Deutsches Version dieses englischen Blogposts
Manchmal, wenn ich mich mit anderen Wikipedianern unterhalte, versuche
ich alt und weise zu klingen. Und ich rede über die Zeiten, als es noch gar
keine Wikipedianer gab, und alle Datenbanken liefen auf einem einzigen Server,
der von Hamstern angetrieben wurde. Um in der weiten Öden des IRCs jemand zu
treffen, musste man sich Tage vorher verabreden. Alle Regeln und
Bearbeitungshinweise der Wikipedia, ausgedruckt auf A4, waren weniger als zehn
Seiten lang.
Das waren die Zeiten, in denen ich Menschen erzählte „ich bin bei Wikipedia“. Und
die Antwort war „Ah, ja, ne, is klar, wasauchimmer“ Ich: „Und jeder kann
mitmachen“ - „Ah, ja, ne, is klar, wasauchimmer“. Ich: „Eines Tages wird es
eine freie Onlineenzyklopädie sein“-- „Ah, ja, ne, is klar, wasauchimmer“ Bis
heute vermute ich innerlich immer, dass Menschen so auf Wikipedia reagieren,
und bin jedesmal sehr überrascht, wenn es anders kommt.
So viel hat sich seit 2003 geändert. Beim Schreiben des Blogposts sitze ich in
Hongkong auf der Wikimania. Die Weltpresse interessiert sich dafür, was Jimbo
in einer Rede sagt. Und vor allem: Wikipedia ist tatsächlich praktisch und
taugt als Nachschlagewerk. Wenn ich mich auf fremden Kontinenten mit
wildfremden Leuten über mein Hobby unterhalte, wissen diese Menschen im
Normalfall wovon ich rede. Und viele, viele Menschen interessieren sich stark
dafür, was in Wikipedia steht: Menschen, die niemals auch nur einen Edit
gemacht haben oder machen werden. Tatsächlich, die Erfolgsgeschichte der
Wikipedia fasziniert mich jeden Tag wieder.
Aber natürlich wäre es anmaßend, davon auszugehen, dass Wikipedia an genau
dieser Stelle aufhört, sich weiterzuentwickeln. Es wäre anmaßend davon
auszugehen, dass Wikipedia sich nicht mehr verändern wird.
Was wird im Jahr, sagen wir mal
2022, passieren? Warum versuchen wir nicht einfach mal einen Blick in die Glaskugel?
Die gute
Nachricht: im Jahr 2022 existiert Wikipedia noch. Die schlechte Nachricht:
Niemand weiß davon
Sometimes when talking to
Wikipedians I try to sound very old and wise. And I start to talk about those
days, when Wikipedia was written by actually nobody, the databases were running
on one server powered by a hamster wheel etc. To meet someone on IRC you had to
plan days in advance etc., all the written rules of all the Wikipedias could be
printed out on less than ten pages.
These were the days when
you told somebody "I'm at Wikipedia." and the answer was: "Ah,
yeah, sure, whatever." I: "Someday it will be a free online
encyclopedia" - "Ah, yeah, sure, whatever." I: "And
everybody can edit" - "Ah, yeah. sure, whatever". Goes away.
Until today this is the default reaction I expect, and 'til today I'm always
surprised when people react differently.
So much has changed since
2003. I'm sitting in Hong Kong right now, the world press cares what Jimbo says
at a keynote and most notably: Wikipedia is actually useful to look things up. When
talking to strangers on the street on different continents, these people know
what I'm talking about. And many, many people care about what is written
inside, people who have never edited Wikipedia themselves. Actually, I'm amazed
by this Wikipedia-story-of-success every day of my life.
But of course it would be presumptuous to assume that Wikipedia will stop at this place and time. It is pretentious
to assume Wikipedia won't change anymore. It will change. What way will it take? What will happen in, hm, 2022? Why
don't we just take a guess?
Let's take a guess.
The good thing:
Wikipedia will still exist in 2022. The bad news: nobody will know.
The good thing: Wikipedia still exists now in 2022. The bad news: nobody knows. Due to new semantic
Wikis, Wikidata, mobile apps etc. almost nobody ever visits the website
anymore, this huge lump of text illustrated by an eccentric image load of stuff some hobby photographers liked about their own pictures.
