Wikipedia and its controversies

An encyclopedic-minded wiki that was created by anonymous savers on a voluntary basis, it offers information on almost any issue.

Resume Summary

Principles: Open Source Knowledge

The idea of ​ ​ wiki is the application of the principles of open source to encyclopedia and, therefore, to knowledge. Namely, that in a free and free project, anyone can cooperate by bringing a stone into the building. The amount of contributions, even the most modest, leads to a complete online encyclopedia.
Articles are licensed free of charge, belong to everyone and can be posted on any site (attention, however, to a duplicate in relation to search engines). Wikipedia hosting is just a server that provides the community with documents written by the community.

Wikipedia has its own laws, its citizens, readers and contributors, a kind of administration, the police (against spam, rest assured) judges, a little supportive... All this developed over three years in response to the problems faced by the encyclopedia.

This site is pretty gracious in the first place, with its free, open to contributions and many sometimes full, often instructive articles.

Evolution

A radical change to part of the wiki: all contributions will have to be checked by a confirmed publisher. This is the end of the policy of free input from the public, and a step in how Knol works, where articles are managed by authors, taking into account the choice of levels of openness to different contributions .

This mode of operation is the one adopted by the German version of the wiki a year earlier. It will be applied to articles devoted to people, first and probably then spread to others. For too often spammed items, there was already an optional method of protection: this way it will become automatic.

The study shows a clear decline in Wikipedia in terms of output and traffic, which is because ancient publishers, who often erase public input, use the site. The Wikimedia Foundation responded to these findings by opening a think tank. With this new policy, it, on the contrary, strengthens the trend!

Changes made by the public will still be possible, but it will not be presented to readers. For their public placement, it is necessary that the registered editor with a number of materials confirm these changes.

This, of course, should reduce spam, but not remove all the shortcomings of the articles. They will only be updated from afar, and articles that are not regularly tracked by publishers will not be updated at all.

Loss of interest

And if you look at the evolution of traffic as Google Trends gives it, the public shows the same discontent: consultations stalled from 2007 to 2009 and are gradually lost in subsequent years.

Why are we turning away from the wiki that kept growing until 2007? The Wikimedia Foundation refuses to admit that the site is losing speed. His explanation is that the site increasingly relies on experts rather than lambda contributors, and so their numbers are naturally getting smaller.
According to Michael Peele, who spoke out in an interview with The Times:

Wikipedia is absolutely not dying. She has a free license, which means that the content that was included is there forever.

And Jimmy Wales, one of the founders, also claims that the number of publishers is stable. Wikipedia-specific statistics show only 39,000 editors for the English version, down 1,500 from the previous year.

The Wall Street Journal article is based on research by Felipe Ortega of Libresoft (Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid).
According to him, Wikipedia lost 23 thousand out of 100 thousand English-speaking editors in March and April. According to Wikipedia statistics, there were 40,000. The difference comes from the fact that Ortega counts all publishers, while Wikimedia only counts those who have done at least 5 issues. Both count inactive publishers.
Not only the number of articles created per month is decreasing, but the number of monthly contributions (5.5 million) and various - registered or not - editors (750 thousand) is no longer growing.
This worries the Wikimedia Foundation, which has launched an operation to try to understand the phenomenon.
The stagnation of updating the site's content is consistent with a drop in its audience, as search engines give way to the latest articles.

Why publishers are leaving Wikipedia

Casual publishers, apparently, become the object of ostracism. 25% of their contributions were written off from 10% a few years before. So, according to researchers, ancient publishers show resistance towards others, which, as a rule, discourages them and contributes to a decrease in the quality of the site's content.

It's a shame to see that the text they added will be deleted or changed by other publishers. In the end, over time, nothing will remain of this. This is what the very principle of free editing by everyone wants.
Why struggle to write quality text that will disappear inexorably over time?

They also complain about the bureaucracy, which, probably, proceeds from the desire to have more expert (quite understandable, rest) editors. It's increasingly difficult to contribute because of the amount of rules to follow and well-established groups of publishers who cancel random publisher releases. This bureaucracy will increase even more soon, with strict control by groups of publishers over articles dedicated to people.

