The most enlightening thing in this article is a graph which shows numbers of editors has declined by 25% while articles are more than doubling over past 8 years. There must obviously be breaking point sooner or later where Wikipedia has more garbage then useful bits. My take away is that Wikipedia's model of small tribes of editors is not working and is demonstrably unscalable.
What could be the replacement? How about Stackoverflow style reputations that one must accumulate overtime and then they translate to privileges. The beauty of Stackoverflow is not its content but this community model they have sharpened to almost perfection. It feels far more scalable than Wikipedia's arcane model of emulating print world editorial team and beautifully takes advantage of gamification combining rewards with career profile.
I'm not really sure why you've been downvoted, as this seems like a non-controversial statement. I am working on a crowdsourced content site, a large part of which is a replacement for Wikipedia's biography and news-based pages (see profile for link). We do gamification (badges for adding certain types of content) and we pay our writers in revenue share. That said, in my experience, the issue is not one of personal reputation, but one of creating a system where quality data can be added irrespective of the quality of the person adding it. The focus should always be on the quality of the edit, not the quality of the editor. This may seem counter intuitive, but a well-designed crowdsourced site does not actually need experts in the subjects it is compiling.
I'm surprised at downvotes too. I suspect there are lots of n00b on HN who thinks downvotes is way to express disagreement. I use downvote for not-nice and spammy comments. If I want to express disagreement, I would just put that in reply. But apparently new HN population does things differently.
I believe after several decades of observation of communities like this one, that it is a character flaw of some programmers that because they are good at talking to computers—which are in fact totally objective interpreters of code—that the same attribute applies to their person. However at some point we are all emotional and biased creatures, and the distinction between disagreement and illogical argument or even outright factual innacuracy can at times blur significantly.
What I'm saying is that before you form a knee-jerk rationalization about the reason a downvote happened (because of course I do the same thing), stop and consider that there's at least a 50% chance that your argument is not in fact as airtight as your brain's emotional connection to it, and perhaps you are being downvoted for reasons totally unrelated to what you so hastily ascribe to the anonymous voters.
I'm surprised at that comment because his writings had given me a different impression. PG's view basically means that people with different opinions and minority views would be punished heavily by the community effectively leading to strip them out of all karma. This guideline would encourage people for groupthink and make them hesistant to offer any perspective that might be remotely perceived as controversial. I truly hope pg's above view was transient and has evolved.
Doesn't it, though? I see reasonable but unpopular opinions blasted into background color all the time. I make it a point to upvote these posts, even if I disagree with the original opinion, because of this behavior shaping that takes place on HN these days. And if I didn't know better, I'd say it was a conspiracy. :P
As per the article, the quality of content is moderated by editors who patrol the edits frequently. For example, you can go to a random wikipage and make some insane edit right now and there is a good probability that it would be reverted within few hours. This probability decreases over time when number of articles doubles but editors patrolling them decreases. Eventually you will start seeing lot of low quality edits sipping in and stay there for very long time.
What could be the replacement? How about Stackoverflow style reputations that one must accumulate overtime and then they translate to privileges. The beauty of Stackoverflow is not its content but this community model they have sharpened to almost perfection. It feels far more scalable than Wikipedia's arcane model of emulating print world editorial team and beautifully takes advantage of gamification combining rewards with career profile.