ++ " edits"
          putStrLn $ show count ++ " were used"

-- NOTE: these days I'd just use Control.Monad.Parallel.mapM
parallel :: String -> IO (MVar (IO Bool))
parallel s = do m <- newEmptyMVar
                _ <- forkIO $ void (putMVar m (comparePages s))
                return m

comparePages :: String -> IO Bool
comparePages url = do src <- liftM parseTags $ openURL url
                      let talkUrls = rmDupes $ concatMap urlsExtract $ text $ diff src

                      artcl <- liftM parseTags $ openURL (article url)
                      let articleUrls = uniq $ extractURLs artcl

                      return $ 0 /= length (talkUrls `intersect` articleUrls)
                   where uniq = nub . sort -- don't double-count in `intersect`!
                         -- throw out any URL appearing twice in a diff -
                         -- must be an old URL in both new and old pages!
                         -- only unique URLs could have been added.
                         rmDupes x = filter (\y -> length (elemIndices y x) <= 1) x

openURL :: String -> IO String
openURL u = do res <- simpleHTTP $ getRequest u
               case res of
                 Left _ -> return ""
                 Right y -> return $ rspBody y

-- pull all text; hopefully, out of the diff-only part of the HTML page
text :: [Tag String] -> [String]
text src = [x | (TagText x) <- src]

urlsExtract :: String -> [String]
urlsExtract = filter (not . null) . map trimmer . words

{- crop a string down to the "http://" prefix, or return nothing
    > trimmer "* http://foo.com"       → "http://foo.com"
    > trimmer "* [http://foo.com]"     → "http://foo.com"
    > trimmer "* [http://foo.com Foo]" → "http://foo.com"
    > trimmer "# It will break!"       → "" -}
trimmer :: String -> String
trimmer [] = []
trimmer y = fst $ break (\x -> x=='[' || x ==']' || x==' ') $ if "http://" `isPrefixOf` y
                                                    then y else trimmer (tail y)

-- "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Princess_Jellyfish&diff=prev&oldid=403146531"
--  → "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Jellyfish"
article :: String -> String
article url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" ++ takeWhile (/= '&') (drop 47 url)

-- pull out all external links (but not local relative links)
extractURLs :: [Tag String] -> [String]
extractURLs arg = [x | TagOpen "a" atts <- arg,
                       (_,x) <- atts,
                       "http://" `isPrefixOf` x]

-- cut everything up to "<table class='diff diff-contentalign-left'>", then cut everything after
-- "<!-- diff cache key enwiki: ... --> </table><hr class='diff-hr' />"
diff :: [Tag String] -> [Tag String]
diff = takeWhile ast' . dropWhile ast
        where ast, ast' :: Tag String -> Bool
              ast x = case x of
               TagOpen "table" [("class","diff diff-contentalign-left")] -> False
               _ -> True
              ast' x = case x of
               TagOpen "hr" [("class","diff-hr")] -> False
               _ -> True

stats.grok.se Script

This is com­piled and run much the same way, minus the -rtsopts -threaded op­tions (it is not par­al­lel).

import Data.List (isInfixOf, nub, sort)
import Network.HTTP (getRequest, rspBody, simpleHTTP)
import Text.HTML.TagSoup (parseTags, Tag(TagText))

main :: IO ()
main = do stats <- fmap (nub . sort . map article . lines) getContents
          srcs <- mapM openURL stats
          print $ sum $ map total srcs

openURL :: String -> IO String
openURL u = do res <- simpleHTTP $ getRequest u
               case res of
                 Left _ -> return ""
                 Right y -> return $ rspBody y

article :: String -> String
article url = "http://stats.grok.se/en/201111/" ++ takeWhile (/= '&') (drop 47 url)

total :: String -> Int
total s = read (head $ text $ parseTags s) :: Int

-- target: TagText " has been viewed 215 times in 201111. "
text :: [Tag String] -> [String]
text src =  map (takeWhile (/= ' ') . drop 17) [x | (TagText x) <- src, " has been viewed " `isInfixOf` x]

Gwern

Anime Edits

Base URL: `https:/​/​en.wikipedia.org/​w/​index.php?title=

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Sub­se­quent De­cem­ber 2011 edits adding Manga Im­pact! ex­cerpts, for use in fu­ture up­dates:

Talk:Hideaki_Anno&diff=prev&oldid=467386283
Talk:Cat_Soup&diff=prev&oldid=467386278
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Talk:Perfect_Blue&diff=prev&oldid=467386187
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Talk:Mind_Game_(film)&diff=prev&oldid=467386158
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Talk:Shinichir%C5%8D_Watanabe&diff=prev&oldid=467386083
Talk:Ikuto_Yamashita&diff=prev&oldid=467386074

Using solid RSs from var­i­ous places:

Talk:Miu_Nakamura&diff=next&oldid=443586698
Talk:Mobile_Suit_Gundam_Unicorn&diff=next&oldid=447787978
Talk:List_of_Code_Geass_chapters&diff=next&oldid=437716103
Talk:Tales_of_the_Abyss&diff=next&oldid=420771901
Talk:Lucky_Star_%28manga%29&diff=next&oldid=423381723
Talk:Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00&diff=next&oldid=413740770
Talk:Gurren_Lagann&diff=next&oldid=460101766
Talk:Kannagi:_Crazy_Shrine_Maidens&diff=next&oldid=256174496
Talk:Code_Geass&diff=next&oldid=466283941
Talk:Eureka_Seven&diff=next&oldid=446508979
Talk:Mobile_Suit_Gundam_Wing&diff=next&oldid=374026158
Talk:Haruhi_Suzumiya&diff=next&oldid=468788910
Talk:Outlaw_Star&diff=next&oldid=460958274
Talk:The_Vision_of_Escaflowne&diff=next&oldid=451719732
Talk:Cowboy_Bebop&diff=next&oldid=448951537
Talk:Katawa_Shoujo&diff=next&oldid=463907489
Talk:%C5%8Ctar%C5%8D_Maij%C5%8D&diff=next&oldid=398585286
Talk:Hatsune_Miku&diff=next&oldid=454344731
Talk:Escaflowne_%28film%29&diff=next&oldid=376488604
Talk:Eureka_Seven&diff=next&oldid=469409898
Talk:The_Animatrix&diff=next&oldid=435026766
Talk:Samurai_Champloo&diff=next&oldid=453680670
Talk:Takashi_Murakami&diff=next&oldid=398800894
Talk:Ghost_in_the_Shell:_Stand_Alone_Complex&diff=next&oldid=468305128
Talk:Yoko_Kanno&diff=next&oldid=460616030
Talk:Eiji_%C5%8Ctsuka&diff=next&oldid=427434029

