Reminds me of Everything2. It started as a freeform text linking site, where nodes (pages) could be linked just like a wiki these days. It was written by some of the slashdot crew, back around 2000. The site grew and attracted a fun crowd who really liked the freeform wiki-like interface. Unfortunately some of the admins wanted to compete with Wikipedia, so the fun, frivolous stuff was discouraged over purely factual nodes. This meant that some people stopped contributing. I left around that time.
>> “I don’t have a problem with roads,” Zeleny said. “There are lots of obscure subjects on Wikipedia, but you have to follow the guidelines. People see Wikipedia as a joke. They think it’s not serious. I’ve taken great, great pains to make sure articles are well written, well researched, and well cited.”
Or maybe more precisely, people's desire to believe the thing they're volunteering vast amounts of their personal time to matters and is serious, and because it's serious there should be rules.
I think it's unreasonable to treat people's volunteer efforts lightly. Nobody gives massive amount of personal time to something they don't really care about.
But that also leads to myoptic views of projects in super-volunteers, where the intent of the project to users gets lost in performance of the rules.
I'm not sure this is a solveable problem for volunteer-based projects though. There are only so many people willing to donate time, and you have to keep them happy.
My wikipedia editing experience was similar, crazy to think that it was almost 20 years ago. Me and some friends contributed our honest-best to some articles relating to language dialects we spoke, and minerals we liked - the stuff we could nerd out about a tiny bit more than whatever was on Wikipedia at the time, and so we added our paragraphs. In all cases the changes were reverted, and we actually made an enemy with a wikipedia editor who if I recall was an army vet and science teacher, and personally 'babysat' the articles about minerals, and would allow no changes to his articles.
I think it would be cool if there was something that saved all contributions, even deleted ones, and made it easy to explore all of them. I know Wikipedia has a diff history but that's not the right interface to bring all that to the surface.
Looking forward to the next collaborative scrapbook to start up so I can participate in good faith and have some good fun :D
That's interesting, because I checked out everything2 last year to see what I had missed out on, and found it a nice place with poetry and personal essays. Maybe at some point their culture changed again?
It's entirely possible! I left sometime in the mid 2000s, so there's certainly a lot of time for cultures to have changed significantly even multiple times.
> Maybe at some point their culture changed again?
Supposedly Tumblr has done the same. They crashed and burned so hard that they actually came out of the ordeal with a reverse eternal September effect, where miraculously most people act respectfully towards each other and are not just trying to exploit the platform.
Oh right! Yeah I completely forgot about its initial incarnation being named that.
It was definitely a new frontier where we thought anything was possible. Just being able to easily link between nodes/pages was a very cool feature back then.
Yeah, agree. Wikipedia's rules are being used as a club and it's too bad.
We get it that people will abuse Wikipedia and it must suck to cull all of the ephemera people submit (not the best word for it but the only one that comes to my mind).
But I think rules should allow for nuance.
Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in topics more akin to Urban Dictionary entries. Sort it's entries to the bottom of the search results, serve up a light yellow background for sub-pedia pages to make it clear these are not conforming articles. But it seems to me like a generally bad idea to be a ruthless gatekeeper for the enthusiastic and motivated contributors out there.
> Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in topics more akin to Urban Dictionary entries.
It's an interesting idea. I imagine a sort of "Official" and "Unofficial" modes. You could flip a switch and see the articles and edits that didn't pass muster.
That way, the ideas and info wouldn't be lost/censored, but wouldn't get to claim they're "formally accepted."
Alternatively you could federate it. Maintain wikipedia as the primary instance but allow users to add secondary, wikipedia community vetted wiki instances to their account so that they can seamlessly flow between them.
Those instances can serve as "incubators" for not sufficiently notable pages and then if they reach notability they can be transferred from the local "small" wiki to "big" wikipedia without losing any of the internal page information (like discussions or old revisions) or local context (still linking back to the "small" wiki).
That way you could have the default unlogged-in wikipedia which shows only the officially vetted pages but then also provide a "wider wikipedia" that includes pages that are of sufficient quality but not quite there yet. And then your local "small wikipedia" pages that don't meet the requirements to move up into the wider network yet.
