User:Kim Bruning/Lost functionalities

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Contrary to what you might expect, Wikipedia has lost several functions and abilities over time. Typically these functionalities have been lost as collateral damage, when other concepts (combat vandalism, kooks, etc) were introduced.


Here's a list.


This is a wiki, please contribute to this list if you know anything I've missed.


Contents

[edit] Ability to establish priority

It was hoped that scientists would sometimes drop by wikipedia, and start a stub or short article on something they had researched, prior to it being accepted in a peer reviewed journal. This would allowed a scientist to prove that they discovered something first.

We originally imagined that ability for scientists to establish priority would make wikipedia the most current information source in history ;-)

Didn't happen as much as we hoped at first, current over-strict interpretation of No Original Research kills this dead.

[edit] Web phenomena / non mainstream phenomena

Notability criteria sometimes tangle with web phenomena. The canonical example is webcomics, where many of the most notable (as stated by recognised webcomic experts) webcomic articles on wikipedia were deleted.

Similar problems can happen with any kind of phenomenon that is not reported in mainstream news (but may be reported on the web)

Workgroups can counterbalance deletion these days, to some extent, but coherent reporting of phenomena can still be a problem.

[edit] Usenet

Usenet is one of the first global one-to-many communications systems that has been in use for over a quarter of a century, has had a strong political and technological impact on society, and has had millions of users worldwide over time.

Verifiability criteria (mostly rightly perhaps) state that usenet is probably not a great source for reliable information. However, People seriously argued removing all content about usenet, because information about usenet can typically only be found on ...usenet. Oops.

[edit] Using wikipedia as an (anonymous) research tool

Here are my original procedure for using wikipedia:

To Research :topic Foo.

  1. Search wikipedia for "Foo"
    sometimes you need to use google these days
  2. If "Foo" not found, create a new page, called "Foo", else continue
    No longer permitted for new users.
  3. google around, read books, etc, find links on wikipedia and toss the mess on foo
    Unreadable mess, not even going to TRY to find notability, Delete.
  4. Refactor until it's readable.
    Oh wait, keep, KEEP! (too late)
  5. Done.

Big problems are inability for new users to create a new page, and hair-trigger deletion that will remove your article in 5 minutes into your week of work ;-)

[edit] New users eliminate redlinks

A very obvious way to attract useful new users to wikipedia was to tempt them to fill in all the red links. This is now banned. (see also #Submitting new articles)

[edit] Submitting new articles

To write: New article on Foo

  1. Create a new page "Foo"
    Not permitted for new users
  2. Do a braindump from memory
    No notability established, not wikified, messy, stub, no references/unverifiable DELETE
  3. Edit into something readable
    No notability established, not wikified, stub, unverifiable DELETE
  4. Wikify and find internal links
    No notability establised, stub, unverifiable, DELETE
  5. google, library search for more information, and add it stepwise
    Still no notability established, less stubby, somewhat verifiable, still DELETE
  6. continue above until you've hit all the points
    Notable, has content, still has unverifiable sections... KEEP and IMPROVE

The idea of a wiki is that you keep and improve articles over time. However, these days people on wikipedia expect good articles to spring into being fully formed... while at the same time banning anon users (our main contributors) from making new articles.

Asking people to write articles or make major changes in their userspace is not the answer, because that negates all the advantages of having a wiki in the first place.

[edit] Improving an article by dumping an information block in

If an article lacks some kind of information, you could originally dump in whatever information you had, and people would wikify it.

These days, if you don't format your information, you quickly get RVVed (ReVert Vandalism). Vandalpatrol is on a hairtrigger.

[edit] Improving an article from memory or logic

In fields like mathematics, computing, engineering, sciences, mechanical work etc, any practitioner in the field will have roughly the same body of knowlege and there will be some sort of consensus between experts, written or unwritten.

