Thirteen years later, why are most administrators still from 2005?

A symptom of the web's own growth in the mainstream and Wikipedia become much more serious as a resource than its early days, that it requires serious attention and effort, not casual hobby moderation. The generation that was really into it in those early days is/was most likely representative of the early Internet generation who believed strongly in the open information movement, and had years of experience in moderated/moderating communities. Now? multiple generations of people who came up more 'digitally native' but only really consume, consume, consume, and take for granted the effort that many services require unseen to appear 'free'. Who's gonna join the small dedicated but exceedingly fussy team of editors with the amount of process and tape involved with keeping up wikipedia pages?

FTA<p>&gt; The problem 10 years ago was that the electorate was far too picky and rejected candidates who should have been promoted. Today, every potential candidate knows this and self-selects themselves out of standing. There aren&#x27;t enough outliers who do stand to make much statistical conclusion from there.<p>Yeah. Everybody got wise to the cliques and power struggles of WP and are put off trying to contribute to it as either an editor (changes instantly reverted) and therefore stops them in their tracks in eventually growing to be an admin.<p>Same deal as StackOverflow. Petty tiny power users wield that power like a maniac because that&#x27;s the way they get their jollies, make the experience a chore for the normies, so no newcomers join, and on the site goes, in a wierd reversal of the eternal september effect.<p>In other cases in real life before the web, i might argue that motorcycles and buicks and HAM radio dealt with this, they got locked into a local culture maxima and have been trapped there ever since, growing stale &#x2F; ever less appealing to newcomers.

I have found that wikipedia articles have gotten more biased over time. Early on in my usage of wikipedia, it was clear there were substantial issues in article about things like Israel-Palestine (substantial pro-Israeli bias then), but most articles were still pretty balanced.<p>Now, it seems that on many actively contested political issues (ie. not something about climate change), there is a clear editorial stance. I say that as someone who has only voted D their entire life and likely will continue to do so absent some realignment. Efforts to change articles like these are reverted by high-status wikipedeans who have made articles like these their pet projects and build up a community of defenders.<p>Example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Russia_investigation_origins_counter-narrative" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Russia_investigation_origins_c...</a>

High status admins who bite newcomers with impunity, don&#x27;t give a damn about systemic bias, ignore their own rules (invoking &quot;Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy&quot;...except when it suits them) - I find the site increasingly infuriating.<p>On the other hand newly minted accounts (a few months old) seem to be getting involved in arcane things by nominating articles for deletion, despite having flimsy edit histories and limited experience on Wikipedia, possibly to build credibility for adminship in future. A worst case scenario is that the long-in-the-tooth admins finally let go, and these dodgy noobs gain adminship.<p>I&#x27;ve kept a clean sheet over a multi-decade editing career, so I can&#x27;t be dismissed as a crank who doesn&#x27;t understand the project, but there needs to be some sort of reform.

I thought it would be fun to contribute to Wikipedia about topics I’m knowledgeable about. Every single attempt was rejected and reverted almost instantly. The rejections were happening so quickly that I have to assume admins had created bots to auto revert any change that did not come from them. There is no way there was time for a human to be involved. After about 10 attempts on 10 different articles I gave up and haven’t tried again since. There doesn’t seem to be any point.

This seems to be the case for many long-term websites I was once part of. A site formed in 2002 is heavily moderated by people who were on it prior to 2010; a site formed in 2007 is heavily moderated by people who were on it prior to 2012.<p>Fact is, experience is king. Someone who&#x27;s been on a site for a year or two is typically knowledgable about it; but when you compare them to someone with a _decade_ or two of knowledge, it&#x27;s far harder.<p>Not to mention the actual politics of picking someone who signed up only a few years ago. Obviously in some scenarios there is just an obvious pick, but, other times, if there is a candidate who joined in 2010 and a candidate who joined in 2020, and both are otherwise mostly equal, you look like a jerk for picking the 2020 user over the 2010.<p>This, unfortunately, tends to lead to stale ideas; nobody who&#x27;s been part of a site for over a decade is going to push for things to be better, since they&#x27;ve probably been quite a bit happy with the status quo.

My biggest issue with WP is that it relies largely on corporate news media for many subject areas and you’re only allowed to include the narrative of established corporate news. There is so much bias that is introduced this way and I don’t see any great solution to counter it.