This would maintain coherency between the wikis for the users who care while also allowing the core wikipedia admins and mods to focus their energy on maintaining a tight selection of well established, notable articles. And then users could choose how wide their wikipedia experience is.
> Alternatively you could federate it. Maintain wikipedia as the primary instance but allow users to add secondary, wikipedia community vetted wiki instances
Nowadays, Wikidata is playing that role already. Its concept of "notability" is flexible enough that labeled roads or individual Pokemons could handily fit there - if something is described to some minimal extent by a verifiable source, it can go in. Each Wikidata entry can contain links and "identifiers" that describe or refer to the same real-world entity in different namespaces, and you can use the Wikidata-specific browser extension Entity Explosion https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Entity_Explosion to seamlessly browse to other descriptions of any given entity as you browse the web. So the vetted "secondary" sources you're talking about don't even need to be wiki-specific, they can be practically anywhere on the web.
I kind of like that it's a different org adjacent to the old one, rather than a subsidiary. "Wiki" was always supposed to be software for thousands of various boards on different topics with no hierarchy, it makes sense that some topics would branch out of Wikipedia into their own Wiki's
The part that never made sense to me is that the exact same content on Wikipedia is proscribed, but if you put it somewhere else and someone else links to it, it somehow becomes OK. From where I'm sitting, the content is either fine or it's not.
A variant of this: you do the research, cite your findings with presumably reliable sources and post it somewhere like a personal blog. Wikipedia doesn't like directly linking to it [0], but if an editor writes the same content and cites the same sources, that's also OK, even though I'd argue that's plagiarism.
Makes perfect sense to me. You are not supposed to write Wikipedia articles on your original research.
If you want to help Wikipedia, feel free to write articles based on work that other people did in your field. Don't add any conclusions of your own. Let someone else write the articles on the research that was done by you.
I think that is a very reasonable tradeoff.
—-
> if an editor writes the same content and cites the same sources, that's also OK, even though I'd argue that's plagiarism.
An editor should not copy your blog post. They can describe whatever you wrote about and cite your blog post as a source. Or, they can go after the same original sources you have cited and write their own summarizing article (but not copy the blog post, and they also can't add any of their own conclusions).
> Or, they can go after the same original sources you have cited and write their own summarizing article (but not copy the blog post, and they also can't add any of their own conclusions).
That's my point: you've done the legwork, but you don't get credit for it, and as far as Wikipedia's policies are concerned, can't. They aren't supposed to cite your blog as a source, because it's self-published. I've seen many edits citing what I thought were well-researched entries get reverted because "it's a blog."
The Wikijournal effort https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group is supposed to plug that gap. If you think you have worthwhile primary research that is up to academic standards, it can be published in WikiJournal after review, and that information can then be referenced in a Wikipedia article.
I don't believe wikipedia considers blog posts published sources (probably because of bitrot). I believe the easiest way to get any specific conclusion/belief/opinion into wikipedia, is to get it published as a book. Then it can be cited as "alternative" theory or whatever.
If anyone wants to produce digital work about anything, there should be a home for that. Perhaps it doesn’t belong in Wikipedia, but maybe there’s like a “Wikipedia Open” sibling website that clearly communicates a lower standard of quality, relevance, curation, but generally ignores those requirements. Where I can write up my grandma’s cookie recipe without having to manage my own website.
“I think this is relevant. Here you go, world. Do with it what you may.”
I mean...this is precisely what's supposed to happen when you have a niche interest? And this is a better situation for them anyway because now they can use some structured data extension (SMW, Cargo,* WikiBase, DPL) specifically tailored to their needs and create a lot more advanced querying/filtering features that are super usable by the average person rather than requiring you to know SPARQL. Wikipedia doesn't support SMW or Cargo (for good reason) but on specific-subject wikis that aren't literally the scale of Wikipedia one of these is pretty much a must-have if the admins are tech-savvy enough to make good use of them. (My recommendation is Cargo but either can work)
*no relationship to the Rust package manager, it's a SQL wrapper for MediaWiki
I would say the headline here if anything is, "WikiMedia doesn't support niche-interest wikis that run alongside Wikipedia" and instead make you either self-host or use a farm (Fandom, Miraheze, Wiki.gg, etc).
