I’ve pointed out in other posts that Wikipedia has outlasted every attempt at developing a competing “better” community-sourced general-purpose encyclopedia. While that means Wikipedia has had excellent staying power, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s perfect or even necessarily very good the way it is.

Case in point: a lengthy rant from Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the Search Engine Land blog, which he posted on his personal blog Daggle. Sullivan learned that the Wikipeia page for Jessie Stricchiola, one of the pioneers in fighting click fraud, had been deleted for “non-notability”. Sullivan wanted to provide the editors with references and proof of Stricchiola’s notability—and the rest of the blog entry details his attempts to make his way through the Kafkaesque process of doing that.

The process is really too long and involved to summarize, but it essentially involved Sullivan being directed from place to place on Wikipedia without any of them explaining exactly where he needed to post his complaint.

Sullivan concludes:

Walls That Protect Also Divide

It’s insane. It really is. And with respect to the many hardworking people who have created a generally useful resource, it’s not a friendly resource. It doesn’t have systems, as far as I can tell, designed to help it improve. It has walls, walls you believe (with many good reasons) are designed to protect it from being vandalized. But those walls themselves are their own type of vandalization of the very resource you’re trying to protect.

Subject Experts Need Not Apply

Bottom line — I’ve gotten no indication that anyone at Wikipedia actually cares what a subject expert has to say on, well, a subject they’re an expert in. Instead, you drown in a morass of bureaucracy. It shouldn’t be this way.

Can Wikipedia be made more friendly? Can a competing encyclopedia ever succeed? We may never know. The problem, as Sullivan points out, is striking a balance between openness and protection from vandalism. The more protective measures you throw up, the harder you can make it to contribute. Small wonder some would-be editors give up in disgust.

18 COMMENTS

  1. Wikipedia rewards serious contributors who provide notable content.

    Obviously, therefore, anyone whose contribution does not remain in Wikipedia was insufficiently serious and was not providing notable content.

  2. His main complaints seem to be that he was too pissed off to read any of the guidelines/articles he was actually pointed to, which made him more frustrated and confused. If he’d just calmed down and actually RTFM instead of randomly clicking things, he could’ve had a review up within minutes.

    • The article page helpfully links to the deletion discussion in the log (right on the main article page)
    • The deletion discussion page (which he was able to find) links to the deletion review. He ignored the guidelines and decided to do explicitly do what it says, in bold red letters no less, not to do by editing the deletion discussion page.
    • He didn’t bother reading http://enwp.org/WP:Deletion_review because it says plainly “Deletion review (DRV) considers disputed deletions and disputed decisions made in deletion-related discussions and speedy deletions. This includes appeals to restore deleted pages and appeals to delete pages kept after a prior discussion.”
    • He clicked the wrong link in the email. He apparently doesn’t understand the difference between a page that shows “all changes since your last visit” and “the current revision.”
    • Apparently the big “TALK” link up top (and in that user’s helpful userpage notice) is confusing for him. Of course, he crops that part out at the top.

    Overall, he comes off a petulant child who, because he was already pissed off, decided to act irrationally and vindictively and ended up making things harder on himself in the long run.

  3. I love Wikipedia. I don’t agree with any of the criticisms in this article. They are marginal and utterly trivial.
    Criticising ANY service, company, application, web site for not being ‘perfect’ is disingenuous for a start.

  4. Jason, can you please explain why you went ad hominem on what I consider to be a fair and honest (and critical) appraisal?

    The fact is, Wikipedia’s policies are often inscrutable and give self-appointed Barney Fifes the right to censor edits or even pages that it considers unimportant. This is the USA, dammit, not Republic of Censuria.

    It would be really easy to give a button or two to appeal an editing decision or to appeal a deletion decision. I recognize the challenges in trying to manage so many users and to enforce policies uniformly. But I don’t think the current policies come anywhere close to being usable or fair.

    The blogpost was written by a SEO person — which raises another question. Why does google’s algorithms boost search results for wikipedia so much? In many cases, a wikipedia search result in sufficient to answer a simple query, but in many cases a wiki article reflects the institutional biases of the site and waffles so much as to be incomprehensible/useless.

