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It's tricky, as a lot of what makes Wikipedia good is an accumulation of policies and practices that force you to use its features. You can't just install MediaWiki or Confluence and expect it to be good.

As an example, orphan articles (ones not linked from any other pages) [1] are categorized and tagged on Wikipedia. There are many editors that spend their time trying to find places to link to orphaned articles, which improves discoverability of that information.

The best programming language-specific Wiki I've found is cppreference.com. They have a very nice stylistic approach to dealing with the different C++ standards.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Orphan

3 comments

There is a saying you can't solve a social problem with a technical solution. Wikis are mostly just a thin technical layer to let people create their own solutions to social problems.

That saying said, people often wrongly call technical problems social, being blind to obvious technical flaws that drive users into various directions. They attribute it to some inherent user property when in reality it’s a technical nuance of a system that does it. Most problems include a user behavior, but most user behaviors include the shape of some existing solution.

I think I understand what you mean, but it would be really helpful to make sure I understand if you could make a practical and specific example of what you mean? Has there been a case with Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Community where this specifically has happen?

I think this can only be seen by an insider-enough, and I am not that much of a wikipedia guy.

An example that probably everyone can understand is youtube. Content creators are often begging for like/subscribe and even present graphs that show that only 10% of their regular viewers are subscribed. This seems like a social problem to some, but in reality it’s a technical problem because if you like/subscribe, your feed will drown in “similar” videos of much lower quality and that will haunt you for weeks. And there’s a whole set of other ui/ux issues even if you decide to subscribe. So many people avoid interacting with videos too much because of that.

I know youtube is a beaten horse, but it is a textbook example of what I mean. I could theorize about what’s wrong with wikis, but wiki guys see it much better. My key thought here is “check twice that it’s not technical before calling it social”, but it may not be the case here.

On the other hand, the entire reason that creators want you to like/subscribe is so you drown in their videos, so you watch more, so they get more ad $$$. If liking/subscribing didn't have that affect, they probably wouldn't beg you to do it.

As an aside though, only 10% participating isn't very unique to youtube. Its a pretty common rule of thumb that 89% only lurk, 10% participate in some limited fashion, and 1% become super active, in any online community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Their videos pop up in the feed by simply watching. That’s how 90% stays retained without an explicit connection. What happens after subscribing is two-fold: a subscribed viewer gets more “related” crap from other channels due to shown “interest”, and a channel gets more chances to get recommended to new people. So it’s a growth thing, but not directly linked.

But I agree in general that a problem may be sort of recursive or self-supporting and not always technical. I just see people often enumerating simplest solutions and defeating them in the same comment, so that nothing gets done or even tried, when real-world systems are always complex and complexity is hard but at the same time has many potential tipping points. People build empires on default settings alone and lose businesses on a tiny but stable leak in the funnel. Thinking that there’s no such important and easily overlooked points in any non-trivial system, and it’s just all about users, is a mistake.

I'm not sure if this is what the parent means, but i kind of feel like the tags vs categories debate.

MediaWiki uses the term "category" for its system of tagging pages. This generally is used as a very complex system of hierarchy with many nested levels and prescribed "correct" categories.

Some people think we should use "tags" instead (e.g. less nesting and more intersecting. Instead of a category "People in Belgium" use a tag "People" and a tag "Belgium" and apply both).

On a technical level the feature requirements are basically the same, but the word tag and the word category have such strong connotations that the mere name strongly supports one social organization over another (imo)

I would say the current lack of editors is a technical issue and not a social one. Most search engines and large-language models discourage readers from going to Wikipedia by hiding the source of the information. The actual technical means the Wikipedia community uses for social communication (IRC, email, Wikitext talk pages) are out of date as well.

We definitely need an official Discord equivalent with wider adoption. I can't effectively use IRC on my phone and computer simultaneously. In terms of editor outreach, I don't have any easy answers. Wiki Education is very good at bringing in editors.

This is another good example of people writing the problem off to social without even trying something more sophisticated than a counter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578134

The amount of trivial self-defeating ideas that for some unclear reason supposed to prove the absense of a solution - with the current solution being a dead stupid counter - is amazing.

Ah but we can create a technical solution to easily ignore a social problem until it festers horribly!

I used to sit next to Nate, the founder of cppreference.com . Humble dude. I had no idea he created it until a coworker mentioned "did you know that Nate created a website about C++". I thought cool, assuming it was some small site. I asked Nate what it's called, he said cppreference.com . I thought wow, that's the C++ website.

Building on your idea, it’s also important to look at how wikis use Mediawiki. Different wikis in the Wikimedia ecosystem apply different sets of patterns appropriate to their size and purpose. Wikivoyage is a useful example of hierarchical information. Wikibooks shows how subpages can be used effectively.

Aside from Mediawiki.org, Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, has written extensively about wiki patterns. He’s also created a reference implementation for a federated wiki that attempts to solve the fork & revision control use cases centralized wikis struggle with. See https://github.com/fedwiki