I wish that was the headline, because then Miraheze would be notable enough to get an article on Wikipedia. At this point those of us on the board would even like bad press over no press at all.
Shameless plug: miraheze.org offers free, ad-free wikis offered by a charitable foundation.
I still think Wikipedia's focus on significance was a historic mistake. At the very least there should have been an "extended" Wikipedia+ that strived to include all human knowledge no matter how trivial.
Not having this meant for-profit companies like Wikia (now fandom.com) could take over much of that space, pervasive tracking and ads included.
I 100% agree. They also apply rules inconsistently, where the handful of times I've tried to make an article on well-known scientists (h-index 70+) years ago, the editors rejected it despite some secondary sources. On the other hand there are many articles being created by some editor on scientists who have almost no track record.
Wikipedia is already one of the best data sources for training LLMs, and if they were less stringent, it could even be a better resource.
I find Wikipedia's frontend more enjoyable than AARoads. It's understandable as the community of editors probably wasn't as technical as some other communities, but it feels a bit slow, there's no search, and there are a number of broken links.
It makes sense that the consumption side of the site isn’t as good, since super-niche sites like this are more for the benefit of the writers than the readers. The value and enjoyment is in collecting the information, not retrieving it.
And that might sound like a criticism, but it’s really not. Niche interest sites where people spend their time collecting a huge level of detail on a topic few care about are awesome, and I love them. Just realistically, they’re not there for the readers.
We already see this with niche things like gaming fandom details (every pokemon used to have a wiki page for a bit, but now that's all properly handled by Bulbapedia) so I wonder why we haven't seen it for more serious topics before? Math, Engineering, CS could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd think.
In some cases technical subjects just require some pretty steep prerequisite knowledge, but where possible it's nice to try to make them as accessible as can be done practically within the space constraint of a few introductory paragraphs. Usually that means trying to aim at least part of any article at approximately "1 level below" the level where students are expected to first encounter the topic in their formal study. (This isn't always accomplished, and feel free to complain on specific pages that fall far short.)
Writing for a extremely diverse audience with diverse needs is a hard problem. And more generally, writing well as a pseudonymous volunteer collective is really hard, and a lot of the volunteers just aren't very good writers. Then some topics are politicized, ...
How much time have you personally spent trying to make technical articles whose subjects you do know about more accessible to newcomers? If anyone reading this discussion has the chance, please try to chip away at this problem, even if it's just contributing to articles about e.g. high school or early undergraduate level topics – many of these are not accessible at the appropriate level. But if you are an expert about some tricky technical topic in e.g. computing or biology or mechanical engineering, go get involved in fixing it up.
I’m sure it is totally impossible because figuring out where to start (what’s “obvious” to the reader), but a wiki that also has some sort of graph and could work out the dependencies for a given theorem, what you need to know to understand it, and then a couple applications (for examples) could be really useful. Automatic custom textbook on one specific topic.
It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created using natural language generation on a functional programming base. The main goal is to generate content in any language from a common underlying structure, but one could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in that framework as well.
Although this is partly inevitable because the content is really abstract, I know there are more approachable ways to define “monad” than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad
Yes Wikipedia is really bad for maths articles. They're all written by people who just learnt about the topic and are showing off their pedantically detailed knowledge of it.
And various languages and frameworks have wikis too, like Python, PHP, WordPress, etc.
So there's definitely some interest in wikis outside of fandom topics. The Wiki listing pages on Wikipedia has at least 30% of the page listing wikis that don't involve a piece of media/fiction:
I suspect the disparity is probably because hobbies and fandoms could mostly only communicate via the internet, and naturally went from fansites and hobby sites to wikis. Meanwhile more academic subjects have an audience who seem to be unsure of the value of these sorts of free resources.
Fandom is complete and utter SEO garbage - every single fandom with enough nerds to have sense has moved off of it into an actual independent wiki. IndieWikiBuddy is an extension that actually takes fandom websites, and redirects google searches to the actual community run page. https://getindie.wiki/
Oh I agree. I like to link to non Fandom wikis when their available, use that same plugin in most browsers, and support things like the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance.
Sadly quite a few wikis still use the service, and haven't gone independent yet.