Dilemma

Wikipedia faces an insoluble dilemma: keep a fully open site to enjoy more activity and immediate updates, minus the ongoing fight against spam, and often dubious content, or restrict access to "experts." They are volunteers and are not required to work on the site, so updates and fixes can be permanently canceled.
And in the second case, the site grows when it is serious about content, but loses the support of Internet users who no longer contribute to it.

Links

Search Engine War

In December 2006, news spread that Wikipedia was going to launch its own search engine to compete with Google, because the leaders of the encyclopedia believed that the latter was too spammed by webmasters and, therefore, returned little significant results. The goal was to replace search engine robots with humans (controversial progress, especially when the number of pages increases exponentially).

Finding Wikia, the Human Engine

Advertised as Wikiasari (in Hawaiian, wiki means "fast " and asari "searches "), and then refuted, the Wikia search engine is launched on January 7, 2008 as a subdomain Wikia.com.
He shifted to the search engine the principles underlying Wikipedia and the Answer website from Yahoo: everyone is allowed to contribute, it is best to get out of the mass of individual actions, albeit with spam and vandalism...

The engine used Grube software, purchased from Looksmart, which launched a similar project before returning to the robotic engine. "Grub" was created in 2000.
He also used Nutch, a Lucene-based search engine, open source software that provides a crawler, HTML page parser, and other related services.

Search.wikia.org redirect to answers.wikia.org. The human search engine was only interested in spammers !

Wikisic

In January 2007, SearchMe launched the Wikiseek engine, designed to replace the internal search engine on Wikipedia with something more efficient! The new engine looks like Google's and uses robots.
Vikisik died in late 2008.

Conflicts

National Portrait Gallery

The NPG reproached her for filing a lawsuit on Wikipedia and posted about 3,000 images online, which she digitally conducted to market them.
These images are in the public domain, so Wikipedia considers itself entitled to post them online and use them for these articles.
The NPG has received support from another body, BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies), which makes this argument:

"Copying original works for commercial activities requires skill and expertise and financial value of production." 
(Trad.: Reproducing original work for commercial use requires know-how and experience, as well as financial costs for the manufacturer.) 

In fact, a state of war persisted for months between the NPG and Wikipedia, as employees of the former were systematically banned by maintenance teams of the latter because they deleted their company's digital images on Wikipedia. They are identified by their IP addresses, which belong to the NPG.

To what conclusion? Is it more legal to make your own oil with someone else's work (in this case, with pictures that are in the public domain) than to offer them to everyone for free ? Is it fairer to trade what belongs to everyone than to return everything that belongs to them?
In fact, the NPG is actually forced to volunteer as Wikipedia volunteers, which is quite comical.
She lost the trial.

Scientology

Wikipedia decided to ban all contributions from IP addresses associated with the Church of Scientology, believing that the contribution of sect members (according to France, this is a sect) was aimed at improving the image of Scientology without any objectivity.
Since Wikipedia's principle is to prohibit contributions aimed at self-promotion, which often amounts to barring interested persons from responding when they say anything on their account (in the field of biography or businesses), Scientology has no right to intervene when they talk about it.
Wikipedia believes that many people use sect computers without the ability to identify fake noses using the same computer with different accounts, which partly motivates the decision to ban all IP. Especially since these publishers seem concerned only in conversations about Scientology.
It remains only for the operatives to wait for Xenu's intervention... or use a proxy!

Ministry of Justice

The US Department of Justice was banned by Wikipedia after a person tried to change several articles using their IP address. Reference: The Register.

Barbara Bauer

Wikipedia has often been the target of libel accusations. In an article dedicated to him on Vicky, literary agent Barbara Bauer calls herself: "Doombest XX work agents" (the dumbest of the twenty worst agents).
We appreciate the encyclopedic quality of the article. Wikipedia lags behind the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech, and New Jersey law. It is supported by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), an association for free speech on the Internet.
She states that plaintiffs should bring a case against the authors of these statements, and not against the joint sites that publish them. But the anonymity of contributions makes such a pursuit quite difficult!
Barbara Bauer has allegedly already filed several complaints about Internet sites, and the Absolute Write website has been closed.

Finance

The cash desk is provided mainly through an annual fundraising campaign. The costs cover the costs of servers and, above all, the salaries of 300 people. Note that only volunteers make content.

