Ham House of Horrors? The nightmare future of Wikipedia's symbiotic content creation model

[Jake Is A Sellout]

Witness the potential nightmare future for Wikipedia, that is perhaps already here.

The main problem with Wikipedia's future survival, is a lack of editors. Too few sad bastards addicting to writing an encyclopedia for the sole joy of writing an encyclopedia. Spread too thin, and too lacking in social graces. An ever decreasing circle.

The answer? It was perhaps starting us in the face all along. The editors become......editors. A handful of (allegedly) skilled and Wikipedia knowledgeable people who merely oversee the work of the much more numerous........writers.....people who simply focus on writing about a specific topic, their expertise all coming only in that topic.

So, where do the writers come from? Obvious! The people with the most motivation to write about a particular topic.

Take Ham Hall for an example. Perhaps the only current example? Certainly a new one on me. As distinct from Wikipedan In Residence stuff and all that more formal shite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... oject_team

A group of National Trust volunteers are upgrading the Wikipedia article on the National Trust property. In their spare time, they're doing the heavy lifting, and a handful of editors are just chipping in with feedback on what they have written, what they can do next, and making occasional edits of their own.

The goal is to get the article to Featured Article status. That's a good place to be for writers with a real vested interest in the topic, because that allows you to reject any edits you don't like, for lack of consensus, far easier than it typically might be.

People might look at that and think of the obvious problem. But this is Sucks! If you want rudimentary analysis, go to Wikipediocracy.

What I first thought of here, was the obvious symbiotic relationship this sets up.

If you know these addicts as I do, then the writers have just as much of a more selfish and self interested motivation to reach their goal, as the editors do to help them achieve it. Even though in theory, the editors have no obvious motive to do anything other than a good job as an impartial Wikipedian committed to the cause.

But the editors here cannot be as objective and perhaps even harsh as they might wish to in their desire to prevent the more obvious issues. Because the writers here, are a finite pool of resource, and they all know each other, having their own external preexisting relationship.

Piss the writers off, and the editors might be looking at a nightmare future.

As a simple matter of fact, a Wikipedia that can't attract and retain these sort of writers, will be a very dull place for the Editors. They'd be back to the rather depressing experience of looking around, watching much of what they and their friends built, many long departed, crumble into ruins. Hard to muster the effort to go back to the hard graft of a actually researching and writing an article like Ham Hall themselves, and marking each others work, when it seems to be even more of a case of polishing a single grain of sand in a giant sandpit of giant turds than it already is.

I don't foresee these editors wanting to really piss them off for any reason, least of all high minded aspirations to be the noble guardians of Wikipedia's principles. After all, if, as seems to be the case here, the writers really are blowing smoke up their asses as if they genuinely think they have any expertise in the field of editing an encyclopedia (becoming familiar with Wikipedia is not expertise). And rather obviously, given their own motivations, that is probably not a case of them just being nice to be nice. If your actual real world job is pizza delivery driver, you're gonna quite like that.

And how long before the greedy Foundation starts to realise the advantages of this new, symbiotic relationship?

If the Foundation can charge Amazon for a service that is legally free, can they also not persuade the National Trust that it is in their interests to start donating to Wikipedia? Guidebooks don't come cheap. All that printing and researching. Jesus. What a ballache.

I for one, salute our new symbiotic overlords.

What can possibly go wrong?

[sashi]

ahem... with a thread title like that you need fictional mansions to show the ham house team how to make their universe shiny, with WD-40 properties like with (which has evolved from "award shared with --> together with --> with --> roommate" §)

A featured article these days should have a network of WD items as good as Wang Zhaoxuan House, no?

Cf. Jin Ping Mei

[ericbarbour]

People might look at that and think of the obvious problem. But this is Sucks! If you want rudimentary analysis, go to Wikipediocracy.

bad idea, you are unlikely to get much "analysis" of a "coherent nature" from them.

