There's a certain class of Wikipedia edit I used to make. I don't anymore. I still remember how to log in, and I still make some edits, but smaller ones.
What I used to do was find an article that had been flagged for not having any sources. Then I'd find some official sources and include them in the article's bibliography. It's not really doable anymore.
Until fairly recently you could freely surf the websites of most magazines and newspapers. They might try to coax you to subscribe by offering some kind of premium content. Or they might have a limited number of articles you could read in a month, and once you had used them up you had to wait for a new month to begin. But increasingly we're in the "no freebies means no freebies" era. Everything is paywalled.
You could say that this kind of crackdown was always inevitable. That publishers have to make money. You'd have a point. But some things rankle. For one thing this comes after years of online readers tolerating oftentimes intrusive ads. Also, are the revenues being used to pay writers and bring in more and better journalism? Doesn't seem like it.
For better or worse the infrastructure of the internet was based on certain things being promised. Now they are quickly being unpromised.
2 comments:
Providing relevant sources to a wiki article that interested you was definitely a worthwhile thing to do when you had the time and inclination. It's a shame it's no longer very easy to do. Neither of us have ever done a wikipedia edit but we do have experience with the problem you've described.
Nowadays we're grateful to see that we can still read most articles on arcive.ph as it's become essential for reading current news articles, or at least certain perspectives on the news being presented. Not only are newspapers and magazines often off limits to casual readers but also sites that would be interesting to explore. There are a couple of Substack writers whose work I'd have liked to examine further only to learn whole pages have been paywalled.
There are the links posted where you try to follow only to be informed you've already seen your share of articles this month and you've never been there before. Or the news aggregator sites most of whose links are paywalled so you can't read them anyway. I'm not sure which are the most annoying. But in any case it's simply impossible to afford more than a couple, or any at all. At least you could browse a news stand.
As far as bringing in more and better journalism I have to agree with you that doesn't appear to be the case at all. More worrying is the fact that information as it appears on the web often lacks clarity or perspective - like wars, for instance - making it more difficult for readers to determine the truth of the matter. When does too much information become not enough?
The good news is that if you're interested in weird stuff or abstruse subjects it's likely you'll still be able to have fun on the internet.
I like to think it was worthwhile. There are certainly cultural and institutional problems with Wikipedia that on some topics render it an untrustworthy source. For all that it's still a place that many people go for information. So why not improve the quality of what they're getting?
It's a common enough problem. It's nice to know that archive.ph is there and that it works. So far at least. It's apparently one mirror of this sight called archive.today. It's popular for understandable reasons. Substack writers vary in their approach to the medium. The smart ones must know that you have to give new readers at least a taste so that they have positive associations with you.
Oh yeah, the "you have seen your share of articles for the month" bit. I guess that makes sense if your share is zero. The thing is that there are articles and then there are articles. Not everything has a big "re-read" value. Some articles you just scan and forget. But by the times you find out if an article is worth holding onto, it's already too late.
A lot of purported journalism is relatively lacking in context. And maybe that was always going to be the case. The technology is alienated, in that they're aiming at audiences base on nothing but IP addresses. There's no sense of continuity in the conversation.
I certainly have a number of weird interests. How well is that Internet serving them? It's an open question with an evolving answer.
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