this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Wikis were invented as a way, and are a good solution when the goal is, to crowdsource objective facts about the world.
The great thing about a wiki is that as long as one person once added any given fact, it is in the wiki.
On all contentious issues, by definition there are not too few people wanting to write about them, but instead there are too many, so this is why wikis are just not a suitable mechanism for writing about anything contentious: they're a solution to a nonexistent problem and there is no rational reason why truth about any given issue should be determined by "who has managed to edit the page last".
Wikipedia addresses that last issue with "semi protection". It's not a complete absence of rules - large decisions are made by consensus and the whole system is maintained by admins and bureaucrats with bots.
For example there's an article on the flat earth theory, and we're not going to even pretend like there's any merit to that idea anymore. One can only edit it if they're an established, registered user. And if one such user decides to troll, then it'll be reverted nearly instantly, and that user will waste a lot more time establishing a new account than it takes to deal with them.
I'm familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that, yeah. I am also familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that there are topic areas (such as Israel/Palestine and the Holocaust in Poland on the English-language version) where the shortcomings of the wiki system are completely evident. Once you have to restrict editing to users with more than 500 edits and make special rules how to handle sourcing, it's clear that the wiki just isn't a suitable mechanism: if there are so many people wanting to write about a topic that you have to do that, then why not abandon the wiki concept altogether?
The greatest success story of the wiki principle isn't Wikipedia, nor any other Wikimedia project. The greatest success story of the wiki principle is OpenStreetMap, which does limit itself to objective facts and is used not just by people, but also organizations. I work as a software developer and I've encountered usages of OpenStreetMap data many times, but of anything on Wikimedia projects? Wikipedia is great for teenagers to get an overview of the world, but everyone who actually needs the information in it has better sources for it anyway.
Because it's quick? At that point it's not just the last thing anyone wrote - it's a collaborative effort from many experienced volunteers. Wikipedia doesn't have to be either a purely "no rules" wiki or a purely "all rules" paper encyclopedia.
Where would you suggest as a better source for general information, when one would otherwise start with Wikipedia?
I am saying that if there are so many people wanting to write (and influence public opinion) about a topic that you have to go into endless arguments what the article should say, then there is no reason why it has to be "quick" that the article gets published with whatever new ideas anyone has had.
As it is now, Wikipedia is what we have and I am not saying you shouldn't read it.
The downside - and I'm in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that's in the wiki forever too.
And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.
One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader's reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.
Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?