Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia may or may not be failing

Fish

This may or may not be a humo(u)r page. ++Lar: t/c 22:14, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Awesome. Renata 22:24, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

It is humo[u]rous in places, yes. Though there's sort of a serious point behind it. You're free to ignore that completely, of course :) – Qxz 23:11, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah... and its probably the best reaction possible in response to the discussion regarding the other essays. :) --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 23:35, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Answer

Is Wikipedia succeeding in its aim of becoming a high-quality, free encyclopedia? Or is it failing beyond all hope of recovery?

Yes. --Dachannien^Talk_Contrib 23:08, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Good! Just as long as it's not sitting around doing nothing, that would be boring – Qxz 23:11, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Anyone want to structure this?

It's hopelessly rambling. Whether it's intended to be serious, humorous, or both, it could certainly stand to be better written. —Doug Bell ^talk 01:24, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm sorry. I just sat down and started typing, then after about ten minutes, thought "Hey, I'll post this as an essay". It's not meant to be Shakespeare. Now this is a wiki, so if you want to mercilessly edit it, you can – Qxz 01:31, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I should also point out that tidying it up is kind of against the point of the essay, which is that rather than writing and re-writing essays about whether the project is failing, we should be writing articles. In that respect, the bad structure is not entirely unintentional – Qxz 01:37, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Agree with Qxz, the rambling is part of the charm. It is needful. ++Lar: t/c 13:56, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Article

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. This article has been tagged since February 2007.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia may or may not be failing is a Wikipedia essay by user Qxz. It is a response to two other Wikipedia essays that debated whether Wikipedia has been successful in meeting its goals as an encyclopedia. Almost the entire essay consists of questions, thus creating, through repetition, a satirical tone. In a later talk page comment, however, Qxz indicated that there is a serious purpose behind the essay. The essay concedes that the Wikipedia processes Arbcom, RfA, and AfD are broken, but concludes that "people are… going to agree."

This section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details.

Outriggr later wrote an "article" about the essay on the talk page, in a vague attempt to be humo[u]rous. He incorrectly stated that the essay claimed Arbcom, RfA and AfD were broken, when in fact it did no such thing, merely suggesting these possibilities in the form of questions. Qxz later extended this article, pointing out some of Outriggr's misconceptions, and applying an NPOV tag. Shortly afterward, Wikipedia exploded due to a self-referential logic error. [1]

References

1. –Outriggr § 01:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Remind me again what the point of this is? :) – Qxz 01:46, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Cool! LOL. –Outriggr § 01:52, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

love it

thanks for this. 131.111.8.103 18:11, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Answers

Is Wikipedia succeeding in its aim of becoming a high-quality, free encyclopedia?Yes Or is it failing beyond all hope of recovery?Yes

Is the mere fact that it exists on the scale it does an indication of success?Yes Does the redistributability of its content ensure that, one way or another, it can never fail?Yes Or does the malignant outcome of a few webcomic AfDs and the decision to make things difficult for spammers mean that the entire project is the birthchild of Satan, as many bloggers would have us believe?Yes

Does "Featured article" status have any real meaning?Yes Does the ratio of featured articles to non-featured articles actually tell us anything?Yes Or is it about as useful as dividing a contributor's edit summary usage by the number of Portal talk edits they have?Yes What about "good articles"?Yes Is "good" good enough?Yes Is it too good?Yes At the end of the day, does it matter what an article is labelled as provided it's encyclopedic and useful to its readers?No

Is Wikipedia's aim to become "Britannica-or-better" quailty hopelessly unattainable?Yes Or, given that most of the Micropædia articles are a couple of paragraphs long with no authors or references, and the Macropædia has only 700 articles, has it already been attained?Yes Is 1,600,000 articles too many, or too few?Yes, Yes Is this metric a misleading one?Yes What about the average length of the article?What about it? Average number of edits?What about them? Median number of minor edits per page move?148.7 Which is better – lies, damned lies, or statistics?All of the above.