Given others are giving their Wikipedia edit stories I&#x27;ll do mine. I am not usually a Wiki editor for context, so I was editing from an IP without an account.<p>I was reading the page for a weaponry used by civilians when I noticed someone had linked to a protest page but had labelled the link &quot;x riots&quot; instead of &quot;x protests&quot; -- this seemed a little odd to me.<p>I edited the page to correct the link&#x27;s text to match the page it pointed to. Within a day it was reverted, I re-reverted and asked the other editor for their rationale. They stated it was important to note that weapons are used by rioters and not protestors and reverted the change once again.<p>I made one last revert to keep my change, cited npov plus some other wiki customs the offending editor had been ignoring and asked them to just edit the wording if they felt so strongly about the nuances.<p>And they did. The other person, a power editor, conceded that this unrelated page was not the appropriate place to argue the semantics of a protest vs a riot and they reworded that section while keeping my edit.<p>Just thought I&#x27;d chime in, since positive reviews are naturally rarer than negative ones.

I wonder if, as the culture has ossified, fewer and fewer people stuck around as editors long enough.<p>Either driven away by other editors&#x2F;admins, not finding it fulfilling enough as so many topics are already “taken”, or simply didn’t think they did enough to be eligible during their time (correctly or not).<p>Or, I suppose, they don’t WANT to move from editor to admin for some reason.

My experience with Wikipedia is that toxic, power-hungry trolls like &quot;CityOfSilver&quot; [0] get into positions of power (though luckily <i>only</i> as a reviewer and not an admin). Funnily enough, for the issue I had, it was an admin who agreed with me and simply made the edit that CoS contested and insulted me over (removing unsourced Russian propaganda).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;User:CityOfSilver" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;User:CityOfSilver</a>

I&#x27;d encourage people to keep editing. From HN and Reddit I thought that my changes would be thrown out, but nothing happened except bots cleaning up my references.<p>An issue that I noticed is that scientific articles accumulate newsworthy theories. The prion article has a section on weaponization, and prion diseases often have sections on alternate theories, or say that the causes remain unknown. Years later these articles need to be updated or trimmed down.

One implication of this is that some time in the future (tough to say when exactly) Wikipedia will have a big attrition problem. I could imagine a scenario in which all the current editors retire or pass away and simply are never replaced and Wikipedia dies.

I was an active Wikipedian back in the early days (2002-2006), and I ran for adminship twice, each time I was rejected for petty reasons. If you don&#x27;t have a &quot;perfect&quot; account, they will pile on opposes. The only reason why so many people became admins at that time was that Wikipedia was still pretty much a &quot;greenfield&quot; site at the time (It had only around 700,000 articles back then, which is ~10% of what it is now), and there were plenty of volunteers signing up. Now it has become more established, and more rules have kept new generations out, similar to how boomers keep younger generations out of housing and high paying careers, despite having more education than them.

Aren&#x27;t administrator named for life? If they are, it seems natural that they are getting older, like the Linux kernel leaders.

They spent years building a toxic moat and now they wonder why nobody wants to swim in it? Zero sympathy.

I honestly don&#x27;t remember the last time I used wikipedia. As a member of a minority community. It doesn&#x27;t have anything that I care about. My information resources are elsewhere.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if the number of admins was cut in half again in the next 10 years.

Reading through the responses on that page, many of the editors leaving a comment started editing before 2010. I&#x27;m curious how many people considered part of the editor community started in the last few years.

Everything that people say about StackOverflow and its &quot;deletion culture&quot; is doubly true of Wikipedia. Wikipedia today is rigidly controlled by a relatively small group of power users. It&#x27;s completely unusable for any &quot;culture way&quot; topics and politics in general, including geopolitics, economics, etc. They make the site actively worse on purpose on a regular basis. If you try to make any kind of good faith edit it will be pretty much immediately deleted by someone, and then you go to the history of the page and see that guy has been editing that article (and 1000 others) for a decade.<p>Of course this goes totally against everything Wikipedia originally stood for: neutrality, reliance on reliable sources, &quot;be bold&quot;, &quot;anyone can edit&quot;, &quot;nobody owns an article&quot;, etc. But it doesn&#x27;t matter, because for every Wikipedia policy there is another policy saying exactly the opposite thing. It&#x27;s a &quot;rule lawyer&quot;&#x27;s paradise: if you know all the policies back-to-front, you can argue your way around any drive-by contributor&#x27;s attempt to justify their changes.<p>For me, Wikipedia has gone through a bit of a cycle. For a long time, it was unreliable, but the contents were at least largely contributed in good faith. Then it seemed to get better. But these days I try to get information from any other source first, and check the citations pretty carefully. A lot of &quot;information&quot; is sourced from very political media outlets in the US which wear their biases on their sleeves. That&#x27;s okay, those outlets should exist. But they&#x27;re not reliable sources for an encyclopedia.

I remember as a child, reading an article about a man who got up every day and logged into Wikipedia and wrote articles about Native American artists. This was in the 90s, and I thought the whole thing sounded wonderful. So I signed up for an account and became an editor. I&#x27;ve maybe contributed 20 or 30 edits over the past 20+ years. That initial influx of people I think has given the impression, or, perhaps the media, that there is a huge army of people maintaining the site.