What is Next
From WikipediaStory
Proposed length is roughly 20 pages of hardback book length, but this is up to the community of writers! See WikipediaStory:Community Portal for more information.
Links should appear as footnotes in the final version; <ref> tags don't work here.
Contents |
Preface
- This chapter was written collaboratively, by Wikipedians and other Internet users, using the wiki process. In order to prevent it from devolving into chaos, we referenced statements that provide the basis for our predictions.
What next for Wikipedia?
Since launching in January 2001, Wikipedia has expanded from its single initial article in English to over 10 million articles across 250 languages.[1] The number of editors has likewise grown from a handful to millions.
At first, the challenge was to create articles, to at least have any article about anything, to obtain a critical mass of usefulness. This was achieved at a phenomenal rate, even by Internet standards.
However, by 2006 there were signs of a slowdown, at least in the flagship English Wikipedia. The rate of article creation noticeably slowed, such that by the end of that year the previous five-year growth curve could no longer be described as exponential.
That same year, Jimmy Wales proposed that the community focus on quality versus quantity, that Wikipedia was sufficiently high profile that there were more and more embarrassing episodes concerning its reliability and credibility. It started with the Seigenthaler incident, which showed the real danger and challenge of maintaining biographies of living people. This led to a new so-called "BLP" policy that set a very high standard of quality for living persons so as to avoid cases of libel. The problem is it runs counter to many community practices, like BE BOLD and actually puts up barriers to participation.
Add more...
Community Health
There hasn't been a single centralised community on the English Wikipedia for some time, as forums for discussion are divided and subdivided into highly specialized topics. Cases where two highly active editors will not interact each other for months at a time, nearly impossible in the early days, are now common and perhaps the rule. Wikipedia is now fairly typical of groups formed by most human groups with broad shared activities, overlaid with localised communities formed through shared sub-interests. How these communities interact and how well they avoid claiming ownership over groups of articles (and what happens when they do) will likely be a key factor in how the community side of wikipedia goes forward.
Wikipedian Durova is pessimistic about the ability of Wikipedia to remain personable:
Durova's fourth law: small organizations run on relationships. Formal policies emerge when the organization becomes too large to operate on that basis. Policies continue to grow in both quantity and complexity in proportion to organizational growth until the policies no longer work, at which point the policies remain in place while the organization reverts to running on relationships.
The lack of personal connections between users has also resulted in an increase in appeals to procedures, and their resultant increase in importance. When a Wikipedian has a disagreement with a user that he or she is already familiar and expects to interact with again, negotiations on a personal level are the norm. As the wiki grew larger, Wikipedians could still find a third editor in common whom they both knew to act as a mediator. Once the community grew so large that personal appeals were no longer possible, policy and dispute resolution became paramount. The conception of "policy" thus drifted from "a description of how we do things" to "the way I have to do things because otherwise they will punish me". This drift was connected to the proliferation of procedures and guidelines intended to constrain administrators and other users with special privileges, as well as the fury directed at administrators who were perceived to step out of line. Paradoxically, the attempt to draw bright lines around administrator and thoroughly vet administrator candidates to prevent possible abuse accentuated, and perhaps created, a special status for administrators.
Policy had always failed in particular cases that did not fit the boilerplate for which the policy had been written. But as policy became both harder to change and more enforceable, users were increasingly faced with the choice of delivering clearly flawed results or flouting policy. The latter was particularly the case after the body of policy became so vast that one could not reasonably expect to know the relevant policy or precedent for every decision. In order to protect themselves from the imposition of policy and for support in the day to day running of the wiki, users naturally turned to other users with which they had amicable relations. These smaller networks largely took the place of the sitewide "community", which no longer offered the long-term relationships that it once had. Organized around article subject (WikiProject NASCAR), ideology (Deletionist), location (Australian Wikipedians' notice board), administrative task (checking new pages), and sometimes just Wikipedians that liked each others' style, they offered overlapping identities for Wikipedians from which they could seek support.