These people have a tendency to add unreferenced information to wikipedia such as:

  • Apples fall from trees
    • This is common knowledge for most of humanity. You'll find that no-one actually writes these things down, so finding a reference is very hard. Placed here for comparison with the examples from specialist fields. Note how "Apples fall from trees" was once a redlink.
  • DOS 'dir' and unix 'ls' are roughly equivalent
    • everyone who has ever used both dos and unix knows this, however, the 'dir' fact can only be found in the dos manual, and the 'ls' fact can only be found in official unix manuals. There's no such thing as a "dosunix" manual, so it will be very tricky to find a verifiable source for this. And yet it is a somewhat useful thing to know if you want to have any clue as to what you're doing ;-)
  • Adrenaline is a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands, which are located just above and behind the kidneys (adrenal~="next to kidneys")
    • Actually this is look-uppable, but most biologists probably won't bother to reference this, as they consider it basic knowlege (oops). I have some doubt that this can be found on PubMed at all, because any paper describing this would predate MEDLINE by over a century.

Experts typically don't bother referencing things they believe are common knowlege because "everyone knows that!". It's probably a bad idea to actually delete common knowlege information, otoh finding refs might be tricky.


[edit] Rebuttal

So someone who doubts it will place a {{fact}} tag, and anyone who cares can source it in a few minutes.

[edit] References

  1. ^ "All apples fall from tree early" New Mexico State University, November 2000, retrieved February 1, 2007
  2. ^ "Apple Maggot Management in Home Gardens", Jeffrey Hahn and Mark Ascerno, University of Minnesota, 2005, retrieved February 1, 2007
  3. ^ "DOS to UNIX Translation", University of Edinburgh, retrieved February 1, 2007
  4. ^ "YoLinux.com: UNIX For DOS Users", retrieved February 1, 2007
  5. ^ "Adrenal Glands", Cleveland Clinic, retrieved February 1, 2007
  6. ^ "Your Adrenal Glands", Endocrine Web, 2002, retrieved February 1, 2007
  7. ^ "Definition of renal", Merriam-Webster, retrieved February 1, 2007
  8. ^ adrenal. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved February 01, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: [1]

2 references for each one, mostly from Wikipedia:Reliable sources, in a few minutes, from a search on Google. The last one even had a ready-made citation to copy and paste. It ain't rocket science, dude. And, frankly, so-called experts who believe that information about the adrenal glands, derivations from French or Latin, or even Unix and DOS, are "common knowledge" should be ... politely corrected. AnonEMouse (squeak) 21:02, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pages accidentally created in wrong namespace just vanish

Which just happened to me when creating this page. Vandalism patrol is so fast that it becomes impossible to correct certain classes of mistakes. :-P

[edit] Loss of SQL access for admins

Admins used to be able to do read SQL queries on MediaWiki's underlying MySQL database. No longer possible.

[edit] Images by permission

Asking someone for permission to use an image on Wikipedia, back when we could still use such images, generally got a pleased and friendly response. Asking someone to release an image as public domain (which sounds awfully, well, public), or GFDL (which they've probably never heard of) gets a very different response.

[edit] The ability to influence search engine rankings

Wikipedia currently ranks well on many search engines. It used to be that Wikipedia's high ranking would favourably influence the ranking of websites that were linked from Wikipedia; however, due to increasing problems with spam, all external links are now marked 'nofollow', so this information is lost to the search engines that would otherwise benefit from it.

[edit] Incremental paragraph writing

Once upon a time, someone would insert a partial paragraph of text that was missing key bits of information, and this would be gradually expanded by the editor and/or other editors. This avoided the necessity of saving the whole thing up into one big edit, and meant lots of small changes could be made instead. This worked well, because it meant people who were not expert writers, but did know about the subject, could contribute to Wikipedia productively.

This cannot happen these days, because any paragraph of this nature will be reverted nearly immediately.

[edit] True informal dispute resolution

It used to be possible for any small-scale Wikipedia issue - article content disputes, user conduct issues, policy arguments, etc. - to be sorted out simply by some level-headed user going down to the area of dispute, and cooling it down. Blocks were considered a "last resort", and discussion was used before they were put into effect.

Now, there is some hideously-complex, formally-structured, "Request for <mediation|arbitration|undeletion|administrator intervention|personal ban set by Jimbo|nuclear warfare>" process that absolutely must be followed, on pain of death. Each of these have their own very specific instructions on how they must be used, which are invariably totally different from all the others, and usually fail at what they are meant to do anyway.

Either that, or some administrator just comes along, and bans whoever they like, regardless of what started the problem in the first place. The people involved then waste huge amounts of time fighting out an arbitration case over who blocked whom, and whether it was valid or not under WP:XYZ.

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