Technology

Looks like they nearly shut the door on new admins circa 2008 and the existing group is slowly attriting.

Wikipedia is an RPG and it’s too hard for new players.

Everyone's pointing out that this is specifically about admins (not editors) and the general difficulty of wikipedia editing specifically due to its rules and reversions, but I really feel compelled to offer a counterpoint: this applies to wiki editing in general.

I've been editing mediawiki-based game sites since the mid 2000s - before Wikia became Fandom, before it was evil, before it started gobbling up smaller wikis with tempting financial offers. I took a decade+ off and only recently found myself drawn back into the hobby in the last couple of years when I found a game I loved that had a burgeoning wiki that seemed to need help.

I was handed admin privileges within a month because an extension I wanted to use (ReplaceText) was locked behind admin. Two years later, I'm still there because I hold 85-90% of the edits on it. And I. Just. Can't. Get. Help. Not even from the site owner that handed me admin. I've gotten interest from I think seven whole people in all that time, and all but two dropped off within a week or two; the remaining two have a page or two they each maintain but leave the rest of the site to me. And this is a live service game, so it's a neverending stream of event pages and new content that I, and only I, keep going. (Worse: the live service content follows predictable formats, so most of my new pages start by copying another page. This would be so easy for anyone to learn.)

No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.

This seems somewhat important. Things, even major institutions in the internet, can be very generational. Never thought about that in terms of Wikipedia before.

Many people pointed this out in the link but yeah, it's much harder to make edits / entries in wikipedia nowadays.

The rules are more strict and you have to respect an increasing number of rules, etc.

I remember when Wikipedia started to get some steam, it was basically a text editor with very basic hyperlink-style formatting.

Minor changes / typos are still easy to do, but frankly I wouldn't know how to start anymore if I wanted to create a new entry.

I've lost all my respect for the official wikipedia when they deleted a page that I frequented regular. It was an overview about the generational differences between products from one large manufacturer. iirc it was dismissed as an ad or something.

The infuriating part was that this page existed for 10+ years, had 200 different authors, and 100k+ monthly views. But yeah, mods went power tripping with no regard to the dozens of hours unpaid volunteers put in. Fuck this

Just a showerthought:

Maybe that's part of a much bigger generational divide. Maybe Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the old pre-commercialization internet. "From the people for the people", but actually from people whose hobby it is to spend time in front of a computer screen.

BBS systems, usenet, forums, early websites, slashdot, open source, Wikipedia, early reddit, ...

in contrast to: ConpuServe, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, Tiktok

Editing early Wikipedia waa easy, fun, and meant something. You freed information from behind a paywall. Free as in speech.

Now, everything is free as in beer ("some restrictions apply") and editing a wiki is no longer easy when you grew up swiping an iphone, not hacking a unix terminal. This, plus admin culture.

I think this happens to all professions.

I edited articles as a teenager in the early 00s when most people still used brittanica and Encarta. The quality was probably really bad, but the articles didn't yet exist or only had a stump.

But the articles now have a much higher quality, with good sources and a very consistent style. If an article doesn't exist today, it was purposefully removed because it did not meet the criteria to have a wiki page.

Obviously, such a thing becomes more of a dedicated hobby and not something a few amateurs do on a whim.

Similar things happened to YouTube videos, or historically, to things like singing, story telling, quilting, etc.

As something becomes more popular, the pool of participants grows and the selection becomes more difficult.

If I understand this correctly, Wikipedia might be in trouble once the old guard retires because new ones aren't coming?

I gave up editing as a hobby when others got really pissy with me when I said that just having a newspaper mention a restaurant did not make the restaurant notable.