These subcommunities, ranging in size from the hundreds who have declared their affiliation to the Deletionism and Inclusionism, to the handful of users who concern themselves with certain administrative concerns, form both forums for member support and targets of criticism by non-members.
There will be ongoing discussions on issues, like the Deletionist/Inclusionist issue and other issues that are simular. Some users will loose theirselves in these discussions, making wikipedia a platform to 'play the manager game', where others just continue to contribute new lemma's that will be 'managed by the managers'. If these managers are the kind of contributors that wikipedia needs, is a complete different discussion. The more wikipedia will grow in size, bandwith and reknownance, the more it will attrackt POV-pushers, single-issue-contributors, and also people that just like to hear their voice and use wikipedia as a platform to 'stir in the shit'. Where simple rules, like 'forget all rules' would work in the early days, with the size of the project nowadays we need clear guidance for new users, or accept that the whole project will have a maximum level where it will emerge to. That will mean a maximum level of quality more then a maximum level of lemma's, but I believe it is inherent to the project. As vandalisme is something you can not ban and have to deal with one way or another, also for other issues there will be an ongoing fuzz. Once you solve it for one userID, the next one will pop up even sooner as the one before.
To the extent that the informal affordances of talk pages and the more bureaucratic affordances of RfC's RfAr's, AfD's, MfD's and the like have failed to yield community consensus on divisive issues and contentious policies, political discussions have migrated off-Wiki to other forums such as Wikipedia Review and Wikback, to numerous personal and media blogs, to Facebook networks and affinity groups, and to Skypecasts such as Not the Wikipedia Weekly.
Adminship
Being an administrator can be harder than ever (or not admins are still largely free to chose their roles). What used to be "no big deal" and jokingly referred to as a "janitor" is has become a somewhat more powerful role. Administrators used to be expected to largely learn on the job but these days they are expected to be pretty much ready to go and because of that, the open process of questioning and challenging a candidate is somewhat intense. Peers will research previous edits and look for anything resembling incivility, while others will toss in a pop quiz about copyright and the philosophy of American fair use law. Any inadequate defense of one's previous actions or current policy may mean votes "against" the user.
Many feel it has gone too far (Insert quote). Administrators have morphed into users who have editorial authority and as a group more and more responsibilities. And the public theater of the "adminship" process means many users don't bother at all trying to obtain that status.
Various suggestions for dealing with this problem exist ranging from the technical of splitting up admin powers (begun with the introduction of non admin rollback) to trying to facilitate various social changes. With the break-up of a centralised community how admins deal with the drift to become the aristocracy of Wikipedia is likely to be one of the key factors in Wikipedia’s future social dynamics.
Policies?
Among the policies which are most problematic, the policy on Biographies of Living People (BLP) has been especially contentious. There are over a quarter million BLPs on the English Wikipedia, and many of them have been not only a source of disagreement, but a source of embarrassment to the project.
Policy growth is likely to continue but mostly in specialised areas or as further fine tuning of speedy deletion.
Relationship with the Wikimedia Foundation
The English Wikipedia is by far the largest of all of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects in any language. It draws the majority of the press, accolades, and donations for the Wikimedia Foundation. As it continues to grow, other projects and languages are beginning to fall under the English Wikipedia's shadow. The relationship between the Foundation, and the English Wikipedia is becoming more strained, with calls on the one side to focus on the "moneymaker" and largest projects, and calls from the other side to give more attention to the smaller projects.
This strain is further exacerbated by the make up and, as of May 2008, restructuring of the Board of Trustees. What was once a board dominated by members of the community, has since become a ground for power struggles by trustees that have little to no relationship with the Wikipedia community. Even the founder, Jimmy Wales, maintains a tenuous modern relationship with the English Wikipedia; with many actions he takes being disputed, and criticized as "out of touch" with the community.