Because ultimately, Wikipedia's criteria for allowing articles is whether or not the subject of such has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on. Otherwise, most of the article is going to be someone's personal opinions or their own research. Most minor American roads and Pokemon don't have that coverage beyond showing they exist and their route. Allowing those articles to be created is a signal that "there's reliable newspapers or academics covering the history of this highway" when in truth if a history section is ever added, it's not going to be based on anything beyond what the editor came up with.
That is what distinguishes Wikipedia from large language models or Google which'll say they have information on a given topic even if their sources are questionable. The value-add of Wikipedia is curation, and when the quality of one's outputs is a function of one's inputs, it's sometimes better to just not give an output when the input doesn't exist.
>has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on
Which is, of course, completely ironic. Wikipedia's notability criterion depends heavily on books in some library stack that essentially no one will ever actually check or appearances in other print form that no one will check either.
I've found a couple of minor "folk histories" of things that appear to not have been true after looking at actual books (which may have not been actually accurate either though they seemed plausible).
There's an opposite irony, too: Wikipedia doesn't want to be a location for original research, but moving the pages out of Wikipedia means they could now be a suitable citation source for articles on Wikipedia.
From my understanding this is also sometimes a method used to get fake info on Wikipedia. Get the fake info on a secondary source, then cite that on Wikipedia.
I've seen this kind of stuff used in some activist style groups as well before. Someone may be trying to push some kind of agenda. While in an argument with someone they link to a Wikipedia article. That Wikipedia articles source ends up linking to the activist groups own site. That site then links to some kind of sketchy or very broad conclusion piece of "research" that is unreproducable.
So I feel like Wikipedia's rule don't necessarily make their content any more reliable. It just adds a step if you're looking to push some kind of biased/iffy opinion onto a page.
And it's not just a Wikipedia thing. When I was researching a book a number of years back I found some fairly consistently repeated origin stories which, if you went back to some older books, basically weren't the whole story.
Definitely, but that's what it means to be an encyclopædia. Wikipedia is very definitely relying on foundations that are shakier than anyone expected when the project was started -- but still (at least in my opinion) firm enough to build something net positive.
There's an XKCD cartoon in that vein. Best to get it in print somewhere but getting information onto what is a plausibly credible source is better than nothing with respect to getting it into Wikipedia via a citation.
That's part of why digital libraries are important!
Wikipedia has its own "Wikipedia Library", which is a system to allow active editors access to high-quality sources. But if it has to be resorting to Sci-Hub or libgen to check sources for Wikipedia, that's also a form of public service.
It relies on databases donating access to Wikipedia editors. There are other restrictions too. Most of the stuff in TWL can be accessed with a university library card that many alumni are eligible for.
I think about trying to start a math and physics wiki all the time. Basically it needs to keep track of as many major results and link them all to each other and map between their terminologies. It is so exhausting that so many results are hiding in papers from other subfields that use slightly different notations and terminology so you can't find easily find them.
It seems to me that the line has been drawn at perceived academic interest. "Notability" is highly context-dependent, but I find that it's easier to identify Wikipedia's line of notability when you consider the potential academic usefulness of a particular article. Minutae of science, history, mathematics, etc seem more likely to be "academically significant" than a county road in Michigan, or a Pokemon.
When I was a kid, I was taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source. I know I'm not the only one. Part of me wonders if their present moderation is influenced by that.
> taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source
What ends up happening is people (including academics in published work) still use Wikipedia as a source, but just don't mention it. This is much worse than just citing Wikipedia, because it can lead to "citogenesis", whereby a claim that originated (without evidence) in Wikipedia is then given credibility by being republished elsewhere. Sorting out what happened later is a huge pain, and many examples slip through the cracks.
Overall, Wikipedia should be taken for what it is: a moderately inconsistent tertiary source written by pseudonymous volunteers some of whom are dispassionate world-class experts and others of whom are incompetent amateurs, ideologues, or trolls.
However, what I've found tracking down lots of Wikipedia claims over the years is that Wikipedia is on average no less reliable than many other kinds of sources that are taken more seriously, including paper encyclopedias and peer-reviewed journal articles (and don't get me started on newspaper articles). Every source and author should be carefully evaluated for credibility and read with at least some skepticism.