    I’ve tried following their editorial policies several times and find appalling at people who don’t even seem to have any writing ability or understanding of the subject overrule me. Initially I resisted, but the effort was so fatiguing that I gave up.

    During my last episode, I wrote: “Wikipedia is useful for finding out information which is verifiable (and found in some commercially maintained databases). That means birth dates, death dates, colleges attended, ISBN numbers, awards, etc. It is minimally useful for acknowledging controversy about a topic. Wikipedia is semi-competent for providing overviews of laws and physical sciences. Wikipedia is now inadequate in identifying notable people, notable ideas, notable works of art. It is also inadequate in assessing value of a contributed link. It also is inadequate at handling independent media or in documenting phenomenon of no economic value. The need to have “notability” and “reliability” causes Wikipedia to trust known commercial media sources more than unknown ones. That is a bias which ultimately will limit Wikipedia’s usefulness and cause lesser known encyclopedias to be more informative and insightful.”

  5. My admittedly minor run-ins with Wikipedia and those of my friends remind me of a sailing club where I was once a member.

    There was a lot to like about the club. The cost of membership was low and it had every type of sail-driven vessel from sailing boards to racing catamarans and weekend cruisers. They also had excellent training. You could join the club knowing nothing about sailing and end up quite knowledgable. Some of the club’s leaders were marvelously helpful, with a great love for sailing that they wanted to share. And yet there was something vaguely uncomfortable about belonging to it, something so unsettling that I ended up buying my own boat to be free of it.

    It took me some time to realize what that something was. Like any club, there were all sorts of grunt work that needed to be done to keep the boats in repair and the club functioning. The club’s problems lay in what C. S. Lewis called an ‘inner circle.’–a clique who did a lot for the club and, as a result, held a great deal of power in it and had come to treat it as their private domain, their rule being justified by all the work they were doing. It was their attitude toward the more rank-and-file members that made the club uncomfortable. In the end, it wasn’t our club. It was their club. We existed only under their sufferance.

    Wikipedia strikes me the same way. There’s an enormous amount of grunt work involved in maintaining both the software and the article content. The result is that those who do so regard themselves as an inner circle that looks at those outside their dedicated ranks as mere tools at best and, at worst, an irritating interference with their all-important work.

    As an outsider, Sullivan’s attempt as a mere ‘subject expert’ to challenge the decisions and policies of Wikipedia’s inner circle irritated them. He simply didn’t understand that the hidden machinery, bureaucratic policies, and protective attitudes exist at Wikipedia precisely to allow that inner circle to maintain its control. He mistakenly thought Wikipedia was as open as it claims to be.

    Those who’d like to look into what an inner circle is like can find it described masterfully in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. My own hunch is that Lewis learned about inner circles by observing faculty politics at Oxford’s various colleges.

  6. I didn’t go ad hominem. I simply summed up my reading of his rant, which was anything but fair. It is, apparently, the fault of Wikipedia’s closed, unfriendly world that he didn’t bother to actually read the advice he was given. Every single one of his points can be refuted by simply saying “he didn’t read anything (the emails, the links he was given, the guidelines, etc)”. But he came into the discussion from the point of view of “these people are idiots, I’LL do what needs to be done and they’ll just have to accept it”, disregarding the whole concept of Wikipedia’s community in the process.

    If he doesn’t want to be treated like a petulant child, he should stop acting like one and throwing temper tantrums when he doesn’t get his way. If he’d calmly gone about putting the deletion review through, the matter would’ve been closed (either with the creation of a new article or it staying deleted) before any of this needed to happen.

  7. “I’ve tried following their editorial policies several times and find appalling at people who don’t even seem to have any writing ability or understanding of the subject overrule me. Initially I resisted, but the effort was so fatiguing that I gave up. ”

    Even the most smug amongst us forget to edit their own postings occasionally. I tried following this pair of sentences, but the effort was so fatiguing, I gave up.

  8. Jason – what Danny is arguing (and I agree) is that a subject matter expert should not have to become a Wikipedia expert in order to contribute.

    Suggesting that he should have just RTFMed glosses over how completely un-user-friendly the service is to casual contributors who wish to enter into the discussion of a deleted page.