A dif­fer­ent ex­per­i­ment: will links to solid RSs and even links to the The En­cy­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion be re­moved? So far one was⁠.

2009_Lost_Memories&diff=prev&oldid=470467955
Motoko_Arai&diff=prev&oldid=470467674
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Jonathan_Clements&diff=prev&oldid=470462657
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Princess_Hours&diff=prev&oldid=470462001
Grey_(manga)&diff=prev&oldid=470461371
Xiaolu_Guo&diff=prev&oldid=470461100
Ry%C5%8D_Hanmura&diff=prev&oldid=470460758
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Hisashi_Inoue&diff=prev&oldid=470459933
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Kamishibai&diff=prev&oldid=470458875
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Satoshi_Kon&diff=prev&oldid=470358071
Takao_Koyama&diff=prev&oldid=470357021
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Gor%C5%8D_Masaki&diff=prev&oldid=470356471
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Katsuhiro_Otomo&diff=prev&oldid=470331626
Roujin_Z&diff=prev&oldid=470331486
Hiroshi_Sakurazaka&diff=prev&oldid=470331348
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Steamboy&diff=prev&oldid=470330011
Jun_Suemi&diff=prev&oldid=470329717
Hiroe_Suga&diff=prev&oldid=470329562
Kaoru_Abe&diff=prev&oldid=470329401
Haruhi_Suzumiya&diff=prev&oldid=470329105
Haruka_Takachiho&diff=prev&oldid=470328354
Haruhi_Suzumiya&diff=prev&oldid=470182038
Nagaru_Tanigawa&diff=prev&oldid=470181840
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Ai_no_Kusabi&diff=prev&oldid=470166234
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Mecha&diff=prev&oldid=470165105
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Ry%C5%8Dsuke_Takahashi&diff=next&oldid=449407491
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Xam%27d:_Lost_Memories&diff=next&oldid=475503315
The_Secret_World_of_Arrietty&diff=next&oldid=478900309
Lupin_III&diff=next&oldid=478919543
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Gasaraki&diff=next&oldid=473622482
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Grave_of_the_Fireflies&diff=next&oldid=479452287
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Wolf_Children&diff=prev&oldid=584892972
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Shigurui&diff=prev&oldid=560964921
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Summer_Wars&diff=prev&oldid=508328050
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Hellsing&diff=prev&oldid=526359534
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Baccano!&diff=prev&oldid=549343791
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Non-anime Edits

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Re­cent edits:

Talk:Okinawa_diet&diff=next&oldid=460765305
Gyaru&diff=next&oldid=477996685
Cleve_Cartmill&diff=prev&oldid=584474394
Deadline_(science_fiction_story)&diff=prev&oldid=584474333
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KrebMarkt

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  1.  

    From “Dig­i­tal Fil­ters II” in The Art of Doing Sci­ence and En­gi­neer­ing⁠, Richard W. Ham­ming 1997:

    This is ex­actly the same mis­take which was made end­lessly by peo­ple in the early days of com­put­ers. I was told re­peat­edly, until I was sick of hear­ing it, com­put­ers were noth­ing more than large, fast desk cal­cu­la­tors. “Any­thing you can do by a ma­chine you can do by hand.”, so they said. This sim­ply ig­nores the speed, ac­cu­racy, re­li­a­bil­ity, and lower costs of the ma­chines vs. hu­mans. Typ­i­cally a sin­gle order of mag­ni­tude change (a fac­tor of 10) pro­duces fun­da­men­tally new ef­fects, and com­put­ers are many, many times faster than hand com­pu­ta­tions. Those who claimed there was no es­sen­tial dif­fer­ence never made any sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the de­vel­op­ment of com­put­ers. Those who did make sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions viewed com­put­ers as some­thing new to be stud­ied on their own mer­its and not as merely more of the same old desk cal­cu­la­tors, per­haps souped up a bit.

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  2.  

    Yvain, “Be­ware Triv­ial In­con­ve­niences”⁠. The con­nec­tion to Wikipedia ⁠is ob­vi­ous⁠.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  3.  

    Ab­stract of “Ci­ta­tion Ad­van­tage of Open Ac­cess Legal Schol­ar­ship”, Dono­van & Wat­son2011. Are legal schol­ars lazy? Are law li­braries ill-​​​funded? Do legal schol­ars have lit­tle in­cen­tive to write well-​​​researched pa­pers? And yet, mak­ing pa­pers a lit­tle eas­ier to ac­cess re­sults in a dra­matic dif­fer­ence in ci­ta­tion.