As I got older, teachers (and then professors) tended to get more comfortable with Wikipedia. I never, EVER cited Wikipedia, but it was generally acceptable to use Wikipedia as a starting point - or even to use Wikipedia as a way to find other sources. My fiancée substitute teaches between jobs, and her impression is that policies relating to Wikipedia may be more lax today than I ever saw.
For a lot of these fields researchers already feel like they are contributing to the community by writing manuscripts. Making a wiki of that written for lay people is a fruitless waste of time, wikipedia entries are good enough for lay people and people in the field would probably rather read a legitimate review article with 150 sources.
https://Topology.pi-base.org (a database of certain mathematical objects) started as a wiki, but transitioned to using GitHub pull requests and custom software to support automated deduction.
Folks interested in open collaborative math content may find these interesting:
This lets users practice and test things without risk to their work or account.
2. Sites that try to "keep the db clean" by nuking stuff they think is "bad" by some criteria.
Sites like this: Wikipedia, most big subreddits
Type 2 sites can be unsustainable because they tend to make new users feel judged, and don't give them the chance to iterate and improve their work until it's more ready to be shared and useful to a broader audience. You just find your content nuked, or removed from the subreddit, or downvoted a ton, often with a dismissive or aggressive comment. This is NOT the way to grow and survive as a company over a long period of time
Obviously, there is no necessity to keep the db full of only high quality items. As the scope and number of niches a site covers, it's not possible to maintain that. On the other hand, using algos lets you do interactive tests with content, directly testing against various audiences to see if they like it, without having to do editorial work yourself.
Of course, there has to be some limit - articles for every pokemon, or every version of every pokemon, etc at some point it does get too far. The thing for me is coming in and seeing your content completely deleted.
> 2. Sites that try to "keep the db clean" by nuking stuff they think is "bad" by some criteria.
The problem on Wikipedia is less about having standards and more about having changing interpretations of fundamental standards re-classify large swaths of previously acceptable content as unacceptable.
The trend away from subject-specific notability and sourcing guidelines to applying one notability guideline generically to every subject, regardless of the intent in doing so, mostly just gives editors who like to delete things a whole new buffet of articles to tear through.
I'd definitely agree that changes like that intensify the issue!
For me as an amateur contributor, though, even the normal experience was tough - suddenly I returned to find my content removed, with a short, aggressive note, left by what wasn't a committee, or a jury, but rather a single, annoyed and tired individual, who in his seniority was somehow justified in unilaterally acting alone to delete my work, without the careful attention to detail in documents, wording, and formality which helps make real-world justice palatable. The carelessness with which he wrote made it clear that at that site, I was to be considered a person of very little value at all.
To speak more clearly, that was the social/psychological effect of it - which left me without much motivation to continue! And I think that's a wide effect - if you compare a typical 1st-time wikipedia editing experience to the more successful UGC sites, it's pretty clear they all make some effort to shield users from that (if they can) and let them feel successful, even if they aren't yet. (I know from the inside of one of these places that users get mad at for removing their creations for copyright or other reasons, all of us on the inside hated potentially frustrating a creator, and admired them for trying over and over to create something.)
Moreover, from what I've heard, there used to be more freedom on wikipedia, so the argument that "it's always been that way" might not even work.
Using those definitions there are really no type 1 sites except maybe 4chan, which itself even lightly moderates. All the other sites you mention heavily moderate and most of them automate that moderation.
You really can’t have a site that’s a free-for-all because of spammers, griefers, racists, and other various forms of jerks.
Yes, I didn't break them out but I do consider some types of basic filtering to be legitimate because they're both common across cultures, and their limits can be described fairly precisely. These are things such as prohibitions on political, ethnic or religious conflict, criminal activities, nudity, and of course, copyright.
Actually, treating censorship of those things as the default global level of censorship makes the difference between restrictive sites like Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet even more stark.
It's almost unimaginable that YouTube would remove a creators content simply because they thought the topic was irrelevant, or the quality too low. So I agree we can't have a true free for all online. But the distinction between the large group of UGC sites that really try to cultivate and protect their creators from those that don't is reflected in the popularity and growth rates of them all.
I may be missing your point, but Wikipedia and most big subreddits have proven quite effective at growing and surviving.