    In the end, it alienates people who have significant domain experience but don’t have the time to learn the ins and out of Wikipedia. In that case, it’s the users who suffer.

  9. Eric – They shouldn’t have to become a Wikipedia expert, but they SHOULD have to have a modicum of civility and the ability to follow basic instructions. Coming into a conversation with the attitude of “I’m right, you’re wrong. You’re all idiots, so do what I say” while blatantly disregarding the rules isn’t going to get anything accomplished offline, online or on Wikipedia in particular.

    I don’t see what is un-user-friendly about a warning that says “DON’T EDIT THIS PAGE” with a helpful link to the page that he did need. It’s not that complicated and I would expect somebody as technologically apt as him to be able to follow simple instructions.

    It only alienated him because he came into the discussion angry and didn’t bother to read, or plainly disregarded, the information in front of him.

  10. Jason — I’ll only speak for myself, but this is not a helpful page for a subject expert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review

    What that page essentially says is “unless you’re willing to learn another language, your subject expertise isn’t wanted.”

    As someone who gets angry at robo-menues (“dial 9 to hear these options again”), I have no doubt that I’d be livid if I was trying to support an associate and got pointed to Wikipedia’s Deletion Review page.

  11. “What that page essentially says is “unless you’re willing to learn another language, your subject expertise isn’t wanted.” ”

    Welcome to anything ever. Would you walk up to a musician and tell him that you “liked the twangy-twingy bits but you wanted to hear more of the ruunpa-ruunpa next time” and expect to be taken seriously?

    Everything about Wikipedia tells you what to do. I guess we’re sorry that we aren’t willing to just bow down and bend our entire world around this guy because he’s a Subject Matter Expert?

  12. DensityDuck — I think we just answered whether your original posting was intentional or not.

    Wikipedia’s original mission was to make it easier for subject matter experts to contribute. There are areas where it is difficult to do so. You can either tell us we’re WRONG WRONG WRONG and Wikipedia functions perfectly as is, or you can see if there are ways to improve.

  13. Eric:
    Sorry, but I don’t see what’s confusing about the following:
    Find this page confusing? Just put a note on your talk page with {{Help me}} (including the curly brackets) above it and someone will assist you.

    or

    Deletion review (DRV) considers disputed deletions and disputed decisions made in deletion-related discussions and speedy deletions. This includes appeals to restore deleted pages and appeals to delete pages kept after a prior discussion.

    What part of that is in another language? What is confusing about “This includes appeals to restore deleted pages”?

  14. Jason — the iTunes EULA is also in English, but few people would claim that it is parseable.

    Yes, everything is spelled out on the Deletion Review page, but it is done in such a way that is completely n00b-antagonistic. The goal of Wikipedia’s management pages should be to enable people who are not Wikipedia experts to remain engaged.

    It’s apparent that you and DensityDuck refuse to consider this from the perspective of someone who isn’t deeply entrenched in Wikipedia. Fair enough.

  15. Eric wrote: “Wikipedia’s original mission was to make it easier for subject matter experts to contribute.”

    Firstly my question is, “easier” than what ? Easier than getting Encyclopaedia Brittanica to change their 25 volume paper edition ? Easier than getting any other encyclopaedia to edit their inaccurate entries ? Easier than what ? It is essentially a meaningless and totally subjective statement.

    ” There are areas where it is difficult to do so. You can either tell us we’re WRONG WRONG WRONG and Wikipedia functions perfectly as is, or you can see if there are ways to improve.”

    It seems to me as a bystander in this debate, ( I am no expert on Wikipedia editing – though I did correct a page once about two years ago and found it easy as pie, which I find bizarre considering this article content) that the issue here in the comments is not whether it could be improved, but responding to a ranting and totally over the top attack.

  16. Eric, there’s only so many ways to say “RTFM”.

    “You can either tell us we’re WRONG WRONG WRONG and Wikipedia functions perfectly as is…”

    If that’s the way you insist on looking at it, then fine; you’re WRONG WRONG WRONG and Wikipedia functions perfectly as is. Learn to use it.

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