jarfil , 8 months ago

I know about those, and I have to partially disagree.

The number of edits limits were introduced to filter out people who had no clue, or wish to have a clue, about how Wikipedia worked. I remember having to spend some time on the latest edits page looking for vandalism, or searching for misspellings, or helping people with the formatting of their articles, to get to a minimum number of edits needed for some vote. I learned a lot during that time, and I think it was a reasonable way of achieving it.

Where it started getting out of hand, is when over time the minimum number of edits got increased, and increased again, and again… getting into silly amounts more fit for a bot than for an actual human.

I haven’t looked at it for several years, probably lost my voting rights long ago.

Why Emily St John Mandel asked for help getting divorced on Wikipedia

This isn’t absurd, it’s one of the safety mechanisms to keep a minimum of quality to the information included in the Wikipedia: to be a tertiary source.

Anyone can be a primary source; they might be the ones with the most knowledge… or some rando making stuff up. Wikipedia doesn’t have a panel of experts capable of judging this, or even people in charge of verifying the identity of anyone, so instead it simply rejects all primary sources as a rule.

Because of that, Wikipedia is based on secondary sources and their reputation, on people deciding to analyze, and verify more or less, what someone else is saying.

It isn’t absurd, it’s the only way to run a project where everyone can edit everything, including people totally clueless of the subject at hand… who can nonetheless report on the analyses done by secondary sources, help with the formatting, spell checking, or double check the validity of sources added by others.

I am pretty sure I am more knowledgeable on said subjects than those “editors”.

That’s the thing: you may be pretty sure, but Wikipedia has no way of knowing whether that’s true, and doesn’t even try to.

If you are more knowledgeable, you’re free to become a primary source and publish your stuff, whether through academic means or simply on a website.

If you’d rather apply your knowledge to analyzing the articles of others, you can become a secondary source just as easily, start a WordPress or Medium blog and go ahead… but don’t forget to cite your primary sources.

Wikipedia is the entry point for people totally clueless about a topic, aimed not towards presenting knowledge, although it does some of that, but mainly towards presenting where to learn more.

It isn’t a perfect system, ideally you’d hire a panel of experts and have them curate all content… but that comes with a whole set of problems, that would never have let Wikipedia reach the size it has as fast as it has.

Keep in mind the original Encyclopédistes took 19 years to publish a single edition with little over 70,000 articles, while the Wikipedia has grown to 6.7 million articles in just 22 years (Size of Wikipedia as of Nov 2023)… plus some more in a bunch of different languages.