I'd also suggest a major distinction between type 1 and type 2 sites are a focus on creation vs consumption. There's a lot more consumers than producers and, depending on your goals, it might improve the experience for more users by deleting the content of some.
>most big subreddits have proven quite effective at growing and surviving.
That depends on your criteria. If popularity and user engagement are the only important metrics, this is absolutely true.
If however, clarity of purpose and effective moderation are important, I would strongly disagree. From my experience, most big subreddits that used to fulfill a certain niche have devolved into primarily meta-posting and stealth (or not stealth at all) advertisement.
Of the exceptions to the above, many now just fill the exact same purpose. There are around 10 extremely large subreddits that regularly make the front page that are essentially just "look at this picture of something I have/something I saw" with no real boundary between them.
That matches what I would expect. My normal continuation would be to look at the growth from 2014 til now in global internet users, and at the competitors like youtube, insta, etc. I'd expect to find that many of these sites grew 100 or 1000x, and that the global online population whose device power and internet service levels surpass some threshold has also grown by at 10x since then.
Those are all assumptions and memories from working during that time period - possibly wrong, would look up if you disagree. But if you don't, then my conclusion would be that staying flat during a period like that - when you could have grown and supported a deep, new, persuasive trend of literacy, fact-based reasoning and understanding, education and compromise - is a huge failure.
There were 2.79 billion internet users in 2014 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users?... so the number couldn't have grown 10x because there are no 27.9 billion humans yet. The latest data is from 2020, so maybe it's at least 2x what it was in 2014.
This is a great idea, I think. Mediawiki is very good about allowing multiple sites and since interwiki links are bundled in you can just link Wikipedia pages like they’re local to the wiki.
I mean, it makes sense. There's an incredible rabbit's hole of detail on certain topics that probably doesn't belong on what purports to be a general purpose encyclopedia. Honestly a lot of mathematics etc. that is more or less worthless to people who aren't already experts in the area could probably use their own space too.
Yeah, I'm a 'roadgeek' and I thought many of the highway pages were overly verbose trivia. Long route descriptions clearly just taken from a map, random citations about ditch work in 2014 etc. Very little history or substance.
At some point, a general purpose reference can get overwhelmed by specialized minutiae. I'm generally in the inclusionist camp with respect to Wikipedia, but I also don't think it's really an appropriate vessel for all of possible human knowledge. Which implies there is some line. So an article on the Big Dig is probably appropriate but not the blow by blow history of some country road.
Is the article on route 48 meant to be a 500,000 word treatise on its history including every work order involved in its construction and maintenance as well as discussion of the procurement process for the paints used for its lines, or can some of that maybe be elided? Would you expect the article on homeomorphisms to include a list of every homeomorphism every described, suggested, defined, or posited?
Wikipedia has a couple of devices to solve this organizational problem: "full article" links that appear at the top of sections, and "list of X" pages. So in your examples, you'd have a three-sentence "History" section on the Route 48 page, with a link to the full article on the history of Route 48 at the top. For your second example, there would be a "see also" section at the bottom of the article, including a hyperlink to "List of Homeomorphisms."
Risks of too much low interest data in wikipedia include:
* Not enough interest to update wiki when the subject changes; then wiki becomes out of date and unreliable.
* Too few eyeballs allows false information to be added (accidentally or intentionally)
* Becomes harder to do wiki-wide changes (of course it's inevitably too large for manual wiki-wide changes, but you can imagine more articles means more corner cases will be hit that will get automation mistakes or require more complex automation. Think info-boxes used in novel ways etc)
The first two are arguments against letting an individual write a single article about a unique topic, not against allowing a vibrant community of people with special interests document them in a public reference.
The third could be solved by only deleting pages that use the wiki language in unmaintainable ways.
A lot of making a high quality resource comes down to editing. Making sure you don't just include what you need but also remove what you don't. It is impossible to satisfy everyone, which is why i think it is a good thing to separate out to different resources when different groups want different things.
It's more the Wikipedia leadership that would have to be convinced. And looking at it that way, is it safe for all human knowledge to be gatekept by a single group?