How reliable is Wikipedia?Very. Has the number of elephants tripled in the last three months?Yes If I pick a random statement from a random article, will it be true, or will it be truthy?Yes Is it appropriate to cite Wikipedia?Of course. It is of the utmost appropriateness to cite a Wikipedia article in itself as the source of all the claims in that article, see this, for example. Is it appropriate to cite any encyclopedia?Yes Is it appropriate to rely on anything in Wikipedia at all, ever?Yes Do thousands of graduate students owe their degrees to it nevertheless?Yes

Is the unevenness of Wikipedia's coverage unacceptable?Yes Does it matter that Jumpluff has an article but Macrophage colony-stimulating factor receptor does not?Yes Is someone going to go and write that article now I've linked it?Yes Is the overwhelming presence of popular culture and underwhelming presence of 17th-century Dutch art a poor reflection on the user demographic and an indication that we are drowning in cruft?Yes Or is the creation of a large, centrally-organized, well-written, sourced, encyclopedic collection of information something we should consider an achievement, regardless of the subject matter?Yes

Is RfA broken?Yes Is it not broken?Yes Does this have anything at all to do with the encyclopedia?Yes Is ArbCom broken?Yes Does this have anything at all to do with the encyclopedia?Yes Is AfD broken?Yes Does this have ... well, it does, but is it a problem?Yes

Is Wikipedia confusing to newcomers?Hell Yes! Is it hostile to outsiders?Yes Perplexing to those not in the "inner circle"?Yes Do experienced editors give the impression they don't care because secretly, it's just as confusing for them?Yes Is it impossible to add information to Wikipedia without the "abusive mods" removing it?No Or is this a misconception derived from the experiences of those with extreme viewpoints who attempt to rewrite controversial articles without discussing the matter with other users?Yes Do we really care what someone who blanks an article and writes "penis" thinks of the project anyway?Yes

Are all our articles written by high-school kids with no knowledge of the subject?Yes Is this a bad thing?No Or has Wikipedia inadvertently done something rather impressive – taken the millions of kid-hours of spare time that these people would otherwise have wasted on video games and MySpace, and actually put it to productive use?Yes Is the project run by abusive, power-mad adolescents?Maybe Or is this an unfair generalization from the inevitable disruptive few?Yes Is there a cabal?Yes If so, does it exist?Yes Can I be in it?No

Is Wikipedia about to run out of funding and close down?Yes Or did the accountant miss a zero off the last fiscal report?Yes Will the Foundation discover $1,000,000 down the back of the sofa some time in the next four months?Yes Or will we have to resort to running ads on Wikipedia?Yes Would it be in the spirit of the project to do so?Yes Would it be idiotic not to do so?Yes Would the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, or would it drive everyone away?Yes, Yes How much of the money would I be getting?Exactly $.02

Does any of this matter, in the grand scheme of things?Yes Or does Wikipedia's massive user base mean that, short of drastic action, the project will find its own direction?Yes Would it be better if, instead of writing these essays, we wrote more articles?Yes

Questions, questions, questions. Feel free to add more perplexing questions that no two people are ever going to agree on as you see fit.No —The preceding unsigned comment was added by ONUnicorn (talk • contribs) 21:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC).

How can we measure this?

I think it's impossible for us to measure whether Wikipedia is failing or not. It's sort of like the observer effect: any attempt to measure it will affect the results. Any subsequent questions on the matter should be referred to the explanation of Schrödinger's cat. --Elkman - (Elkspeak) 00:24, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Speaking as an occasional contributor, I have to say I believe Wikipedia is failing because of power struggles, infighting, and a poisonous culture which tends to encourage "old hands" to treat newbies like dirt or worse. It's difficult when one must deal with people who believe it is their duty to stop others from performing reasonable and competent copy-edits, for example--especially when everyone's services are being offered on a free and voluntary basis. You can't grind well-meaning volunteers into the mud and expect them to come back for more punishment. But perhaps that's the point.

Hmmm... I refer you to paragraphs 8 and 9 of the essay, which consider these matters – suggesting that actually, most experienced contributors have no clue what's going on either, but generally don't go out of their way to attend to newcomers' needs, and that power struggles and infighting take place only between a very small group of people (not all of whom are administrators) which leads to unfair generalizations to the administrators as a whole. I don't think anyone honestly believes that it is their duty to stop others from performing reasonable and competent copy-edits; in fact I have never seen any attempt to prevent good-fairth copyediting that did not involve either an honest mistake on the part of one of the involved parties, or a vandal who was later dealt with. Don't forget that everyone is a volunteer, including administrators, and including those who spend several hours a day reverting vandalism. Many of them have been on the recieving end of many derogatory comments, including – depending on how it is interpreted – your own (you seem to be lumping all "old hands" together and accusing them of infighting). Yet they do, in most cases, continue to contribute. By far the most effective way to prevent contributors from being deterred would be to eliminate all vandalism; people tend not to like it when they discover their hard work has been trashed by some anonymous IP address with nothing better to do. Sadly, there is no easy way of doing that – Qxz 05:10, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Best. Essay. Ever.