Through a host of apps,
information comes custom tailored for different people at different times. This
information is read to them, transformed into videos or given to them in small
bits by mobile. There are a lot of shiny surfaces, where one can get
Wikipedia-information without having to bother about the encyclopedia and all the
boring stuff surrounding it.
Many people contribute in
many different ways. Most of Wikipedia's content is delivered by partners. Bots
plunder archives of many institutions and upload all their content bits to Wikipedia and Commons. A diverse set
of people from all over the world, tags this content, assesses it, gives it
point-values, and likes or dislikes it. Other bots aggregate these
interactions. These aggregation bots produce content specifically aimed at different readers.
Beneath/around Wikipedia is a huge archive of material that gets aggregated in
several ways. Wikipedia - aggregation by text writing - is just one way one can access the information. This way though is still the way preferred by the "young (and not so young) and
educated".
To actually edit the
Wikipedia itself one has to have master access. Editing Wikipedia is the only way on
which people can actually break something and do harm to the project. So access is limited. The right to edit Wikipedia has to be earned through successful work in the
wider Wikipedia ecosphere. Only some freaks - nerdy graduate students, former
graduate-students and would-be graduate students of older age - edit the Wiki.
Everybody else is happy just producing content.
Don't see it
Do you remember the old
times when one had to visit a real website with huge lumps of text? The website was kind
of white. It had some pictures that were more or less appealing; many sunsets.
And it had a lot of text. Sometimes it had well written text, most of the times
it had not-so-well-written text. Everything could be found, but it took a lot
of effort. Many people were excluded because it was so difficult to get the relevant information.
Not anymore. Today your
phone, car, house, social network, newspaper and doormat give you information
you desire. The freezer still does not order the milk by itself, but it is able to sing the best quotes about milk, taken from Wikiquote. Or theses appliances give you some information you maybe desire. Targeting is
still a problem. But why should one visit this large, confusing website to get
some information that is badly targeted as well.
The Wikimedia Foundation
and some of the bigger chapters tried between 2014 and 2018 to develop these
apps and software themselves. But still they were way to slow. Can you imagine? The
actually tried to include the community in the process. It was a process that was as
undemocratic as it was slow and ineffective. The Wikimedia-efforts were much too
concerned with preserving Wikipedia the way it was. No real change is possible
when involving a community. Their attempts never took off. It couldn't be
really successful. So the race was made by more ruthless and more effective
competition.
When Wikidata took off,
when Wolfram Alpha was able to blend Wikipedia and Wikidata information with
nice movies and pictures, when Google decided to be ruthless in mining
Wikipedia - these players made the apps that show Wikipedia to the world. Since
most people never get to the Website anymore, the Wikimedia movement receives a
lot less donations. Of course Wolfram Alpha, Google and Wikiweibo pay all the
bills to run Wikipedia. But of course they really like to pay for stuff that
makes Wikipedia easy accessible to them.
Now in 2022 for most of the people Wikipedia looks
and feels like any other website. For the most apps information is lumped
together from several sources. "Reading Wikipedia" is taught in
graduate school course. Really curious people are actually the only ones still
reading the website and the encyclopedia.
The website still exists.
Due to the change in community the texts are better written than they were in
2013 and since 2018 actually the search engine works. But still: Wikipedia is
only for people who really really want to know and delve deep. This is not a
majority (or even a sizable minority) of humankind.
Don't write it
In 2015 the Foundation gave
finally up on the community, and decided to let the community be itself. The decision was made to not
mingle with it anymore and just ignore it. No more attempts to create diversity
or to introduce newbies into the community. Just let it be and create new, easier to handle communities.
Wiki Loves Monuments lead the way
and the visual editor paved the road. Don't introduce people into this stiff
conservative community where people had to master a steep learning curve to
accomplishing anything. Just give them something nice to do where people can
contribute. Make it easy for newbies. No hassle, to arguments, no
unfriendliness.
