netmouse | Wikipedia Task Force: Reader Conversion

The procedure for discussion on Wikipedia is completely unclear, and I say that as somebody who has been editing articles for years. It must be completely invisible to newcomers, they probably don't even have a clue how to enter in.

Or, to put it another way, are we supposed to just start editing your list?

Gack; and it wants me to create a THIRD username/password pair for what is, to me, "the same thing"? And I think it said the username I use on Wikipedia isn't even a valid one at Wikimedia.

If you are going to add social interactions to wikipedia, you might suggest a reputation system like stackoverflow.com has for editing entries.

the couple times I have tried to contribute anything to Wikipedia, it was met with such incredibly nasty attitude, that I never went back.

I was an interested editor when Wikipedia first started up, but after the third or fourth time my extensively researched pages were dumped for some fanboy's screed I just stopped trying.

Now years have passed, it has no doubt vastly improved, and I really need to be doing my grad school work right now. i figure I'll check in with Wikipedia again next summer.

Two reasons:

1) The process is fairly opaque to me. I don't really know how to start; people say it's easy, but from what I see on my remote viewpoint is that there's actually a lot of political stuff (Home on the Strange had a web page, then got deleteamated for "not being of interest," despite the fact that it had like 30,000 daily visitors), so why bother?

2) I'm never clear where the lines are drawn, and anything I'm interested in, I'm involved in. I know that making my own Wikipedia entry is wrong (not that I would), but I'd also feel uncomfortable editing, say, the Clarion page because I'm involved with that. Or Kelly Link, because I know her. In short, there's some fuzzy line between "my own self-interest" and "the public good," and I'm not sure where to draw that. But the places I'd be most likely to know enough to edit are the ones where I'm not sure if I'm ego-editing.

There's a real problem with admin attitude. It's nearly always the case, when I've seen it happening, that the admin is relatively ignorant in the area of the article compared to the contributor he's arguing with. But they puff themselves up and try to make themselves look big. Since, on Wikipedia, they ARE big, bigger than me, there's usually nothing I can do about them, so I go away. Admins should be trying to help people make the pages better. Having to delete something is a *failure* for Wikipedia.

I have gotten the feeling that if you're not part of the secret cabal, then any changes you make will just get dumped. Doesn't matter how useful or not. Or, maybe labeled as irrelevant and not worth having in wikipedia, then dumped.

I don't consider myself an expert, generally speaking - I suppose I could go trolling video-related web pages, but my skill-set is very well represented, I think. Essentially, I would have to go looking for something specific that I know more about than most people, such as something local.

And at that point, when I'm trying to hunt down anything I might have unique knowledge of, it starts to sound more like a chore, y'know?

My experience of Wikipedia as a community has been pretty negative.

Example 1) A friend of mine was an editor, was blocked in error in July 2007, and it seemed absurdly difficult to unblock him - let alone for anyone at Wikipedia to take responsibility for the mistake or to apologise. See this affair chronicled at these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive276#User:Gerry_Lynch_Unfairly_blocked_as_a_sockpuppet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alison/Archive_12#Gerry_Lynch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gerry_Lynch#Unblock

It seemed to Gerry (and it seems to me) that if he and I had not flagged up this on our respective blogs, and got friends to directly lobby the admin involved, his block would have been allowed to stand. (And one person who tried challenging the block on Gerry was then himself blocked, which is appalling.) As it is he is discouraged from contributing as he once did, and I am discouraged from doing much at all.

http://sammymorse.livejournal.com/tag/wikipedia
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/905163.html
http://matgb.livejournal.com/222634.html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009200.html

Example 2) This is rather more minor but much more personal to me. Back in January 2008 I created a page about my ancestor Sir Nicholas White - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_White - who was a moderately well-known political figure in 16th-century Ireland. I was dismayed to get a comment a few months later on a livejournal post on a completely different topic as follows:

Do you think you can make your way towards supplying sources for Nicholas White (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_White), specifically the ones you were working from when you created the article? This stuff is supposed to be verifiable, in case you've missed the last more-than-half-a-decade's worth of policy development.

