Wikipedia as editorial microcosm

As of this writing, Wikipedia has been around for over 20 years. In that time, over 6 million articles have been written in the English encyclopedia. Each one of these pages has to fit within the expansive scope of Wikipedia, have verifiable sources, use appropriate tone, and navigate a complex editorial process in which anyone might edit but few do so substantially.

For many articles, this works out well enough, and we find not only good information, but information that is sensibly organized and clearly written. But getting to this status can be a long process. Often decisions made at one point might set an article in a direction that leads it to an unexpected or controversial result. Alternatively, some articles have conceptual issues that create challenges for how to focus, present, or organize the content that are never fully handled by the community. All of this takes place over a continually expanding span of time and is contingent on who happens to have time, who takes interest, and who can navigate the community and know how to use the tools.

The result is that some articles stall—sometimes despite having straightforward topics, a lot of contributors, or being essential or basic for a widely recognized topic. Stalled articles, as we're defining them here, are those that end up with some significant amount of content (so we're not including stub articles since those haven't stalled so much as have yet to get going), but the content may not be formatted or organized in a sensible way, be focused in an enigmatic or unclear direction, have controversies or ambiguities that have not been worked out by contributors, or otherwise have significant issues that experienced editors (or those looking out for the issues) can see but are too much for the casual contributor to take on. In short, they require bold edits and also community engagement that is also aware of and able to work with Wikipedia procedures and concerns.

To be clear, Wikipedia articles are never finished; this is part of what makes Wikipedia an amazing resource and an interesting site for thinking about writing. Wikipedia articles can continue to expand and evolve as long as there is sufficient work put into the articles. At the same time, one sign of a good article is that it does stabilize; this is one criterion for the official designation of "good article" on Wikipedia. Stalled articles, in contrast, are articles where the continual process of editing has stopped because significant and advanced writing is needed to make it possible for work to continue. In such cases, the whole process of incremental or distributed contributions is undermined by significant writing issues that require a more substantial intervention. Substantial improvements and contributions—even the whole writing process—halts far short of the standards and quality one hopes for on Wikipedia until someone strategically and diplomatically intervenes to get the writing going again. In fact, many of the articles identified in this project were set into a particular form and, despite sometimes glaring issues, were hardly altered, in some cases for over a decade. Others were the subject of significant edits that attempted to add content to or polish the article despite, and without addressing, significant conceptual or organizational issues.

Why Do Some Articles Stall?

In trying to understand Wikipedia, these stalled articles became instructive for understanding both complex editing and the kinds of editing issues facing Wikipedia, as well as providing a place for greatly needed strategic developmental editing support (for our definition of developmental editing, see Problem #3 in the Introduction). It is thus worth examining them at length.

In this section of the webtext, we first provide three general categories for why articles stall, with a number of subcategories and examples of each problem. The aim here is to produce an extensive but not exhaustive catalog of the reasons that articles tend to stall. The reasons they stall point to their relationship to Wikipedia editing and to the possible paths for remedying the issues one finds in them.

These are:

Conceptual Issues

• Due to the Nature of Wikipedia as an Encyclopedia
• Due to an Article's Relation to Other Articles
• Due to Conceptual Ambiguities
• Due to Nuances in Notability
• Due to Skewed or Inappropriate Emphasis (Conceptual NPOV)
• Due to Conceptually Particular or Controversial Topics
• Due to a Topic Changing

Writing Issues

• It's an Essay (or Other Nonencyclopedic Genre)
• It was Written Piecemeal
• Large Organizational Issues
• There is Too Much Subject Matter Expertise
• The Writing Issues Are Complicated and the Material Extensive

Community Issues

• Policies Have Become Obstacles
• Quirks Become Magnified
• People Have Less Time, Access, or Interest—or Too Much
• The Community Is Intimidating

We then provide general comments on addressing stalled articles aimed to assist the community, split into two pages. The first considers what skills are needed for addressing stalled articles. The second considers what it looks like to address them within the existing structures of the community.

A quick note about how we came to the categorizations provided here, since it will help readers understand where and how to look for the problems identified and assist future researchers in conducting similar research. The core of this research comes from articles that were worked on intimately in six iterations of the assignment discussed in Part 2. As part of this assignment, students went in search of stalled articles, proposing five and ultimately selecting two to work on. This exposed us to a wide range of articles, not only the ones that were selected for improvement but also others that were ultimately passed over. The ones that were worked on by students required in-depth analysis of the current state of the article, its history, and the discussions around the talk page. We also took note of other articles that were not selected but which were ultimately of interest for this problem of stalled articles.

From 2020–2022, we reviewed all the articles that had been worked on by students as well as the ones added during those semesters, and put them into a database (totaling 243 articles). We then reexamined the history of the articles, tagged them for major issues, noted student interventions, examined communication around the article, and noted what had happened since the student intervention. We also added other examples discovered in the process of working with selected articles. From this dataset we then developed these categories to group together articles with similar issues. Representative examples are cited from this dataset.

Note that results in Part 1 do not, for the most part, reference student work but rather talk about the reasons articles stalled regardless of whether students were able to intervene successfully to remedy the issue. More direct references to student work are saved for Part 2.