to be fair though, it can be a hassle to get something on wikipedia - writing a well thought out addition to a page, only to have it immediately reversed out can be disheartening.
I remember making a small edit to the page of my kid's school, to correct an obvious factual error, providing a source with the correct information, and ended up in an edit war over it...
> to be fair though, it can be a hassle to get something on wikipedia - writing a well thought out addition to a page, only to have it immediately reversed out can be disheartening.
It indeed can take work, but that's also the reason why wikipedia's signal/noise ratio is high and often passed as the tertiary source.
Still, I feel that the bulk of the work lies in establishing notoriety. Sometimes people feel that very obscure topics that lack any acceptable source and fail to establish notoriety should be center stage. Sometimes the problem is half-assed nature of a contribution. Still, it's better to give it a try than to simply complain about no one having done any work.
I've noticed that I stopped being reverted as I made more edits. I have maybe 500 edits, total, so I doubt it's people actually remembering me. The two biggest contributors, as far as I can tell, is that your first <x> edits are scrutinized more extensively. That's either informal/by some of the spam rules/etc., or, on some wikipedias (dewiki, for example), a specific feature where your first <x> edits need to be signed off by more experienced users.
The second, and probably more important, mechanism is simply getting better. WP has a rather distinct style in that it allows absolutely zero jokes, for example, no matter how subtle. Compare with even the most respected publications... The Economist and it's silly captions come to mind.
It's not just humor, but any form of metaphor or irony will usually get reversed, as does any interpretation, even if obvious:
"As the judge became senile, his verdicts started to become erratic. Some defendants chose to gamble and not protest his assignment, and some of them probably got away with murder".
That needs references not just for senility and erraticisms. The causality will be challenged, as will the speculation on defendants motives, the imagery of gambling, and the conjecture about random verdicts potentially letting criminals get off.
Unfortunately deletionists have won, at least in my limited experience, and Wikipedia subjectively feels now to be largely a kingdom of those who find it more satisfying/easier to delete information than to create.
It's a quite disheartening state of affairs, and the saddest part is that it was potentially avoidable... but now that the culture has calcified, it seems very unlikely that it will change, since it's something that's been discussed for _years_ now [1][2]...
> Unfortunately deletionists have won, at least in my limited experience, and Wikipedia subjectively feels now to be largely a kingdom of those who find it more satisfying/easier to delete information than to create.
One of wikipedia's tenets is that Wikipedia is not your personal blog. Thus I feel that any baseless accusation of "easier to delete than to create" is disingenuous and more often than not is just a kneejerk reaction motivated by a desire to hit back at Wikipedia for doing the right thing and keeping the signa/noise ratio high.
I've been at both ends of that deal. I've seen plenty of my articles being marked for deletion, and as an anti-vandalism editor I've also deleted an awful lot of articles. I recommend you also invest some of your time doing anti-vandalism work to get a glimpse of the torrent of crap that storms into Wikipedia each day, from puerile vandalism to shills forcing their products/services everywhere, and also of course people posting their own uncorroborated personal accounts citing themselves.
The process is flawed given that it's driven by volunteers and unfortunately there are indeed false positives and false negatives. Nevertheless, I'm sure the experience would be insightful and educational, specially with regards to learning how to write acceptable wiki articles, and enough to stop this blend of petty baseless attacks.
After all, it's easier to whine conspiratorial accusations on online forums than it is to actually learn how to contribute, and more importantly how to work to improve things.
I have no doubt that Wikipedia has to deal with a flood of trolls and vandals, that that is a tremendous amount of work, and that the editors are doing their utmost to follow the standards defined by the community.
I am merely pointing out that the culture and standards as they stand now lead to a situation where a newcomer (or even a long-time contributor) is likely to bounce off after being caught in an edit war once too many times. Saying "Oh, just contribute an article when you see a gap" is an invitation to sink a potentially unbounded amount of time and effort into something that has an unfortunately high chance of being eventually deleted.
Don't mistake me, I love the concept of Wikipedia, and I think it's a fantastic project – I just find it tragic. Maybe it's truly the tragedy of the commons and the situation is unavoidable because of the flood of spam/vandalism, but I wonder whether you see there a problem to be solved at all.
That's how Wikipedia works: people like you and me search for a topic, and if something is missing then it's up to us to fill the blanks.
Contributing something to a wiki takes as much work as posting a message on HN.