No "thank you for your contribution to Wikipedia", just, as a subsequent commenter put it, an "insultingly offhand and demanding" comment which very effectively vandalises my commentary on the quality of St Mark's written prose. Why did this anonymous person not email me, or comment on my user page? Is it wikipedia policy to vandalise newbie users' blogs if they don't keep every rule? Because that is what I felt had happened.

Well, bugger that. I shall create content where I know it is valued and useful, which is clearly not Wikipedia.

Your list of points is very good. I completely agree that "conventions are non-obvious"; I also agree that it is a problem that if your own wikipedia page is wrong, you can't change it yourself or even put in an official request to have it changed, you have to find a friend who knows their way around Wikipedia and isn't obviously linked to you, which is an absurd way of having to game the system. But very simply, there is no openness, no obvious way into the system, no helpdesk. Wikipedia appears to cater for experienced Wikipedians without very much interest in increasing their number - indeed, the two examples I gave above actually look like attempts to intimidate the faint-hearted, and frankly whether or not that was the intention it was successful for both me and Gerry.

Another option not listed (that I can see):

I don't take Wikipedia seriously.

Sure, I do use it from time to time, but I'd never use it as a serious citation and would always double-check "facts" on an entry with another couple sources.

It seems the most under-represented group is "people who actually know what they're talking about and care more about the subject than about scoring points."

I don't consider myself to be expert enough on a large variety of topics. Where I do think to make a contribution, generally someone else has made it first.

As others have mentioned, the interfaces, both technical and social, are not of the friendliest.

A couple of examples:
At a very basic level, if one clicks on the link to edit a Wikipedia article, one is usually confronted with a mass of wiki mark-up. for the uninitiated, this, in itself, is sufficiently daunting to have a good chance of scaring one away. The same applies to discussion. In addition, for discussion pages, one must understand that the discussion page is a wiki, itself. This is not necessarily obvious even to someone who already uses the web; it is not the usual interface for providing content.

I have not contributed to Wikipedia at all, even to fix obvious typos. I have read quite a few history and discussion pages for Wikipedia articles. Much there often seems to be expressed in such a way as to lead me to doubt intent toward cooperation.

Interesting that you should be bringing this up today. It was only a Tuesday that I became curious about what hacking might be happening using Wikipedia. I searched on just those terms and came up with a bunch of articles such as this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-dark-side-of-wikipedia. It seems that there is a certain justifiable paranoia, though that is no excuse for unpleasantness as a policy or even as a common response when dealing with newbies.

I will, however, plug another on-line, volunteer cause: Distributed Proofreaders (www.pgdp.net). I did a bunch of work for them early on (about 2000-2001). It's fun nit-picking, if you like that sort of stuff and I think that the cause is good. I should really get back to doing more of that.

Notability is a cultural value judgment. Some subcultures are welcomed on wikipedia and considered notable while others are not. It feels arbitrary and unsafe.
I recommend you use "uncomfortable", "unwelcome", or "exclusionary" when that is what you mean. Over-use of "unsafe" frames a problem of etiquette and diplomacy as if it were a moralized issue of injury, and makes the statement hyperbolic.
People do not want to invest time in an article only to have it deleted because a band of young male editors don't appreciate it.
There is definitely a problem with 14-year old guys. This is why Metafilter is so great. The $5 one-time fee, and one week before being allowed to post or comment, is all the barrier to entry a community needs.

That having been said, I would still stop contributing if women or the elderly unjustifiably deleted my work. Sometimes I've posted to Metafilter and it was deleted for reasons that I understood better afterwards. But if it happened for reasons I disagreed with, I'd just stop attempting to contribute. Wikipedia needs standards that they can justify to a broad range of people. But there will always be a spectrum outside that range who will never contribute for this reason.

Because editing Wikipedia gives the appearance of being A Way Of Life, rather than Just A Goddamn Hobby.

I'm not sure this forwards the discussion, but here's another example of why Wikipedia isn't attracting the high quality of input it wants: even people who aren't using the page feel insulted and belittled by the attitudes they encounter from the current admin.

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