    Swan2010 sur­veyed a 31 stud­ies and found 27 show­ing ben­e­fits to OA. For ex­am­ple, ben­e­fits to open ac­cess were found in bi­ol­ogy by Gun­ther Ey­sen­bach⁠, and Steve Lawrence found sim­i­lar re­sults for com­puter sci­ence ar­ti­cles on­line or of­fline:

    The mean num­ber of ci­ta­tions to of­fline ar­ti­cles is 2.74, and the mean num­ber of ci­ta­tions to on­line ar­ti­cles is 7.03, or 2.6 times greater than the num­ber for of­fline ar­ti­cles. These num­bers mask vari­a­tions over time—in par­tic­u­lar, older ar­ti­cles have more ci­ta­tions on av­er­age, and older ar­ti­cles are less likely to be on­line. When con­sid­er­ing ar­ti­cles within each year, and av­er­ag­ing across all years 1990–2000, we find that on­line ar­ti­cles are cited 4.5 times more often than of­fline ar­ti­cles.

    We also an­a­lyzed dif­fer­ences within each pub­li­ca­tion venue, where mul­ti­ple years for the same con­fer­ence are con­sid­ered as sep­a­rate venues. We com­puted the per­cent­age in­crease in the av­er­age num­ber of ci­ta­tions to on­line ar­ti­cles com­pared to of­fline ar­ti­cles. When of­fline ar­ti­cles were more highly cited, we used the neg­a­tive of the per­cent­age in­crease for of­fline ar­ti­cles. For ex­am­ple, if the av­er­age num­ber of ci­ta­tions for of­fline ar­ti­cles is 2, and the av­er­age for on­line ar­ti­cles is 4, the per­cent­age in­crease would be 100%. For the op­po­site sit­u­a­tion, the per­cent­age in­crease would be -100%. Fig­ure 2 shows the re­sults. Av­er­ag­ing the per­cent­age in­crease across 1,494 venues con­tain­ing at least five of­fline and five on­line ar­ti­cles re­sults in an av­er­age of 336% more ci­ta­tions to on­line ar­ti­cles com­pared to of­fline ar­ti­cles pub­lished in the same venue [the first, sec­ond (me­dian), and third quar­tiles of the dis­tri­b­u­tion are 58%, 158%, and 361%].

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  4.  

    On the other hand, one eco­nom­ics study showed no ben­e­fit, Craiget al2007 found no ben­e­fit in one physics sub­field:

    Three non-​​​exclusive pos­tu­lates have been pro­posed to ac­count for the ob­served ci­ta­tion dif­fer­ences be­tween OA and non-​​​OA ar­ti­cles: an open ac­cess pos­tu­late, a se­lec­tion bias pos­tu­late, and an early view pos­tu­late. The most rig­or­ous study to date (in con­densed mat­ter physics) showed that, after con­trol­ling for the early view pos­tu­late, the re­main­ing dif­fer­ence in ci­ta­tion counts be­tween OA and non-​​​OA ar­ti­cles is ex­plained by the se­lec­tion bias pos­tu­late. No ev­i­dence was found to sup­port the OA pos­tu­late per se; i.e. ar­ti­cle OA sta­tus alone has lit­tle or no ef­fect on ci­ta­tions. Fur­ther stud­ies using a sim­i­larly rig­or­ous ap­proach are re­quired to de­ter­mine the gen­er­al­ity of this find­ing.

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  5.  

    Max Levchin⁠, Pay­Pal co-​​​founder; pg 11, Founders at Work↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  6.  

    Joel on Soft­ware, ⁠“Fog­Bugz”↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  7.  

    Joel on Soft­ware, ⁠“Strat­egy Let­ter III: Let Me Go Back!”↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  8.  

    ⁠“Rate this Page” is Com­ing to the Eng­lish Wikipedia⁠, WMF blog↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  9.  

    “The search queries that took Aus­tralian In­ter­net users to Wikipedia”, Waller2011:

    This ex­ploratory study analy­ses the con­tent of the search queries that led Aus­tralian In­ter­net users from a search en­gine to a Wikipedia entry. The study used trans­ac­tion logs from Hit­wise that matched search queries with data on the lifestyle of the searcher. A total sam­ple of 1760 search terms, strat­i­fied by search term fre­quency and lifestyle, was drawn…The re­sults of the study sug­gest that Wikipedia is used more for lighter top­ics than for those of a more aca­d­e­mic or se­ri­ous na­ture. Sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences among the var­i­ous lifestyle seg­ments were ob­served in the use of Wikipedia for queries on pop­u­lar cul­ture, cul­tural prac­tice and sci­ence.

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  10.  

    pg 136, “4.4 De­mo­graphic Analy­sis of the Wikipedia Com­mu­nity”↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  11.  

    ibid. pg 137↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  12.  

    The Kag­gle back­ground in­for­ma­tion on the “Wikipedia’s Par­tic­i­pa­tion Chal­lenge” in­cludes an in­ter­est­ing ex­tract from the WMF re­port:

    “Be­tween 2005 and 2007, new­bies started hav­ing real trou­ble suc­cess­fully join­ing the Wiki­me­dia com­mu­nity. Be­fore 2005 in the Eng­lish Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new ed­i­tors would still be ac­tive a year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new ed­i­tors were still ac­tive a year after their first edit. Post-2007, lots of peo­ple were still try­ing to be­come Wikipedia ed­i­tors. What had changed, though, is that they were in­creas­ingly fail­ing to in­te­grate into the Wikipedia com­mu­nity, and fail­ing in­creas­ingly quickly.”

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  13.  

    Rather than reach­ing 95k ed­i­tors, the ac­tual March-​​​July 2012 num­bers were 76,274/​75,141/​76,956/​74,402/​76,400. In ret­ro­spect, my pes­simistic 75% pre­dic­tion that 95k would not be reached was ac­tu­ally lu­di­crously op­ti­mistic, given that the 95k ed­i­tor mark has never been reached: the high-​​​water mark seems to have been March 2007 with 90,618 ed­i­tors >5 edits that month. So we have been shrink­ing ~2.8k ed­i­tors a year: ((91 - 77) / (2012 - 2007)).↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  14.  