Year Donations Expenses Accumulated profit
2003/2004 $80,129 $23,463 $56,666
2004/2005 $379,088 $177,670 $268,084
2005/2006 $1,508,039 $791,907 $1,004,216
2006/2007 $2,734,909 $2,077,843 $1,658,282
2007/2008 $5,032,981 $3,540,724 $5,178,168
2008/2009 $8,658,006 $5,617,236 $8,231,767
2009/2010 $17,979,312 $10,266,793 $14,542,731
2010/2011 $24,785,092 $17,889,794 $24,192,144
2011/2012 $38,479,665 $29,260,652 $34,929,058
2012/2013 $48,635,408 $35,704,796 $45,189,124
2013/2014 $52,465,287 $45,900,745 $53,475,021
2014/2015 $75,797,223 $52,596,782 $77,820,298
2015/2016 $81,862,724 $65,947,465 $91,782,795

Source.

2016 dollar spending breakdown by Wikipedia:

Category Appointment
Salaries
31,713,961
Rewards
11,354,612
Internet hosting
2,069,572
Internal operating expenses
1,065,523
Manage donations
3,604,682
Professional services expenses
6,033,172
Other management expenses
4,777,203
Travel and conferences
2,296,592
Impairment and amortization
2,720,835
Special event expenses.
311,313
Total expenses.
65,947,465

"Donation management" or "travel" costs everyone only those servers that in 2016 show 16 billion page views per month! (Source)

MediaWiki

The free encyclopedia uses a modified version of Mediawiki software originally made for it. This software is also used on personal sites.
It allows you to edit pages and manage publisher accounts, archives and editing histories.

Description

Each page has a discussion page that is similar in format to an article. In fact, the whole wiki is based on one page format. However, it allows you to import images to slightly confuse the rigidity of this text content. There is a recursive side to the design: the article has a discussion page and history, the discussion page has a discussion page and history...
Editing articles takes place in a peculiar dialect, similar to bbCode, with the insertion of sufficiently complex CSS tags to make something as unusual as adding an image. However, wysiwyg is quite widespread on CMS. Then there are the wysiwyg extensions in Mediawiki, but you won't find any hints of Wikipedia.
On the other hand, additional tools have been developed to combat vandalism, but they require constant activity on the part of publishers.

Restrictions

In fact, the software uses the hypertext of the classic network and does not use any technical innovations typical of Web 2.0.
When you compare the importance of the site's traffic with the Mediawiki software that controls it, and even taking into account the extensions that it brought to Wikipedia, you get the impression of a liner driven by a layout engine with a propeller 3 cm long. In addition, it takes 10,000 swimmers to push the device, fighting with palm trees, this is about the number of "administrators " of the site! 

Even if MediaWiki is considered a CMS, it remains an extremely primary tool, which is limited to posting raw texts written collectively online. This data is not processed, while modern CMS is able to create numerous pages that meet various requests from the database.
Thus, the project can develop in two directions: Content with more advanced wiki software (plus Web 2.0) and improved organization of contributions.

Wikidashboard и WikiScanner

To analyze the contribution of publishers to a Wikipedia article, including when most of the contribution is made by one publisher who can influence its content, researchers create a tool - Wikidashboard.
This tool provides the following guidance for this article:

Thus, he wants to make up for the shortcomings of the organization's system, which simply marks the page as an "object of violation ," which does not necessarily lead to the necessary fixes.
But when you know the anonymous publishers of Wikipedia, you can already guess how they will manipulate the results of the tool and superficial serial publications by article...

Wikidashboard is a work by Ed Chi of the Palo Alto Research Center.
This site reminds that Vales himself, the founder of Wikipedia, warns users that the content of the wiki should not be used by students, as well as for serious research.

WikiScanner is another open-source tool created in 2007 by Virgil Griffith that analyzes information about unregistered publishers such as IP and uses that data to confuse organizations editing articles about them for a more favorable image. Among the list of such "manipulators" - the FBI, the CIA, the Vatican, the Church of Scientology, the UN, Microsoft and Apple, many political parties!
Even if it violates the site's rules, the purpose of such a contribution may be to right wrongs, not to hide inconvenient truths.

Other tools and documents

Encyclopedia trademark

Useful pages about Wilkipedia. Note that external link beacons <a> have the rel = "nofollow " attribute, which always needs to be done in response to Wikipedia's nofollow policy in order to comply with the Network's ethics rules.

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