Nolmagia

Wikipedia and Open Access: One person's Opinion

First of all I think it's mostly a moot question because the bottom line is that there is a very well entrenched philosophy at Wikipedia such that if people proposed using ads for example it would just never fly. There are too many people who are too invested in completely open access. As you might guess I'm not as committed to it as I think most Wikipedia editors would be. But even I'm still mostly committed to it. It's just that I'm not quite as rigid about it as I think most editors would be. Take ads for example. I would personally be OK with ads because I just block them anyway and I think they could bring in a ton of revenue to the Wikipedia foundation with minimal effect on those of us smart enough to load adblock software. In fact if it were up to me I would allow adds and donate some of that money back to Adblock and also use some of it to educate all Wikipedians about how to use it. To me that would be a win=win but I know such an idea would never fly here. Also, adblock isn't fool proof, it doesn't work on mobile devices for example so that would be a drawback.

I also think that the general question of "open access" is interesting for other reasons. Here too I'm more on what I guess is the conservative side of the argument. For example, as a tea house host I see a LOT of time wasted dealing with questions that IMO could be mostly ameliorated if we changed some of the policies here. For example, I would say you can't even begin to try creating a new article until you have X number of non-reverted, non-trivial edits under your belt. Too many people come to Wikipedia with the idea of (and are IMO wrongly encouraged by Wikipedia to think this way) of creating "their page" or "their article". We should encourage people from the beginning to think collaboratively and to mandate that until they have demonstrated some basic competence in how to edit existing pages they shouldn't even attempt to create new articles. We have so many articles as it is now that almost certainly every major topic has an article already. The vast majority of the new pages are attempts at vanity pages, or someone writing a page for their high school, etc. Also, redundancy is a major issue. There are so many articles that duplicate each other.

That's another reason I would change things here: it takes a lot longer to fix something than to create more crap or to break something. Try looking at the process for merging two articles. (The way you fix the error of having two articles for the same topic). It takes a lot of work. For a while I spent some serious effort trying to merge articles but I soon got discouraged. It just takes one person to object because you deleted some piece of crap that they wrote and to derail merging the articles. I've unfortunately had that experience. There are other examples like this (e.g., the policy about red links) where the original philosophy that Wikipedia had when the Internet was new are still in effect but IMO no longer make sense. When the Internet was new just about anyone who had access to it was more computer literate than the average population. That is no longer the case yet we use the same policies for a huge site with millions of users that we used for a brand new site just getting off the ground.

One thing that has occurred to me though is that it is possible to take open source software and to wrap it in various ways and make a profit from it. You can see examples of this in the various consulting companies and software repackaging companies like Red Hat that have formed around Linux. I think doing something like that around Wikipedia is an interesting idea. What the company would be I'm not sure. I think most likely if it were to make sense it would be something around the Semantic Web; the latest brain child of Tim Berners-Lee Wikipedia has been doing an excellent job of packaging the data in the encyclopedia so that it's available for Semantic web programs to query and use. One of the main books on SPARQL (a key technology for the Semantic Web) uses Wikipedia info Boxes as one of the examples all through the book. It's actually kind of amazing how much can already be done with this technology even though it doesn't get a lot of press. ...I'm rambling... see why it's dangerous to ask me for my opinion? Anwyway hope that was of some interest. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 20:04, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

Your experience with Wikipedia so far

Welcome to Wikipedia! I am conducting a quick survey about newcomer support and I would like to hear about your experience so far. Your response will go a long way to help us build a better experience for newcomers like yourself. The survey will take you around 10 minutes to complete.

To learn more about the study, visit this link: https://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Co-op

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Thanks!

Gabrielm199 (talk) 16:14, 16 January 2015 (UTC)