    The suc­cess­ful recre­ation of Mzoli’s ar­ti­cle and the end­less dele­tion de­bates about Daniel Brandt (crowned in suc­cess for the dele­tion­ists) again come to mind.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  15.  

    In June 2011, Kag­gle and the WMF ⁠an­nounced a “Wikipedia’s Par­tic­i­pa­tion Chal­lenge” to de­velop a bet­ter sta­tis­ti­cal model for pre­dict­ing ed­i­tor re­ten­tion; while the train­ing data was bi­ased⁠, ⁠the re­sults are not too sur­pris­ing: the sin­gle best pre­dic­tor is the fre­quency of any edits prior to the cut­off. See 2nd place, ⁠Ernest Shack­le­ton or con­tes­tant Keith T. Her­ring:

    A ran­domly se­lected Wikipedia ed­i­tor that has been ac­tive in the past year has ap­prox­i­mately an 85% prob­a­bil­ity of being in­ac­tive (no new edits) in the next 5 months. The most in­for­ma­tive fea­tures (w/​r/​t the fea­tures I con­sid­ered) cap­tured both the edit tim­ing and vol­ume of an ed­i­tor. More specif­i­cally the ex­po­nen­tially weighted edit vol­ume of an user (edit weight de­creases ex­po­nen­tially with in­creased time be­tween the edit and the end of the ob­ser­va­tion pe­riod) with a half-​​​life of 80 days pro­vided the most pre­dic­tive ca­pa­bil­ity among the 206 fea­tures in­cluded in the model.

    Other at­trib­utes of the edit his­tory, such as unique­ness of ar­ti­cles, ar­ti­cle cre­ation, com­ment be­hav­ior, etc. pro­vided some ad­di­tional use­ful in­for­ma­tion, al­though roughly an order of mag­ni­tude or less than the edit tim­ing and vol­ume when mea­sured as global im­pact across the full non-​​​conditioned ed­i­tor uni­verse.

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  16.  

    I dis­agree with parts of Mario’s essay; for ex­am­ple, his first ex­am­ple is wrong as there are count­less ar­ti­cles to write from the sis­ter wikis (Emi­jrp es­ti­mates in 2021 that WP has 6.2m ar­ti­cles out of 104.7m pos­si­ble ar­ti­cles), and many spe­cial­ist sources like The En­cy­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion have hun­dreds or thou­sands of en­tries that Wikipedia does not (I counted a dozen or so just link­ing to the ar­ti­cles ⁠writ­ten by Jonathan Clements—eg. many of the bi­og­ra­phy redlinks in “Seiun Award” or “Nihon SF Taisho Award”.) And every day, sites like the Anime News Net­work or New York Times post dozens of re­views or other ref­er­ences that can be eas­ily & prof­itably worked into ar­ti­cles—⁠but aren’t⁠.

    One com­ment makes the good point that the the­ory of com­plete­ness would not pre­dict any flatlin­ing in the smaller and less com­plete wikis, yet we seem to ob­serve a gen­eral flatlin­ing.

    How­ever, his rea­son 2 is sim­i­lar to my own the­ory about the Seigen­thaler af­fair and the BLP re­ac­tion, and his rea­son 3 is my pre­vi­ous point about process & the fal­lacy of the in­vis­i­ble/​broken win­dow fal­lacy.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  17.  

    Gard­ner’s De­cem­ber UK ad­dress con­tained other graphs worth look­ing at.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  18.  

    Which as links to cre­den­tialed sources will be un­con­tro­ver­sial and re­quire lit­tle de­fense, vastly im­prov­ing the ROI of edit­ing Wikipedia. Wikipedia gets a great deal of traf­fic, and even highly ob­scure ar­ti­cles exert sur­pris­ing in­flu­ence; one can look at the traf­fic rates on spe­cific pages with stats.grok.se⁠.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  19.  

    To quote the great com­puter sci­en­tist Don­ald Knuth in 2006:

    I think that Wikipedia’s enor­mously suc­cess­ful, but it’s so brit­tle, you know, if I was, if I spent a lot of time writ­ing an ar­ti­cle for the Wikipedia, and I wanted to make sure no­body screwed it up, I would have to check that ar­ti­cle every day to make sure that it was still okay, and you know, after I’ve done that I want to move on and go on to other, other things in my life. With TeX⁠, I wanted sta­bil­ity es­pe­cially ur­gently be­cause peo­ple are de­pend­ing on it to be a fixed point that they can build on, so in that re­spect, I dif­fer from the GNU Pub­lic Li­cense⁠.

    (The GPL con­tains clauses that users of GPLed code may use the terms of later ver­sions of the GPL, which may fix any legal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties or ex­ploits dis­cov­ered. This is a com­mon prac­tice among copy­left li­censes and in fact, the WMF it­self cross-​​​licensed the en­tire set of Wikipedias and other projects from the GFDL to Cre­ative Com­mons as well based on an one-​​​time pro­vi­sion GNU added at WMF’s re­quest.)↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  20.  

    “The Ef­fects of Group Com­po­si­tion on De­ci­sion Qual­ity in a So­cial Pro­duc­tion Com­mu­nity”, Lamet al2010, pg 7:

    “We also found that there have been two bots (com­puter pro­grams that edit Wikipedia)—BJBot and Jayden54Bot—that au­to­mat­i­cally no­ti­fied ar­ti­cle ed­i­tors about AfD dis­cus­sions and re­cruited them to par­tic­i­pate per the es­tab­lished pol­icy. These bots per­formed AfD no­ti­fi­ca­tions for sev­eral months, and offer us an op­por­tu­nity to study the ef­fect of re­cruit­ment that is purely pol­icy dri­ven. We use a process like one de­scribed above to de­tect suc­cess­ful in­stances of bot-​​​initiated re­cruit­ment: if a re­cruit­ment bot edited an user’s talk page, and that user !voted in an AfD within two days, then we con­sider that user to have been re­cruited by the bot.

