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Comment by pygy_

1 day ago

> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated

[citation needed]

Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.

The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.

StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.

SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.

7 comments

pygy_

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Viliam1234  17 hours ago

> The article creation [...] growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite.

Not just because of that, but they also made the process of creating new articles very hostile.

Decades ago, when Wikipedia started, it was possible to create a short article, and as long as no one objected against it, it stayed there, and people could later expand it. That's what "wiki" was supposed to mean.

Today, you need to create an article in a separate "Draft" namespace, then a random Wikipedia editor will judge it, and if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references), it cannot be published. And if you don't fix it by a certain date, it gets automatically deleted. (Rather than leaving it there for someone else to hopefully improve.)

I tried to make an article for an author whose books my kids liked. His books were translated to many languages, he won a few awards, and now some company has bought movie rights for the books. Alas, I have failed to establish notability sufficiently in my short article, so it was rejected. The editor didn't even have to argue that the author is not notable (which would be silly, a google search clearly shows otherwise), only that my article failed to establish it. So the official policy now kinda says that it is better to have no article rather than an imperfect one.

Well, I am not getting paid for producing perfect articles for Wikipedia, which means there is no way for me to contribute anymore. Too bad, I have created a few articles long ago.

  • pwdisswordfishq  8 minutes ago

    > if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references)

    Having references for claims is not "perfect"; it's basics. Which is especially becoming more relevant in the age of ever more rampant misinformation.

    Take a look at the list of hoaxes below and wonder what would you have done to prevent them. With Wikipedia being open to editing by anybody, I don't think you could come up with anything better than the system currently in place.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...

  • pygy_  3 hours ago

    I've had my share of battles on WP to preserve content that was dismissed as fringe by people who didn't understand what they were looking at (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_deletion/2...).

    The author you mentioned may not have met the inclusion criteria at the time, or maybe you had the misfortune to fall on a zealous admin who gets dopamine kicks from that kind of behavior. That being said, if a cursory Google search was enough to establish notability, it shouldn't have taken much time and effort to add links to reliable sources and save the article.

    WP is very sensitive regarding inclusion criteria for biographies of living persons, because of the flood of vanity submission they have to filter out. The notability criteria are not perfect, but the provide a good enough balance to limit the spam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#...).

    In my experience, toxic behavior isn't as rewarded as it was on SO, and there are venues to discuss issues.

  • bombcar  16 hours ago

    The old Wikipedia had more information on obscure Pokemon than major politicians, and you could add PowerThirst as an energy drink and not have it reverted for weeks.

    There was something good and glorious about that, but that era is gone. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are done, finished, cooked - what comes next?

    • wikiiiisksklhll  12 hours ago

      Quora had a lot more arrogant mods, but a much shorter peak when it was useful. Now it’s not even worth for AI models to train on its content, it’s even worse than expert-sex-change, the site that was so bad in incentivized SO’s creation.

      I still remember when quora was launched and people claimed it was more welcoming for open-ended questions, when it was obvious from day one it was the opposite, extremely hostile to any newcomers. It actually more appeared to be mostly a community of assholes that was expelled from SO.