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.

The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia’s 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.

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 change , 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. 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. 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 a 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. 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). 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. 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.

A Personal Look Back “Once more and they think to thank you.” Gertrude Stein, A Novel of Thank You 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.