    Using the above processes, we iden­ti­fied 8,464 in­stances of suc­cess­ful re­cruit­ing. Table 2 shows a sum­mary of who did the re­cruit­ing, and how their re­cruits !voted. We see large dif­fer­ences in !vot­ing be­hav­ior, which sug­gests that there is bias in who peo­ple choose to re­cruit. (From these data we can­not tell whether the bias is an in­ten­tional ef­fort to in­flu­ence con­sen­sus, or the re­sult of so­cial net­work ho­mophily [14].) Par­tic­i­pants re­cruited by keep !vot­ers were about four times less likely to sup­port dele­tion as those re­cruited by delete !vot­ers. The par­tic­i­pants that bots re­cruited also ap­pear un­likely to sup­port dele­tion, which re­flects the pol­icy bias we ob­served ear­lier.

    To see what ef­fect par­tic­i­pant re­cruit­ment has on de­ci­sion qual­ity, we in­tro­duce four bi­nary vari­ables: BotRecruit, NomRecruit, DeleteRecruit, and KeepRecruit. These vari­ables in­di­cate whether a bot, the AfD nom­i­na­tor, a delete !voter, or a keep !voter suc­cess­fully re­cruited some­body to the group, re­spec­tively.

    Look­ing back to table 1, we find that re­gard­less of the de­ci­sion, none of the first three vari­ables has a statistically-​​​significant ef­fect. On the other hand, when a keep !voter re­cruited some­one to the dis­cus­sion, we see a sig­nif­i­cant ef­fect: delete de­ci­sions are more likely to be re­versed. We offer two pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tions: the first is that re­cruit­ment by keep !vot­ers, bi­ased as it may ap­pear, is a sign of pos­i­tive com­mu­nity in­ter­est, and sug­gests that the ar­ti­cle should be kept. If the com­mu­nity de­cides oth­er­wise and deletes the ar­ti­cle, then de­ci­sion qual­ity suf­fers. An al­ter­na­tive ex­pla­na­tion is that keep !voter re­cruit­ment is a sign of ac­tivism among those who pre­fer to keep the ar­ti­cle. These pro­po­nents may be es­pe­cially per­sis­tent in main­tain­ing the ar­ti­cle’s ex­is­tence in Wikipedia, even if it re­quires work­ing to re­verse a delete de­ci­sion.”

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  21.  

    It was too hard to ex­tract only the URL(s) being added by a diff, so the script sim­ply ex­tracts all URLs it can find in the diff part of the HTML; so if an ed­i­tor made 4 edits adding URLs A, B, C, and D, and only A were added to the ar­ti­cle, then the script would 4 times ex­tract A-D, spot A in the ar­ti­cle, and de­clare vic­tory. This may ac­count for Kreb­Markt’s in­creased suc­cess rate com­pared to my edits, be­cause she is ac­cus­tomed to pil­ing up her sug­gested links in one tidy sec­tion.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  22.  

    I added a few links to Talk pages to time how long it took for a KrebMarkt-​​​style edit: to go from the ANN page to a saved and re­loaded page which I had checked by eye that the edit was cor­rect was up­wards of 30 sec­onds. >30 sec­onds times 958 edit is >479 min­utes or >8 hours; my ex­cerpt­ing edits take at least 5 min­utes to do, so those 248 edits rep­re­sent >21 hours of work.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  23.  

    Some­one might ob­ject that pick­ing the last link in an Ex­ter­nal Link sec­tion is not ran­dom at all. I am re­minded of an anec­dote de­scrib­ing a court case in­volv­ing the draft back in Viet­nam, where the plain­tiff’s lawyer ar­gued that the lit­tle cage and balls method was not ran­dom and was un­fair be­cause the balls on top were much more likely to be se­lected. The judge asked, “Un­fair to whom?”

    As well, this method­ol­ogy, while being quite as ran­dom as most meth­ods, car­ries the usual ad­van­tages of de­ter­min­ism: any­one will be able to check whether I did in fact re­move only last links which are not of­fi­cial or template-​​​generated in Ex­ter­nal Link sec­tions. This is ev­i­dence that I did not sim­ply cherry pick the links that I thought were worst and so least likely to be re­stored.

    (If I were going to cherry pick under this pro­ce­dure, I would have had to in­vest a great deal more ef­fort: for each re­moval, I would have to find mul­ti­ple can­di­dates each of which sat­is­fied the cri­te­ria and only then could I pick the worst final link; and then I would have to start over for the next re­moval, and since I had to check ~10 ran­dom ar­ti­cles for a pos­si­ble final link, this im­plies for every re­moval, I’d be look­ing at some­thing like 40+ ran­dom ar­ti­cles to do one re­moval or 200+ ran­dom ar­ti­cles a day! And this de­cep­tion would have to be de­lib­er­ate & planned—while most cases of bias are un­con­scious.)↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  24.  

    Some ed­i­tors pride them­selves on de­tect­ing van­dal­ism weeks or months after cre­ation; they are highly un­usual. When I was spend­ing time read­ing aca­d­e­mic pub­li­ca­tions on Wikipedia a few years ago, a num­ber of them dealt with quan­ti­fy­ing van­dal­ism and re­ver­sions; al­most all van­dal­ism was re­verted within days, and re­ver­sions which took longer than a month were very rare (0-10%, to be very gen­er­ous). This was why I chose to wait a month, be­cause wait­ing longer added noth­ing. A week would have been ad­e­quate.

    Rel­e­vant re­search on quan­ti­fy­ing re­ver­sion rates over time:

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  25.  