In the reconstitution of the board, the number of "community elected" seats was reduced to three, while expanding the size of the board to ten. Four appointed "professional" seats, reserved for members who have expertise in a required field may help bring in new talent, but the lack any relationship with Wikipedia or other projects has caused some worry in the community. The remaining three seats include one reserved for Jimmy Wales, and two to be appointed by the chapters in an as-yet-undefined manner. Is this the beginning of a coup, a shift in power away from the people who built Wikipedia into what it is today? And is there something more ominous behind this new structure?
What was once a modest "five figure" budget for maintaining modest technology, aims to be over $4 million dollars in 2008. With a new San Francisco office with a dozen staff members, and more to come, the Foundation is in the midst of a cultural shift. What will the role of this new built-up paid executive staff be?
The English Wikipedia, like all sponsored projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, inherits the overarching WMF Mission, which is to "empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Add more...
Legal status
People have described Wikipedia being full of libelous content, sitting as a big legal threat on the horizon. Will there be a big lawsuit that will put community members in jeopardy?
Editors are legally responsible for their edits. It is likely at one of them will be in the receiving end of a civil action sooner or later. There has already been at least one criminal case.[2]. However, if one makes an edit to another section of the article are they then responsible for the previous edits of which they added their change to?
The foundation is probably safe under the various safe harbour provisions for internet service providers. The various issues with international law are closely tied to how these thing work out on the internet as a whole.
Printed Wikipedia
Will there ever be a printed English Wikipedia?
People are used to seeing encyclopedias in multi-volume book form because that has been the usual way of organizing material since Diderot's Encyclopedie, but the last twenty years have seen enormous changes in encyclopedia publishing. Encyclopedias began being published on CD-ROMs for use with personal computers. Microsoft's Encarta was a landmark example, as it had no print version. A better question to ask would be whether the value of a published book format would be worth the expense. The economics of dead trees publishing placed practical limits on the scope and form of encyclopedias that remained stable from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Most adults over the age of 30 today worked with printed encyclopedias when they were younger. But is there an actual cost-benefit reason to continue doing so?
One of the reasons Wikipedia has been one of the Internet's most radical successes during the first decade of the twenty-first century is because it addressed several longstanding problems of printed encyclopedias:
- A good multivolume encyclopedia is beyond the means of many households, so ready access was limited by income.
- A really comprehensive encyclopedia was economically unfeasable. It simply takes too much space and expense to chop down that many trees.
- Keeping an encyclopedia of any size accurate and up-to-date is a difficult task.
By solving these problems Wikipedia has introduced others. Nobody thinks of pasting a sales brochure into the pages of Britannica, but people attempt that all the time with Wikipedia. And lack of editorial oversight means uneven development: as of this writing the biography of Britney Spears takes up 84 kilobytes while the biography of Socrates is 45 kilobytes. Yet converting Wikipedia from digitized format to print will not solve those new problems, not even in a reduced version.
Encarta killed the paper encyclopaedia some time ago - Wikipedia is unlikely to revive it. Books based on wikipedia content however are likely to appear in print. Rather than trying to write a book about say Victorian battleships from scratch people may chose to start with Wikipedia content and then add typesetting and images.
Competition
What will happen to Britannica, World Book and Encarta in a future with a dominant Wikipedia? Can they adapt?
Britannica is already making access to their encyclopedia more open, and Encarta is accepting suggestions for improvement of their articles. Traditional encyclopedias straights are a full coverage of all important topics, where as not a single of the Elite Eight articles (geography, history, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, personal life, technology, and either science or natural science) is a featured article, high quality illustrations and animations, and a perception of being accurate. They will lose the last one as Wikipedia becomes more accurate and will not have enough visitors unless they change their business strategy.
In June 2008, Britannica released a new participatory strategy no doubt inspired by Wikipedia.
