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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Everyone's pointing out that this is specifically about admins (not editors) and the general difficulty of wikipedia editing specifically due to its rules and reversions, but I really feel compelled to offer a counterpoint: this applies to wiki editing in general.
I've been editing mediawiki-based game sites since the mid 2000s - before Wikia became Fandom, before it was evil, before it started gobbling up smaller wikis with tempting financial offers. I took a decade+ off and only recently found myself drawn back into the hobby in the last couple of years when I found a game I loved that had a burgeoning wiki that seemed to need help.
I was handed admin privileges within a month because an extension I wanted to use (ReplaceText) was locked behind admin. Two years later, I'm still there because I hold 85-90% of the edits on it. And I. Just. Can't. Get. Help. Not even from the site owner that handed me admin. I've gotten interest from I think seven whole people in all that time, and all but two dropped off within a week or two; the remaining two have a page or two they each maintain but leave the rest of the site to me. And this is a live service game, so it's a neverending stream of event pages and new content that I, and only I, keep going. (Worse: the live service content follows predictable formats, so most of my new pages start by copying another page. This would be so easy for anyone to learn.)
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
Not gonna lie. I think most people just don't want work for free for some company's benefit.
Why are you providing a service for some live service game that doesn't pay you for it ?
They do pay me for it actually, in in-game currency, as part of the same content creator program they use to reward fan artists and streamers and such. In the lonely "why bother" moments, it's all that keeps me editing.
That's somehow even worse.
What's the conversion rate between the dollars you are making them and the schrute bucks you are being paid ?
You deride the hobby by equating it to working for free, then you deride it even harder upon finding out it's paid. You're not asking these questions in good faith, and no answer I give you will satisfy you, so I'm not giving you one. Suffice to say I'm very happy with my compensation.
I enjoy the game, so it's money I would be spending out of my own pocket that I now don't have to. And at least half the time I enjoy the wiki editing - note the fact that I called it a hobby (hobbies are things we do for fun). I just miss the collaborative aspect of it all and have days when I feel down about being alone on it.
”I offer money, you'll play the man of honor and take umbrage; I ask you to do what is right and you'll play the brigand. I have no stomach for games.”
Not everything in life has to be a hustle. Some people actually do things because they like doing them.
Did Marx and Lenin never write about "hobbies"?
Exactly my experience with Archwiki and Wikipedia. I've tried to contribute with minor edits and corrections; I get non-stop pushback on the most un-controversial edits of things like punctuation or adding cross-links. I just walked away after a few attempts to satisfy whomever reverts the edits. What's the point of adding the stress of dealing with these people to one's life when there is utterly no personal benefit?
While I agree that's a super frustrating experience, I think you're projecting an experience you had on one (larger, probably more rigid) site to every site that shares its software. Not every small wiki team is like that.
When I get a correction on one of my pages, I welcome it. Even when it's a grammatically incorrect mess, I do my best to incorporate the information added while smoothing out the wording. Even when the correction is outright wrong (there's one drive-by I used to get every couple months who liked to change singular "die" to "dice" when it wasn't appropriate) I explain my reversions in notes and offer to discuss if there are any questions, hoping to leave the door open for a future editor, because that's someone who cared enough to hit the edit button, and I appreciate that.
So while I get that you're turned off from the hobby - and that's a shame - not all of us need a "fucking dissertation" to have decent collaboration.
Is there like... a way of "getting into" it? I feel part of the issue might be the lack of a cultural pipeline for people who are the right personality type to potentially enjoy it to ever be exposed to it as a potential hobby. The closest I've ever seen to any kind of popular internet culture referencing it is that Randall Munroe would occasionally make reference to wiki editing in his XKCD comics and blagposts.
Idk, for me getting into it was just a matter of (1) use wiki as a reference (2) see thing on wiki that needs fixed (3) try to fix it myself, hitting preview and pulling from other similar pages to get formatting right (4) it works - hobby interest awakens.
People nowadays seem too afraid to mess things up to ever consider trying step 3 on their own. I get this impression when I occasionally help other game wikis as well - sometimes one of their templates will seem especially complicated and I just drop the relevant info in their discord instead, and I get all the same pleading not to worry about messing things up before I say "actually I just had to get back to my own wiki and didn't have time to play with it, sorry!" (Shoutout to rimworld wiki admins for being neat and taking submissions through discord like that)
Interesting experience. We started a wiki for our open source project, the community hit the ground running with it. I couldn't have built a better wiki myself. Players love contributing to the wiki every game update. It's bizarre how polar opposite our experiences are.
It's not that bizarre - a community that's coalescing around an open source project is sure to be a lot more inclined toward technical hobbies than the one that gathers around an otome game. I knew that from the start... but still, I was hoping for more like-minded fans than none.
Back when I started editing on an MMORPG wiki, people were a lot more willing to pitch in, even if they weren't that confident. Now... I've asked for help enough times in the past and just got "looks too hard" and other blank stares in response, with a tacked on "thanks for all your work" to maintain the status quo.
Glad to hear your project is going well, at least.
Ouch. I do agree being an open source project would attract more interest in contributing. Maybe you need to get the message out to more people, there must be at least one other person in the community willing to assist?
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