    It’s not hard to es­ti­mate. Take the list of 100 diffs, and use an ed­i­tor macro or a shell tool like sed to strip it down to a list of URL-​​​encoded ar­ti­cle names like so:

    Castell_Dinas_Bran
Ron_O%27Neal
HUD_(video_gaming)
Protector_(2009_film)
...

    Then, loop over the list to down­load the March 2012 sum­mary page for that ar­ti­cle, and fil­ter out the total monthly hit-​​​count (since we don’t care about dailies); ex­am­ple code:

    $ for URL in `cat articles.txt`
  do elinks -dump "http://stats.grok.se/en/201203/$URL" | grep -F " has been viewed "
  done
   [1]Castell_Dinas_Bran has been viewed 914 times in 201203.
   [1]Ron_O'Neal has been viewed 7446 times in 201203.
   [1]HUD_(video_gaming) has been viewed 7579 times in 201203.
   ...

    This out­put is also easy to process with a macro or reg­exp, and once we have the monthly num­ber for each ar­ti­cle, all that re­mains is to­tal­ing them:

    sum [914,7446,7579,542,3103,91,1665,5291,2452,102,272,3344,16214,32268,863,10307,476,
    3825,310,205,441,3028,187,94,115,211,207,522,269,182,1324,950,25660,162,14457
    3881,200,3510,606,430,2048,164,214,136,77,8075,99,255,278,148,525,192,108,295
    61,597,180,3491,753,527,766,113,1405,770,3683,288,873,26811,131,6625,93,212
    538,313,7119,212,76,1130,7741,2136,179,263,632,870,714,338,2517,456,90,621
    1323,316,1125,413,73223,122,12707,6573]
-- 335445

    Note that this is prob­a­bly an un­der­es­ti­mate. It took weeks to re­move all the links, doing it just 5 or 10 at a time, and the 30 day timer only started when link #100 was re­moved. So for link #1, some­thing closer to 2 months passed…↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  26.  

    His user page states as of 2012-05-19 under “My ac­tiv­i­ties on Wikipedia” that

    …My Wikipedia phi­los­o­phy is quite com­plex, and de­fies easy cat­e­go­riza­tion. My ideal for a more per­fect Wikipedia would be to cre­ate many wikis for pop cul­ture top­ics and tran­swiki many of the re­lated ar­ti­cles on Wikipedia to them. (Some of these al­ready exist in a fairly sub­stan­tial for­mat, such as Mem­ory Alpha and Wook­ieepe­dia). I see no rea­son why all 703 episodes of the live-​​​action Star Trek (and 17 of the 22 an­i­mated episodes) should have ar­ti­cles on Wikipedia, when Mem­ory Alpha ex­ists. (Be­fore you go hat­ing on me for that, note that I own all 720 episodes on DVD, as well as all but three of the movies.) This does not make me a ⁠dele­tion­ist⁠, how­ever. I also be­lieve in ⁠struc­tur­ism⁠, and a com­bi­na­tion of two op­pos­ing philoso­phies ⁠mer­gism and seper­atism; merg­ing in small ar­ti­cles rather than delet­ing them and sep­a­rat­ing large ar­ti­cles rather than delet­ing con­tent. I also agree with the tenets of ⁠ex­clu­sion­ism⁠, al­though that also leads back to tran­swik­ism again.

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  27.  

    Since no one no­ticed the 100 re­movals were con­nected, we can as­sume each re­moval was sta­tis­ti­cally in­de­pen­dent; this lets us cal­cu­late a bi­no­mial pro­por­tion con­fi­dence in­ter­val⁠. Specif­i­cally, with 3 suc­cesses and 100 sam­ples, the 99% con­fi­dence in­ter­val is 0-7%. We can de­rive this from Wol­fram Alpha or one’s fa­vorite sta­tis­ti­cal pack­age if one doesn’t want to crunch the for­mula one­self.

    (In­ci­den­tally, Wikipedia has 3,960,143 as of 2012-06-01 ac­cord­ing to Spe­cial:Sta­tis­tics⁠, and I went through per­haps 10 pages for each re­moval, so the total pos­si­ble sam­ple size is ~396,014. That 100 sam­ples can give such a good es­ti­mate—as long as they are in­de­pen­dent—is the same magic that makes things like opin­ion polls work; at least, as a child I found it mag­i­cal that a sam­ple of <1000 vot­ers could pre­dict so ac­cu­rately the elec­tion re­sults in a pop­u­la­tion of >300 mil­lion peo­ple.)↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  28.  

    One might won­der why I had so much traf­fic to an Eng­lish page; do just that many Ger­mans know Eng­lish? No, it turns out my link in their page didn’t come with an “Eng­lish” warn­ing. I added this warn­ing on 2012-05-20, and while there was a major traf­fic spike after that and then a long out­age June-​​​September 2012 where the link was bro­ken due to my own care­less­ness, the warn­ing seems to have sub­stan­tially re­duced click-​​​throughs ac­cord­ing to my an­a­lyt­ics⁠.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  29.  

    It’s ac­tu­ally closer to p = 0.00000000000000022. As­sum­ing one has cleaned up the two CSVs by re­mov­ing the ini­tial sum­mary data and the final total line, the sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis goes like this:

    before <- read.table("https://gwern.net/doc/wikipedia/2012-gwern-dnb-wikipedia-before.csv", header=TRUE,sep=",")
after  <- read.table("https://gwern.net/doc/wikipedia/2012-gwern-dnb-wikipedia-after.csv", header=TRUE, sep=",")
before$Pageviews
  [1]  1  0  2  3 12  3  9  3  3  2  3  0  3  1  9 11  5  6  7  7  7  5  5  7  0
 [26]  1  9 21  3  6  6 12  5  9  7 13 11 11 11 10 12  5 12 16 13  4 14 14  9  3
 [51]  9 11  4 10  5 11  4 21 15  3  7  1  7  4  5  2  4  7  4  5  5 12 14  9  5
 [76]  7  3  3 16  9  6 15 12  6  7  4 14  5 13  5 11  3  2 12  2 19  5  5  9 14
[101]  6  6 14 11 17  5  3  2  3  6  8 26  5  8  5 10  9  3  7 11  7  7 17 14 16
[126]  7  3  4  5 13  8  7 11  3  6  7  8  6 11 16 13 15 11  9  5  6  3 11  7  7
[151]  6  7  6  9 11  6  8 16 10  4  5  9 10  3  6  5 11 25  9  9 17 17 23 21 23
[176] 34  8 15 10 21 20 10 12 21 17 11 30 17  6  7  9 17 12 19  6  7 13 12 12 10
[201] 14 11 13 14 13  9 10  6 10  8
after$Pageviews
  [1] 7 5 3 5 2 2 3 2 1 2 2 2 0 1 1 3 1 2 3 2 1 5 1 0 1 2 1 0 3 2 0 2 1 0 1 1 4
 [38] 2 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 4 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 3
 [75] 2 4 1 3 2 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 2 4 1 2 4 2 2 2 2 1 1

wilcox.test(before$Pageviews, after$Pageviews)

    Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction

data:  before$Pageviews and after$Pageviews
W = 20084, p-value < 2.2e-16

    I’m not sure why R is re­port­ing slightly dif­fer­ent means than I listed pre­vi­ously, but the final re­sult is not too sur­pris­ing when you eye­ball the data—this is a very large ef­fect size⁠. Specif­i­cally, the ef­fect size as Cohen’s d is 1.28 (where 0.5 is de­scribed as “medium”, and >0.8 is “large”):

    (mean(before$Pageviews) - mean(after$Pageviews)) / sd(append(before$Pageviews, after$Pageviews))
1.275841
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  30.  

    See Slash­dot’s “Call For Halt To Wikipedia We­b­comic Dele­tions” for an overview.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  31.  

    “MUD his­tory dis­solv­ing into the wa­ters of time”↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  32.  

    Anime and manga are par­tic­u­larly bad. The Amer­i­can and Japan­ese anime bub­bles of the 2000s popped, and with them went a flood of mag­a­zines and books—the eco­nomic re­al­ity has set in that they are sim­ply not sus­tain­able in a mod­ern en­vi­ron­ment, which of course is very use­ful to dele­tion­ists who want to apply rigid uni­ver­sal norms to ar­ti­cles sans any con­text. This leads to odd sit­u­a­tions like ex­perts self-​​​publishing; from Brian Ruh’s ANN col­umn “The Ghost with the Most”:

    This time, though, in­stead of a fic­tional book about the su­per­nat­ural I’m going to be ex­am­in­ing a non­fic­tion book about Japan­ese ghosts—Patrick Drazen’s A Gath­er­ing of Spir­its: Japan’s Ghost Story Tra­di­tion: From Folk­lore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga⁠, which was re­cently self-​​​published through the iU­ni­verse ser­vice. This is Drazen’s sec­ond book; the first one, Anime Ex­plo­sion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japan­ese An­i­ma­tion⁠, came out in 2002 from Stone Bridge Press and was an in­tro­duc­tion to many of the gen­res and themes that can be found in anime.

    I think the switch from a com­mer­cial press to self-​​​publication may in­di­cate the di­rec­tion English-​​​language anime and manga schol­ar­ship may be head­ing in. A few years ago, when Japan­ese pop­u­lar cul­ture seemed like the Next Big Thing, there were more pub­lish­ers that seemed like they were will­ing to take a chance on books about anime and manga. Un­for­tu­nately, as I know first­hand (and as I’ve heard from other au­thors, con­firm­ing that it’s not just me) these books didn’t sell nearly as well as any­one was hop­ing, which in turn meant that these pub­lish­ers didn’t want to take risks with ad­di­tional books along these lines. After all, all pub­lish­ers need to make money in one way or an­other to stay afloat. In the last few years, the ma­jor­ity of books on anime and manga have been pub­lished by uni­ver­sity presses, per­haps most no­tably the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press. But I al­ready gushed about them in my last col­umn, so I’ll spare you from any ad­di­tional pub­lic dis­plays of af­fec­tion.

    How­ever, this puts books like Drazen’s in an odd predica­ment. It’s not re­ally an aca­d­e­mic book, since it lacks the ref­er­ences and the­o­ries some­thing like that would en­tail, which means it’s not a good can­di­date for an uni­ver­sity press. How­ever, since few pop­u­lar presses have seen their books on anime and manga re­flect pos­i­tively on their bot­tom lines, there aren’t many other op­tions these days other than self-​​​publishing. Of course, these days pub­lish­ing a book on your own doesn’t have nearly the same con­no­ta­tions it did decades ago, when van­ity presses were the do­main of those with more money (and ego) than sense. These days you can self-​​​publish a qual­ity prod­uct, get it up on Ama­zon for all to see, and (if you’re savvy about these things) per­haps even make a tidy profit.

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  33.  

    ‘Tak­ing Up the Mop: Iden­ti­fy­ing Fu­ture Wikipedia Ad­min­is­tra­tors’⁠, Moira Burke and Robert Kraut, in Pro­ceed­ings of the Con­fer­ence on Human Fac­tors in Com­put­ing Sys­tems, Flo­rence, Italy, 5-10. April 2008, pp. 3441-6↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  34.  