The Ham House article right now is actually pretty good, 92k bytes and reasonable detail. This is what Wikipedia SHOULD have, instead of 250kbyte rants about comic-book characters and video games. I'd give it an FA badge--why not.

A featured article these days should have a network of WD items as good as Wang Zhaoxuan House, no?

Aagh, please. Making people look at Wikidata pages could violate the Geneva Convention. They were not meant to be read by human beings anyway.

[Jake Is A Sellout]

People might look at that and think of the obvious problem. But this is Sucks! If you want rudimentary analysis, go to Wikipediocracy.

bad idea, you are unlikely to get much "analysis" of a "coherent nature" from them.

.......

I'd give it an FA badge--why not.

Well, the rudimentary answer would be, before you give this article an FA star, how do you know this article hasn't been tainted with the dead hand of its writer's conflict of interest?

I thought the level of excess detail was one of the more obvious issues that would prevent it being marked as Wikipedia's best work. Wikipedia is not meant to be a guide book.

On that score alone, namely excess detail and guidebookery, I randomly picked this one oddly titled section, and found numerous issues.....

The Private Closet[edit]

This was the Duchess's most private and intimate room where she would read, write and entertain her closest family and friends.[76] The elaborate oil on plaster ceilings in both of the Duchess's closets are by Antonio Verrio. They are among his earliest commissions in England, and his earliest surviving work following his arrival from France in 1672. As his reputation grew he was commissioned by royal and aristocratic clients for larger projects including for King Charles II at Windsor Castle, interiors for the Earl of Exeter at Burghley House and for William III at Hampton Court. The ceiling painting of The Penitent Magdalene Surrounded by Putti Holding Emblems of Time, Death and Eternity was completed around 1675.

The first two sentences read like a literal guidebook. Half of the next sentence and all of the fourth could and should be elsewhere, perhaps in the biography of Verrio. And one of the main problems with this model of writing, when done by amateurs at least, is that I really can't trust that there is any real reason to be mentioning the ceiling painting in an encyclopedia, as opposed to a guidebook. Is it a work of note? Noted by people not micro focused on this house? We can't know. The reference title, Ham House: 400 Years of Collecting and Patronage, doesn't really assuage concerns this is perhaps a case of excess detail. It is evidently not so noteworthy it merits its own Wikipedia article, and it's not necessarily the case here that the writers have not redkinked it because they already know it wouldn't be worth writing an article on it.

A professional encyclopedist just wouldn't make these sort of mistakes. Their editor wouldn't have to deal with such issues when this draft crossed their desk. And this was only one half of one small section.

The tragedy is, this model does have the potential to be better than the original, in that it could see Wikipedia be more comprehensive and more detailed (I wouldn't bet against the idea Original Wikipedia even after twenty years perhaps still doesn't even have an article for every single National Trust property). But it seems obvious that would come at a cost in terms of the quality of the articles. They're going to be poorer, and probably precisely because of issues arising from conflict of interests and fanboyism.

On the flop side, as I suggested, these problems might not necessarily be seen as problems by the Foundation, but opportunities to make money. And so if the Foundation doesn't have a problem, and the writers don't have a problem, that leaves only the handful of Wikipedia editors with a capital E, to prevent these issues from degrading Wikipedia's claim to be an encyclopedia. One where even if the vast majority of articles are pure shite, the limited amount with that gold star, can be, sort of, seen as somewhat comparable to what you might find in a professionally edited reference work. The real question therefore, the sort of analysis that goes far beyond any insight to be found on Wikipediocracy, is would they?

I say no. I say the distoritng effect of the symbiosis set up here, would be too strong.

This is all somewhat academic anyway, if Wikipediocracy are looking for a justifiable reason not to make their brains hurt by considering it, because if people paid even the slightest attention to the quality of Wikipedia, if they even gave a shit that right now only 0.9% of their articles are considered good enough even by their own internal metrics, and that figure is going BACKWARDS, then I wouldn't even be here. Because Wikipedia would be dead already. Or at least be called something else.