Links:
- Blog: "Encyclopaedia Britannica is about to launch a new initiative that we’re very enthusiastic about. The main thrust of this initiative is to promote greater participation by both our expert contributors and readers. Both groups will be invited to play a larger role in expanding, improving, and maintaining the information we publish on the Web under the Encyclopaedia Britannica name as well as in sharing content they create with other Britannica visitors... Two things we believe distinguish this effort from other projects of online collaboration are (1) the active involvement of the expert contributors with whom we already have relationships; and (2) the fact that all contributions to Encyclopaedia Britannica’s core content will continue to be checked and vetted by our expert editorial staff before they’re published." [3]
- Britannica president Jorge Cauz: "We also know that there are many Britannica users who, although they may not be experts in a given field, are interested in spreading knowledge and information and sharing their contributions to that effort with others. The new site will make it easy for our users to do so by making the Britannica content available for them to quote, modify, save under their name, and share it with others at the site. So regular users not only will be able to submit their suggestions to the editors of Britannica, but also create their own content or modify Britannica’s coverage under their own names and share the results with others in a special section of the site. We believe that by allowing our users the flexibility of using existing Britannica content, properly quoting or modifying it, and by doing so under their names, we will not only facilitate their ability to learn more about that topic, but also inspire in them the responsibility that comes with having created a new treatment under their name." [4]
Britannica is learning from Wikipedia. What is Wikipedia learning from Britannica?
Add more...
One of my favorite quotes is "The greatest enemy of a revolution is its success." Wikipedia initiated something new and unprecedented: for several years, it led the way in the collaborative accumulation of knowledge. It was, however, inevitable that other groups and organizations would learn from the Wikipedia experiment, emulate the good, and attempt to resolve the problems, just as this current effort by Britannica shows. As a result, Wikipedia faces two possibilities: it can remain complacent with what it has achieved; or it can attempt to find innovative ways to remain on the cutting edge of collaborative Internet projects. The former is essentially a recipe for stagnation. One can only wonder whether there is enough creativity left to adopt the latter path.
- The Wikimedia Foundation as a professional foundation.
- Board members and governance, are they adequate?
- Finance, what to do with the money? Does money make for problems?
- What is the relationship among board, staff and community?
- Public relations and acceptance in academia. Nearly every week an article about academics who dont trust Wikipedia
- Stable versions and checked versions proposal
- State of other languages
- Can the community sustain itself given its parade of scandals?
- Low hanging fruit all picked?
- Challenge of other rivals, like Citizendium
- Future of other encyclopedias. Bertelsmann has published a Wikipedia compendium in German. Perhaps what will dominate the landscape is a checked and professionally edited version of Wikipedia?
Income
What will be the long term source of income for the foundation?
If the Wikimedia Foundation continues to grow, as some have predicted, it will start to need more and more resources to fund its development. Several different ways of dealing with this have been proposed, from limiting the number of articles, to carrying banner ads at the top of every page.
Yet the problem with the Foundation's pursuit of more sources of income is that it has not effectively made its argument that additional funding is needed. That is not to say that the Wikimedia projects do not need additional funding, but that beyond a vaguely-defined goal of "more outreach" -- especially in Third World countries -- the Foundation has not explained in satisfactory detail which needs they want to address. Unless the Foundation improves its relationship with the community of editors and Admins, it risks having the strong base of support it currently has disintegrate.
Stability of articles
While the English-language Wikipedia is excellent at producing accurate content, it does not successfully maintain this accuracy continuously. In order to address this significant issue, which deters many academics, teachers, and librarians from using or encouraging the usage of Wikipedia, a system of maintaining stability of articles is required. Such a system need not stop anybody from editing, but should simply ensure that readers have an option to acquire stable versions of Wikipedia articles. A proposed MediaWiki extension, flagged revisions<ref>http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FlaggedRevs</ref>, could potentially solve this issue.
More needed here ...
Experts
The English-language Wikipedia prides itself on being a collaboratively-produced resource created "by the people, for the people". However, some people, such as Larry Sanger, the founder of Citizendium, have criticised Wikipedia for being a primarily-amateur-operated project and for not having any specialist roles for professional experts such as academics.
If Wikipedia is to succeed, it must embrace the academic and professional cultures while maintaining a principle of "anybody can edit" and a free-content culture. A marriage of professional and amateur cultures, united to produce a free encyclopedic reference work of high-quality through a collaborating community, could be tremendously successful.
More needed here ...