Of all the Wikipedia essays I've read, this one is the best. --cesarb 01:59, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Really? Thanks... I should write them more often, I guess :) – Qxz 03:58, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Agreed, may perhaps throw it on digg. Chris M. 06:05, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, to be honest, I'd rather not have the anti-Wikipedia trolls trolling it... – Qxz 07:22, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Awesome :-)

Fantastic essay, in that it says no more nor less than the original essays already say. Rather highlights the absurdity of the whole situation. - Ta bu shi da yu 10:28, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Interesting

I have found this essay particularly interesting, partially due to the fact that I just setup a MediaWiki on my intra-net server and started learning how to write these files. Now, I can fully appreciate what goes into getting one of these setup and working. Anyways, back on track, I'd have to say that Wikipedia is, by far, the most successful online encyclopedia I've ever seen. Essays only seem to help progress the growth of this wonderful resource. And, yes, I do believe it was rather humorous in areas. Qzx I salute your ability with humor. I hope to never have to see ads on Wikipedia, but if that is the way it has to be, I'd say that's the way it has to be. Just never bring this resource down.

On top of having such information rich articles, I'm having fun jumping between my wiki and this site learning how to use my own! In so doing, I'm sure I have made Wikipedia's hit counter jump at least 20-50 extra points from where it normally is in a single month. No, Wikipedia isn't failing in my opinion. And, as far as somebody blanking an article to replace it with "penis".... childish, yes, but at least the articles can be restored fairly in a fairly easy manner. I'm sure it becomes a hassle to have to do it every week because of such juvenile actions. Essays, articles, I think more of both shall be a great help. Perhaps, one day, this listing on the english Wikipedia will reach 1 billion articles. Here's counting. Zeifertstc 03:40, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks; the praise is very welcome. Though you did manage to spell my name wrong... it's only three letters! :)

In the time it takes me to write this, at least 100 pages will have been vandalised, and this is Sunday night, about as quiet as it gets. The important thing, though, is that you're reading pages and getting something useful out of them; that's what the project is here for. As far as ads are concerned, I'm pretty sure we will see them, at some point; it's just a case of what form they take. As for the 20-50 hits, we get anything up to 25,000 hits per second, so I don't think anyone will have noticed :) – Qxz 03:50, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It's doing just fine

Wiki will never be perfect, but so what. 99% of the time you dont run into vandalized pages, and the ones that are usually are so obvious that no one would believe what it said anyways. One can always view a previous version. Eventually there'll have to be some changes made when a "super vandal" type comes along and makes a serious attempt to ruin it. But as usual, Wiki will adjust.--Johnnny001 08:46, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

A Proof of Failure?

As a relatively new user, I have naively started some discussion of Darwikinism at User Talk:J Hill/Wikipediology, but in my analysis, I have stumbled upon what may be a proof of Wikipedia failure, as in if Darwikinism holds as written, then the Wikipedia is ultimately unparsable in any state under the Church-Turing thesis regardless of how much of the Internet is devoted to serving it. See the last bullet point (as of 20:21, 9 April 2007 (UTC)) starting with "Another flaw with attempting an atom proof... " in that discussion. I cannot say that Darwikinism must hold, but it certainly contains many statements that many users regard as plainly true facts. This is not to say that there is no utility in having the Wikipedia around as an informal source of dynamic information with both high potential for and high expectation of (a) abuse, (b) vandalism, (c) thrashing reverts, or (d) all of the above. This formal failure to fulfill the stated definition of the Wikipedia falls into the same class as stating there cannot be a fool-proof word-processing grammar checker of human languages or a perfect anti-virus application, all due to the uncomputability of infinitely large classes of undecidable problems. Of course, if Mensa-qualified editors had infinite life spans, infinite hands, and infinite logins at the same time, and if the number of non-Mensan administrators approached zero... Hotfeba

Wikipedia is Wikipedia

'Nuff said. —The preceding signed comment was added by Cadby (talk • contribs) 02:12, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

– Gurch 15:34, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Jumpluff

Jumpluff no longer has an article. It just has a redirect to a list of Pokemon. Should the link in the essay be changed? 66.189.1.140 17:08, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

No, I don't remember the policy (WP:Redirect, maybe?) but you're generally not supposed to replace redirects just because you can. --Thinboy00 @156, i.e. 02:44, 30 January 2008 (UTC)