    From “Cul­tural Trans­for­ma­tions in Wikipedia or ‘From Eman­ci­pa­tion to Prod­uct Ide­ol­ogy’: An In­ter­view with Chris­t­ian Stegbauer”, col­lected in A Wikipedia Reader:

    “Our 2006 re­search [Chris­t­ian Stegbauer, ‘Wikipedia. Das Rätsel der Ko­op­er­a­tion’ (‘Wikipedia: the mys­tery be­hind the co­op­er­a­tion’), Wies­baden: VS, 2009, p. 279 et seq.] com­pared con­tent on user pages from their orig­i­nal start­ing date to the present. 13 We no­ticed a trans­for­ma­tion from eman­ci­pa­tion to prod­uct ide­ol­ogy among those who had reached lead­er­ship sta­tus, but not for ones less in­te­grated. Typ­i­cal state­ments from an user site’s first days would be: ‘Wikipedia is a great idea’; ‘[a] never-​​​ending en­cy­clo­pe­dia cre­ated by many dif­fer­ent au­thors’; ‘every­one should be able to ex­change their knowl­edge for free’; ‘Wikipedia is like ful­fill­ing a dream—a book in which every­one can write what they want’; ‘the In­ter­net shouldn’t be re­garded as a gold­mine’; ‘Mak­ing in­for­ma­tion avail­able free of charge is an im­por­tant task’; ‘the project’s con­cept is fan­tas­tic’; ‘the idea be­hind Wikipedia is well worth sup­port­ing’.

    Six out of seven users who changed their ide­o­log­i­cal state­ments were core users, and five of these were ad­min­is­tra­tors. Half of them deleted their opin­ion on eman­ci­pa­tion ide­ol­ogy in the same in­stance they be­came ad­min­is­tra­tors. In five out of nine cases, they ex­pressed the prod­uct ide­ol­ogy, in­clud­ing re­marks about ‘un­rea­son­able’ peo­ple dam­ag­ing the project, about end­less dis­cus­sions that should not take place when en­ergy should be in­vested in the ar­ti­cles in­stead, and about ‘dif­fi­cult’ peo­ple who are not wel­come at Wikipedia. We also found phras­ing such as ‘cer­tain level of ex­per­tise is nec­es­sary for writ­ing the ar­ti­cles’ or that lib­eral pro­cess­ing is the rea­son be­hind low qual­ity con­tri­bu­tions.”

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  35.  

    From pg 5 of Thurneret al2012 (or see pop­u­lar cov­er­age in eg. Tech­nol­ogy Re­view):

    Tran­si­tion rates of ac­tions of in­di­vid­u­als show that pos­i­tive ac­tions strongly in­duces pos­i­tive re­ac­tions. Neg­a­tive be­hav­ior on the other hand has a high ten­dency of being re­peated in­stead of being rec­i­p­ro­cated, show­ing the ‘propul­sive’ na­ture of neg­a­tive ac­tions. How­ever, if we con­sider only re­ac­tions to neg­a­tive ac­tions, we find that neg­a­tive re­ac­tions are highly over­rep­re­sented. The prob­a­bil­ity of act­ing out neg­a­tive ac­tions is about 10 times higher if a per­son re­ceived a neg­a­tive ac­tion at the pre­vi­ous timestep than if she re­ceived a pos­i­tive ac­tion.

    …The analy­sis of bi­nary time­series of play­ers (good-​​​bad) shows that the be­hav­ior of al­most all play­ers is ‘good’ al­most all the time. Neg­a­tive ac­tions are bal­anced to a large ex­tent by good ones. Play­ers with a high frac­tion of neg­a­tive ac­tions tend to have a sig­nif­i­cantly shorter life. This may be due to two rea­sons: First be­cause they are hunted down by oth­ers and give up play­ing, sec­ond be­cause they are un­able to main­tain a so­cial life and quit the game be­cause of lone­li­ness or frus­tra­tion. We in­ter­pret these find­ings as em­pir­i­cal ev­i­dence for self or­ga­ni­za­tion to­wards rec­i­p­ro­cal, good con­duct within a human so­ci­ety. Note that the game al­lows bad be­hav­ior in the same way as good be­hav­ior but the ex­tent of pun­ish­ment of bad be­hav­ior is freely de­cided by the play­ers.

    It’s worth not­ing the dis­tinc­tion be­tween ‘rec­i­p­ro­ca­tion’ and ‘re­peated’; oth­er­wise this phe­nom­e­non might have an ex­pla­na­tion as a sta­tis­ti­cal ar­ti­fact re­sult­ing from an or­di­nary game ac­tiv­ity like 1-on-1 fights or duels.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  36.  

    I bring up the ‘Lightsaber com­bat’ ar­ti­cle be­cause I did sub­stan­tial work ref­er­enc­ing it be­fore its wiki-​​​deletion, but be­cause it was redi­rected the orig­i­nal page his­tory still sur­vives. It is worth­while com­par­ing the orig­i­nal page with its re­place­ment sec­tion in the ‘Lightsaber’ ar­ti­cle.

    I am chuffed to note that the merge has re­sulted in in­fe­rior ref­er­ences! eg. the Nick Gillard quote in para­graph 2 is un­sourced and has a {{fact}} tem­plate, but was ref­er­enced in the orig­i­nal. Fur­ther, that quote is triv­ially re-​​​referenced (#3 hit in Google). My stan­dards may be too high, but I can’t help but think that it takes real in­com­pe­tence to not only lose a ref­er­ence, but be un­able to re-​​​find such an eas­ily found quote.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

  37.  

    The pathos has, at times, moved me to verse. To quote one of mine from WP:HAIKU (a homage to Basho’s fa­mous verse in The Nar­row Road to Oku):

    Summer AFD -
the sole remnant of many
editors' hard work.

    It is not a co­in­ci­dence that I put that haiku be­fore the final haiku on the page—a haiku com­ment­ing on ed­i­tors who have aban­doned or left the project:

    The summer grasses.
I edit my user page
One last time - really.
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  38.  

    One could also avoid com­pi­la­tion and run it much more slowly as cat urls.txt | runghc script.↩ Right arrow curving left [footnote return link] arrow

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