The first apps for
"limited editing without breaking anything" (by mobile, by apps, just
doing small things) had been developed and could be used much better for
outreach. The first, of course, was a Wiki Loves Monuments app. Just photograph
an old building, give your GPS coordinates and let the app find the building
and categorize the picture. This not only works for monuments but for art,
streets, schools, museums, cars, trains etc.
For fine tuning there was another
app on which people could correct the algorithms. Also there were apps where
people could rate how well a sentence defined its theme, which picture they
liked better as illustration for an article, and a multiple-choice quiz, where people could
rate true or wrong content. The questions of these quizzes were derived from the text.
Suddenly all kinds of
people could contribute easily and doing Wikipedia became popular as a hobby again. It was possible to contribute in a moving car, with limited bandwidth.
All knowledge required could be as little as s strong like or dislike for a
picture. It was possible to edit on the run, on the go and almost on the sleep.
The hard part was the
translation of these contents into encyclopedic content. easy integration was
done by bots, a lot of the workload was done by the still-existing-community of
encyclopedists and some of it was done by paid facilitators.
The old community with its
obnoxious behavior was hidden behind a layer of nice, easy to use tools. Nice,
easy to talk to facilitators helped each other out. Infighting still occurred,
but on a lesser level. Most of the fights were fought a long time ago. A lot of
really difficult people had left Wikipedia to have more impact somewhere else.
The inner core of encyclopedists was not so keen on fighting. The fights that
still happened, did happen a lot of time out of tradition.
Upload it
At the same time, GLAMS,
new Glams, and "maybe-Glams" took off. Paid uploading of material on
Wikisource or Wikicommons became the norm. So much new content could be created
by plundering institutions. They had the real content. They had big waggonloads
of it. Just go there, convince them. Let bots do the initial curating and let
people on apps do the rest.
All the institutions had
their presence on one the projects, and of course it was possible to integrate
an institution and Wikipedia so seamless that the institution could use all
content with anybody noticing. The GLAMs (new-glams, maybe-glams) gave content
and had the whole Wikipedia to integrate it into. While Wikipedia became a huge
institutional archive, a lot of exhibitions became reorganized Wikipedia
content without anybody noticing.
The chosen few
So what about Wikipedia? It
strives. It's nice. Being Wikipedian is an honor. One has hard to work to achieve this status. The
people who care about Wikipedia the website are mostly old and educated and they know a lot. Of course
it's less fun than it's used to be: less brilliance, less innovation, more
routine and day-to-day stuff. But there is more relaxed routine, more
standards, quiet effective work hidden deep inside a giant knowledge machine.
As an editor one learns a lot of new stuff every day. It's fascinating and
boring at the same time. Wikipedia the website still has impact, but only a few know why.
Ein Nachtrag zum Blogbeitrag eines weiter unten: wie Nicole in der Diskussion anmerkte gibt es die ganze Anleitung und Diskussion mittlerweile auch auf deutsch bei Wikimedia Deutschland mit Stipendien von Wikimedia Deutschland.
Ich bin ehrlich gesagt sehr angetan, dass das dieses Jahr so zeitig klappt und fühle mich in meinem Glauben bestätigt, dass seit geraumer Zeit bei WP und WM alles besser wird.
Wer es noch nicht mitbekommen hat: Wikimania 2013 findet in Hongkong statt. Das ist weit weg, Flugtickets sind teuer. Deshalb wird es wie jedes Jahr Stipendien von Wikimedia geben.
In Frage kommen: "Any active
contributor to a Wikimedia project and/or Wikimedia volunteer in any
other capacity, from anywhere in the world,"
Hauptkriterien sind laut Formular Aktivität in Wikimedia-Projekten (50%) und Interesse für Wikimedia/Wikimania. Es hilft vermutlich auch, wenn man vage einen Grund angeben kann, was man dann in Hongkong eigentlich will. Fortgeschrittene könnten noch dazu sagen, warum dass die Leute in Hongkong nicht selber können.
WMDE macht auch irgendwas. Zumindest habe ich in der Geschäftsstelle aus den Ohrwinkeln heraus, öfters mal das Wort "Wikimania" gehört. Nachragen für Detailinfos würde ich mal auf Verdacht an das Team Communitys wenden. Oder an die Stabsstelle Internationales.
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