User:Robertinventor

Hello. I'm Robert. I edited Wikipedia for some time, but then got indef blocked, in part for adding a page about the present day habitability of Mars - the people who voted to delete my article and then indef block me in WP:ANI had no idea that searching for these habitats is one of the top science goals of NASA and ESA. It was the last of many frustratiang experiences of that sort and in the indef block debate they brought up several previous occasions when I tried to fix major errors in Wikipedia as user behaviour issues on my part. Such as my attempt to fix the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis article to reflect the latest conclusions of the USGS, IPCC and CAGE the top most reliable sources in this topic area!

Wikipedia has lots of great content contributed by people who knew their subject well. However as it matured, many left Wikipedia and large areas of the encyclopedia have stagnated. That's especially true of astrobiology. Many of the articles have had few substantial edits for years. Some of the remaining editors do bold but careless edits.

It can be a similar situation sometimes for even the most minor fixes and contributions. And sadly, this doesn't seem likely to change any time soon. Indeed, in my case, I have been indefinitely blocked from editing Wikipedia at all. For how that happened, and more about the background see my Alice In Wonderland Sanctioning In Wikipedia - Blocked For Covering NASA's Science Goal To Search For Habitats For Life On Mars‽. This can make editing Wikipedia a frustrating experience, and in my case, now impossible. So, I've copied the material over into my new wikis, where we can work on updating the material and add new articles, without this issue that your material may be deleted at any time by people who are unfamiliar with the topic.

Comparison with Wikipedia editors
Large areas of Wikipedia seem to have no active editors that know much about the topic. A few that claim to knowledge but don't really. Lots of gnomes fixing typos and grammatical errors and such like. Nothing much else.

I just did a calculation, the number of articles per active editor, treating an editor as active if they do more than about 3 edits per day (100 per month) has increased from 374 articles per editor in 2007 to 1681 articles per editor today. That's for the top 30,000 editors there. Techy details at end.

There are a few thousand editors who do dozens of edits a day - but though some of them are careful, others are careless and error prone or have an agenda or a strange point of view that is the main reason they are so active, who are actually making it worse and introducing new errors. So I think it is reasonable to focus on the 3 edits per day editors..I know this is not a mathematically rigorous calculation, will see if I can find a better way to calculate it.

So - I'm inclined to work in that way, copy the material into another wiki and fix it there. Encourage others to do the same. Maybe some day some of that material will get merged back into Wikipedia if the editing environment there somehow improves. The main issue of course is finding ways for others to find your work. But - well Dorje108 and our Encyclopedia of Buddhism is gradually getting visitors. Only a few per day for the entire encylopedia but increasing. It's a slow process but if it is good, then it will eventually get more visitors. And you feel you've made something worthwhile for the people who do find it already.

Microtonal music is similar. Mainly it's got good content contributed by active microtonalists who have given up trying to edit Wikipedia and gone away. And actively edited by people who don't really understand the topic and occasionally introduce mistakes as they edit. I don't think it is so much an agenda or political view in that case, it's just that many musicians have some interest in microtonal music but don't know much about it, and are doing their best.

It doesn't seem to be anyone left there much active in the project who knows much about the topic. I did have some great discussion on the talk pages with a couple of them, but they did almost no edits. So it's a bit of a dead project. The few there who know much don't do much editing of it.

I set up a microtonal music project in Wikipedia that got 12 editors interested in working on it. I don't know how many microtonal articles there are there. Probably a few hundred of the most important ones. With 12 editors we could hugely improve on Wikipedia in an off-wiki copy working together, editors who know each other. Start it with guidelines that learn from Wikipedia's mistakes to prevent the same thing happening there as in Wikipedia e.g. more like Scholarpedia especially if it's mainly people with off wiki identities disclosed who you know are expert on microtonal music and can go to ask them for help with some question by a newbie of whether an article is accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Microtonal_Music,_Tuning,_Temperaments_and_Scales#List_of_important_pages_and_categories_for_this_proposed_group

With Astrobiology it doesn't even have a project on Wikipedia. And not many articles on the topic. So it would be easy to improve on Wikipedia accuracy in a separate wiki in that case, especially with one very active editor on Wikiepdia who introduces loads of errors there..

Large areas of Wikipedia seem to have no active editors that know much about the topic. A few that claim to knowledge but don't really. Lots of gnomes fixing typos and grammatical errors and such like. Nothing much else.

Buddhism is like that too, lots of great content but hardly any of the original editors that contributed it are still active. The few that are knowledgeable that you meet don't edit much any more.

You post a comment on a talk page and nobody responds even though the page was clearly originally contributed by someone who knew a lot about the topic. Same over much of Wikipedia nowadays - the number of editors are going down, not up, even while the number of articles they have to cover goes up all the time, so there are fewer editors per article.

TECHY CALC DETAILS

Its article count has increased from 1.5 million in 2007 to 5.7 million today: (1,560,000 to 5,710,186 ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#Wikipedia_growth_of_article_count

The number of daily visitors has stayed more or less steady increasing slightly from 60 million per day in 2007 to 65 million today https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/reportcard/#daily-unique-devices That's a decrease of an average of 38 per article in 2007 to 11 per article today.

Meanwhile the number of editors active enough to do 5 edits a month has decreased from 46,000 in 2007 to 30,000 today. (45953 to 28953)

https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm

That means the number of articles per active editor has increased from 34 in 2007 to 197 today. And that's for editors that do only one edit a week.

There are many editors doing many edits a day. But it's a case of one editor spreading their edits over numerous articles or focusing on only the central ones in their topic area.

The number of editors with over 100 edits per month (a bit over three a day) has decreased from 4200 in 2007 to 3400 today (4173 to 3395). So that's an increase from 374 articles per editor in 2007 to 1681 articles per editor today.

There are 277 editors who do over 1000 edits a month, or about 30 a day, this number has stayed more or less steady for the last decade. Increase from 5631 to 20,614 per editor to day. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editor_activity_levels

If you get blocked or banned you are likely to have tangled with an editor in the top 5000 most active in wikiedia. I'm actually currently in that table at position 4071 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits/4001%E2%80%935000 but that's partly because I did lots of minor edits)

Many of the ones who voted to get me indef blocked are in that table.

There are a few editors in those table that do loads of edits, using semi-automated tools, and then there are editors that do thousands of edits a month who patrol an entire topic area - or else - who focus on a few key articles in their topic area. There are also editors who are just good editors and add lots of great content and are very active improving Wikipedia.

But amongst those a few percent at least are probably active with some major agenda or point of view that is the main reason they are so active. Others are just bold and careless and introduce as many errors as they fix.

And apart from that most of Wikipedia is inactive with lots of the articles not being updated by anyone much. But not because it is error free.

My main role there was fixing errors, mainly minor ones. I'd find one or two a week just in ordinary browsing of Wikipedia because I know to check for errors and don't just accept something because "Wikipedia says so". Nowadays I still find the errors but can't fix them. I've started a text file of errors that I find and the minor ones I can fix if ever I do get unblocked.

So I'd be fixing maybe 100 minor but significant errors a year, and an occasional major fix every year or so, perhaps once or twice a year. But all the time there are many other editors there who are introducing as many errors as that or more per year editing stable well written articles and introducing mistakes into them.