Funny how the mind works. I can get so into something, only to lose interest. I had great fun editing Wikipedia, but its internal processes slowed me down, finally to the point where I stopped editing because it felt like a chore.
The thing about the encyclopedia that “anyone can edit” is that anyone can edit what you edit, leading to all sorts of acrimony.
I was astonished at how many bureaucratic guidelines and policies are in place to regulate how people can edit and interact with one another — a consequence of no one having ownership over any one article.
It wasn’t the rules that wore me down, though, but the bickering.
I really do like to argue, and for many years I’ve argued with people on message boards and Usenet, but I lose interest if the argument goes in circles. On a message board, a thread will just die off when people are sick of it. On Wikipedia, you have to defend your point of view if you want to change the article a certain way. (Yes, you are perfectly free to edit the article however you want, but if the changes are contentious, you must defend them on the article’s discussion page or people will scold you or even block your account or IP number, if you are really stubborn about it). If you don’t keep up with the discussion in a seemingly endless effort to reach consensus, you can’t keep changing the article the way you think it should be.
It’s not so much that I have a better way. I’m just saying it can be exhausting. Interestingly, Wikipedia’s parent foundation conducted a study of its contributors and found the project is having trouble retaining new contributors:
Based on this and other research (links below), here’s what we think is happening: As successful communities get really big, they naturally suffer growing pains. New people flood in, creating an Eternal September effect, in which the existing community struggles to integrate the newbies while at the same time striving to preserve the ability to do its work. It does that by developing self-repair and defense mechanisms – which in our case, turned out to be things like bot- and script-supported reverts, deletions, user warnings, and complex policies. All those mechanisms are obviously helpful – after all, they were developed for a reason, in response to real problems. And they do their job: they do successfully help experienced editors preserve and maintain quality. But they’ve also made it harder and harder for new people to join us, which in turn seems to have made experienced editors’ work harder as well. People tell me that editing back in 2001 or 2003 or 2005 was more rewarding —and more fun!— than it is today.
In my case I became frustrated with the inability to reach conclusions with people. But it’s such a fascinating social experiment, and I hope they can come up with some ideas to make it less frustrating. I hope to get back to contributing, if I can pace myself and spread my energy over a range of articles, rather than become obsessed by one. But right now I have almost a mental block about editing, while a couple years ago I was practically addicted.
