2. 外语
  3. Wikipedia’s Trembling [A]Wikipedia is dying! Wikipedia is dying! That’s the line repeated by the media every six months or so si

Wikipedia’s Trembling [A]Wikipedia is dying! Wikipedia is dying! That’s the line repeated by the media every six months or so si

admin2016-04-01  56
问题                     Wikipedia’s Trembling
[A]Wikipedia is dying! Wikipedia is dying! That’s the line repeated by the media every six months or so since 2009, when Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega first noticed that unprecedented numbers of volunteer editors were abandoning the sixth most popular website in the world. As the now familiar story goes, the byzantine(极其复杂的)infrastructure behind the free, crowdsourced encyclopedia—30 million articles in 287 languages, including more than 4.3 million in English—is choking to death. Wikipedia pessimists say the site is fatally blocked by white American men who would rather describe the extreme details of a new breed of Pokemon or fervently debate the politicization of an Arabic food than guide a diverse group of new editors around the world.
[B]The other corrosive element is the pervasive fighting by editors that sometimes supersedes(替代)the facts. "You have to realize that there are two very different sides to Wikipedia," Tare, a 40-year-old IT worker from New England, told Newsweek in an email. One is "the public face of Jimbo Wales and ’the sum of human knowledge,’ represented in tens of hundreds of thousands of articles, i.e. the encyclopedia proper." The other is "harsh and ugly," like "taking the red pill and waking up in the Matrix." [C]In many ways, Wikipedia is a victim of its success, and the Wiki spirit upon which it was founded. The site grew quickly: more than 20,000 articles in 18 languages just one year after Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded it in January 2001. Two years later, Wales launched the Wikimedia Foundation to finance and run the site; the nonprofit now has a staff of 187 people who develop and maintain open-content, Wiki-based products. After the site saw gigantic growth from 2004 to 2007—the English-language Wikipedia had around 750,000 entries by late 2005—the community created some tools to preserve quality and accuracy. Things didn’t go as planned.
[D]A study published in the American Behavioral Science Journal by former Wikimedia fellows earlier this year found that the new automated quality-control tools and bureaucratic editing guidelines "crippled the very growth they were designed to manage" by scaring off new editors: The proportion of "desirable newcomers"—defined in the study as both "good-faith" editors who try but fail to be productive and "golden"(successful)contributors—entering Wikipedia has not changed since 2006, and they are significantly more likely than their predecessors to have their first contributions rejected. The number of editors peaked in 2007 and has been falling ever since, and it’s now next-to-impossible to become a high-ranking "administrator," editors who check entries for accuracy and fairness.
[E]The Wikimedia foundation disclosed in its 2011-2012 annual report that "declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the Wikimedia projects." The Wikimedia fellows behind a comprehensive study led by computer scientist and University of Minnesota Ph.D. candidate Aaron Halfaker were more blunt: They suggested Wikipedia change its motto from "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" to "the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semiautomated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit."
[F]Wikimedia has been working hard on this problem, but the site is still "almost entirely written by techno-Libertarian white guys in their 30s," said Kevin Gorman, a longtime Wikipedia editor who has done work for the Wikimedia Foundation. According to a 2011 worldwide Wikipedia Editor Survey, the typical editor is college-educated, 30 years old, and intimidatingly tech-savvy(懂行的人); 91 percent of them are men.
[G]Headlines proclaiming Wikipedia’s decline are "exaggerated and wrong," said Andrew Lih, a journalism professor at American University and author of The Wikipedia Revolution. Even Halfaker thinks there’s hope. "I’m inspired by what Wikipedia has done for the accessibility and access of knowledge generally," he told Newsweek. "But that doesn’t mean that we can’t do better."
[H]Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner told Newsweek that Wikimedia is primarily focused on fixing the infrastructure, streamlining Wikipedia’s weak and inscrutable(高深莫测的)text-based editing tool so that it’s as accessible to undergraduates and grandmas as it is to geeks(极客). She believes Visual Editor, currently in buggy Beta(测试), will do just that—as soon as it stops crashing.
[I]She also pointed to another pet cause: modifying the site’s interface in small ways most users probably won’t notice. For example, when Wikimedia realized that successful editors got their sea legs by fixing typing errors, the foundation started directing new registrants toward articles full of them. "The idea is to handhold people so they’re getting positive feedback," she said. According to Wikimedia, that quick fix has led to 3,000 new Wikipedians a month making their first edits.
[J]Wikimedia has also hired diversity advocates like Sarah Stierch, a longtime Wikipedia editor and gender issues campaigner. Before joining Wikimedia as a program evaluation community coordinator, Stierch held a paid Wikimedia fellowship during which she focused on gender work and taught women around the country how to edit Wikipedia. She also founded Teahouse, described on its Wikipedia page as "a friendly place to help new editors become accustomed to Wikipedia culture, ask questions, and develop community relationships."
[K]Additionally, Wikimedia helps organize domestic and global education programs in which volunteer "ambassadors" work with college professors to assign Wikipedia entries. Gardner extolled(赞扬)the virtues of the program in Egypt, launched in spring 2012 to tackle the gender gap on the Arabic Wikipedia. It reached out to arts and languages departments, where there is a higher percentage of female students. According to Wikimedia, 87 percent of the Egyptian student-editors in the program are women, and they’ve added more than 1,000 articles to the Arabic Wikipedia and have made needed edits on many existing articles.
[L]Gorman, the regional ambassador for the U.S. Education Program for California and Hawaii, spoke passionately of his work with professors and undergraduates. But he said the program lacks oversight(监督), particularly when it comes to targeting underrepresented topics, and wishes Wikimedia would consider paying ambassadors. "A lot of Wikipedians have a strong irrational fear of money," he said, which he believes holds back widespread progress.
[M]Gardner’s response: "I don’t think we would ever consider paying ambassadors, because we really don’t have to. Wikipedians naturally want to share. They like coaching new people." Gardner believes Wiki-media’s initiatives will start paying off in the next few years—and they might—but the data aren’t impressive. Stierch said her grassroots groups haven’t attracted new women to editing and that Wikimedia still struggles to find women for leadership positions.
[N]Even if Wikimedia fails to draw a diverse group of users who want to edit, not just battle one another, it seems unlikely that Wikipedia will self-destruct. What it offers the world is imperfect, but so much better than no Wikipedia at all—even if, as Stierch said, the site "epitomizes(成为......的缩影)a project started by good-faith white males," like so much written history and cultural research in the Western world, that may take years to change. "I can’t even imagine a world without Wikipedia at this point," Stierch said. "Can you?"
It’s indicated in a report that the biggest threat to Wikimedia has been the decreasing participation.
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答案E
解析 根据declining participation定位到E段第1句。该句提到，维基媒体基金会在其2011～2012年度报告中披露，“参与者持续下降是维基媒体项目有史以来面对的最严重问题。”文中the most serious prob—lem对应本题的the biggest threat，原文disclosed对应本题indicated。
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