My plan to steal Wikipedia
I posted this a few months ago to my Long Term World Improvement mailing list. (The group was on Facebook at the time, but I’ve since moved it to email.)
——————————— I want to steal Wikipedia, but sadly don’t have time to do it myself. The reason is that Wikipedia is a big source of long-term power, especially compared to its size: what you write in Wikipedia is, most of the time, “the truth”. That was confirmed for me when, last month, I did some research to add new sources to an article I wrote. I found a government website that, pretty obviously, had copied its “facts” from the article. I happily turned around, and used the website as a source for the “facts”, since it’s considered a “reliable source”. (I was nice enough to write facts that were probably true.)
The basic plan is simple: Wikipedia is free-content, so anyone can fork it and set up their own version. The steps would look roughly like: Obtain modest amount of funding Download Wikipedia dumps , set up new version of MediaWiki Port MediaWiki to a more modernized web design Modernize and rationalize Wikipedia policies Swap out the logos, etc., and launch the site Track down the tens of thousands of WP editors who’ve quit in frustration, and invite them over The obvious difficulty is that Wikipedia has an incumbent advantage, as everyone already uses it. However, there are a number of mitigating factors: 1) Editing Wikipedia has a very high frustration level, due to bad policies and a near-total lack of dispute resolution. AFAICT, there are more disappointed ex-editors who’ve quit in despair than current editors. (See “The Decline of Wikipedia” in MIT Technology Review, plus educated guesses about annual turnover.) The frustration could be mostly fixed by reasonable policy reforms. Right now, banning someone who isn’t a clear vandal takes months, and many, many rounds of argument. There’s no way at all to resolve disputes about article content, so angry mobs make book-length flamewars about whether individual words should be capitalized . In response, people create more and more “policies”, which aim to settle disputes and rein in bad behavior. The policies now total hundreds of thousands of words, making them impossible for newbies to read, but can’t really be enforced any more than the previous policies. The good news is that means there’s a large base of people who want to edit Wikipedia, can’t do so without yelling at their monitor, and might welcome a competitor.
Gwern , who some people here know, is one famous example.
2) The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia, is infamously inefficient.
Their expenses increased by a factor of ~250 in the ten years between 2005 and 2015.
User traffic increased much more slowly than this, and was offset by the fall in bandwidth costs.
The site’s software has improved marginally, and the number of active users has actually gone down. The Wikimedia Foundation intentionally takes no role in improving site content or policing abusive editors. This imbalance equals opportunity.
3) To my knowledge, nobody has really tried it before. Unlike (say) airlines, there is no long and bloody track record of bankrupt Wikipedia replacements. A very few serious attempts have been made, most notably Conservapedia, Citizendium and Scholarpedia, but all were based on being even more restrictive than Wikipedia rather than less restrictive. Arguably the closest thing is TvTropes, and it’s been fairly successful despite an intentionally narrow focus.
Comment by John Maxwell: “I’m extremely supportive of this idea. I remember reading somewhere that in the early days of Wikipedia, Wikipedia had various competitors, but all the competitors focused on developing really good software and getting the policies right whereas Wikipedia focused on growing fast. Not sure if that’s true or useful.
When considering projects like this, I think you always want to compare the option of starting a new project to the option of trying to improve the existing project from the inside. For example (brainstorming), if you can find a way to contact all of the disgruntled ex-editors and give them a compelling sales pitch for how you’ll fix things, you can recruit them to vote you onto Wikipedia’s arbitration committee. Or you could try to get a job working for the Wikimedia Foundation. Getting a job at the Wikimedia Foundation lets you understand more about Wikipedia’s problems from the inside, and there’s a chance you can find a way to turn the entire ship around (e.g. by writing clever new features as a software engineer or getting yourself promoted to the point where you can dictate policy).
Broadly speaking I think it’s always good to understand the entire system/incentive structure, find the point of highest leverage (often some hidden thing, since the visible things are already being fought over?), then figure out how to apply force to it. Applied to this project, trying to clone Wikipedia directly seems like an uphill slog due to Wikipedia’s extremely entrenched search engine ranking. Search engine optimization is a ‘red ocean’ in this sense. Finding a way to contact all the ex-Wikipedia editors and convince them to form a union seems more like a ‘blue ocean’. (I’m optimistic about efforts to introduce new voting systems, like approval voting, in order to fix politics based on similar reasoning.)”
Comment by Davis Tower Kingsley: “I quite like this idea. Wikimedia is widely hated by experienced people, and Wikipedia’s politics are pretty bad. Beating Wikipedia on content will be easy — the question becomes whether Wikipedia can be beaten on cultural buy-in.
But while that seems hard, similarly entrenched things have fallen before, and broadly speaking most of the Wikipedia replacements aren’t even trying at the large scale. Further, improving Wikipedia would be an obvious big win.
(If anyone does take this up, I know an ex-Wikimedia guy who might have some good info or even be willing to help out.)”
Comment by Joshua Slocum: “Do you have good reason to believe that you (or someone else) could make a real world system that works better? Yes there is agreement that existing solution is not good, but it also sounds like a pretty hard problem to handle well. (I ask this question as a neophyte to internal Wikipedia policies. If there’s some reason why Wikipedia is obviously improbable, I probably haven’t heard of it).”
My reply to Joshua: “Good question. The short answer is that nobody’s ever sat down and decided Wikipedia’s policies. They weren’t designed by any leader or committee or democratic vote. All changes are made by ‘consensus’, and no one is even quite sure what that means. This seems likely to be a particularly bad process, where the only people who get a voice are those with hundreds of hours to burn on largely pointless, unpleasant flamewars.”