I think the difficulty arises from finding a balance between a baseline that appeals to a general audience and an extensive repository for expert reference. Sifting through large Wikis can be daunting and discourage viewership. There is even an acronym for this: TL;DR
Their name might get them in trouble with the AA, a UK and Ireland insurance company who has products such as AA Roadwatch.
Other than that potential future problem, this is pretty much the system working as intended, and they're following the path led by sites such as Wookiepedia.
The site these former Wikipedia editors are joining has existed since 2000, is primarily US-focused, and is named after two people in the US with first names beginning with A: https://www.aaroads.com/about/ So this new migration shouldn't affect that site's legal risk from the UK and Ireland company, which seems pretty low anyway given that context.
I feel like if there were to be a problem, it would be with the American AAA instead, which is probably more similar given that it offers roadside assistance and other road services.
It's sad that you describe the AA as an insurance company - you're not wrong, but that throws the contrast between today's AA and its venerable past into sharp relief.
It's very G/O Media-clickbaity to call this "going rogue". The editors aren't subverting anything.
This isn't the first and won't be the last fork of a Wikipedia community over the increasingly tightened, deletionism-favoring screws of notability and sourcing policies. The only people "going rogue" are the organized groups on Wikipedia moving across wildly different topics in order to hammer them all into one uniform shape that serves nobody as well as it had or could.
> Since August 2022, our project has faced several external challenges that made several members question the viability of editing on Wikipedia in ways that Covid-19 didn't. The notability of highway articles in general became a focus of New Page Patrollers. Additionally, the ability to continue using maps as sources was called into question. Since then, we initiated an RfC to clarify if there was support for long-standing citation practices, namely could we continue to cite maps as sources in our articles? The results of that RfC were mixed. While chatting amongst ourselves online, it became clear that continuing to hope that another RfC or deletion discussion would go our way was an exercise in futility. In the background to all of this, other categories of articles were on the chopping block. First it was articles on Olympic athletes, and then it was cricket and area code articles.
If you think this is interesting, see what happens when you try and edit the page of Susan Gerbic; the leader of the Guerilla Skeptics. She runs a gang of over 150 Wikipedia members who have taken over 1500+ articles. They are like the deletionist described in the article, but operate as an open conspiracy advancing an atheist-materialist point of view. They actively recruit new members, run them through extensive training about the Wikipedia ecosystem and how to dominate it as a team.
That article was written in 2018, since then they have been trashing on a retired admiral: Timothy Gallaudet. They have been disparaging David Grusch, who spoke under oath to the American congress and have undone the work of Nobel laureates trying to edit pages about physics. And yes, they are dominating, a team of editors will beat out an individual contributor on Wikipedia. I don't really care about their position, but they are an open conspiracy, and it's an interesting story.
Just to be pedantic: They started a separate wiki (that isn’t really in competition with Wikipedia), not a “competing Wikipedia” (which is the name of a specific wiki).
AARoads is not a competitor to Wikipedia because it doesn’t try to be a general-purpose encyclopedia. Similar to how HN is not a Reddit competitor. They have different goals and thus complement each other.
The title seems a stretch; an encyclopedia about roads is hardly competing with Wikipedia. In fact that was the point, Wikipedia didn’t want that content in the first place.
Wikipedia seems to have a growing contingent of editors from countries like India, the Phillipines and Sri Lanka who edit topics that seemingly have little to do with those countries.
To establish their credentials, they get involved in arcane areas like Articles for Deletion or other areas that you’d expect would be of more interest to experienced editors.
Now everyone has the right to edit anything on Wikipedia, but it’s starting to feel like paid editors have gained a foothold.
What’s the point of not allowing that content on Wikipedia? I get that some topics are less important or have lower quality sources, but the cost of adding them seems relatively low. Personally I would enjoy seeing all kinds of fandom articles on Wikipedia, roads included.
Something that I see on OpenStreetMap - someone gets motivated and maps a neighborhood in an incredible detail down to the last tree, bench and trashcan, but not motivated enough to actually update the changes over the years, leading to the map being wrong and untrustworthy.
Is it reasonable to expect Wikipedia to index all the things? A road that has never been written about. Openstreetmap is a seperate entity, and that makes perfect sense. So is Github. Do you need an article for every file in the Linux kernel too?
https://everything2.com/
Huh it's still going! It must be 25 years old now, not a bad achievement.