One answer is because "like" and "share" buttons are intended to increase readers, and more readers are (generally) wanted because that increases revenues (advertising, sale of goods and services, whatever). Wikipedia doesn't care about advertising, and doesn't sell anything. It wants readers who are looking for information.

Another answer: Because social networking options would increase vandalism. Anyone can edit Wikipedia; very few articles are protected against non-registered editing. With sharing and likes, one obvious scenario is: Person A edits an article about a high school, adding something like "Principal [X] is a [insert string of offensive nouns here]." Then he/she shares the page, and all his/her friends titter about how Person A was able to punk Wikipedia, at least until the vandalism is reverted. Or, once Person A finds out that obvious vandalism is reverted quickly, he/she starts being more subtle about damaging articles, sharing his/her amusing tweaks with friends.

There are two main concerns:

• The first is privacy. Many modern sharing buttons are actually iframes, i.e. embedded HTML content served directly from the social network rather than the host website's servers. Wikipedia's strong, user-centric privacy policy forbids them from sharing readers' browsing history, and serving content from other domains in effect shares a user's browsing history, since the social network's servers are pinged to serve up sharing buttons each time.
• The second is that sharing buttons are implicit advertising for the social network. If Wikipedia includes a Twitter button, that's as if Wikipedia is saying "Twitter is important enough that you probably will want to go share content from Wikipedia on Twitter". Even if we don't really mind Twitter's effective monopoly on microblogging, or Facebook's on generic social networking, it privileges them above whatever site isn't included through a sharing button. There's a trade-off there: small sites do benefit hugely from being shared on big social networks, and they can streamline the process of being shared for the negligible cost to them of that implicit advertising. However, as a top-ten website, Wikipedia doesn't need this, and its love of neutrality and dislike of advertising far outweigh the purported benefits of being shared.

Regardless of Wikipedia's reasons for avoiding sharing buttons, their utility is minuscule, because basically every computing device has a copy-paste function. Why fiddle with having to pick and choose which networks to mention when all of them are agnostically supported by omission? Moreover, mobile devices tend to have direct "share" functionality embedded into the OS. The Wikipedia mobile apps take advantage of this, since that functionality is relatively agnostic regarding where the content's to be shared.

Wikipedia doesn't need social. In essence, it is the online encyclopedia. Every one knows about them. And everyone trusts them to be the ultimate source for information. Furthermore, most searches for general information result in a wikipedia link within the first 5 links.

Just because you can do social doesn't mean you always should or need to. Research sites don't really need to share particular pages. I mean, isn't the point that they should have a page on every conceivable topic out there. What research sites need to be successful is to make themselves the known authority. They do that more through SEO and by having trusted quality content then by embedding social sharing links.

Users who find something interesting they want to share will share it anyway. The mechanism to do so doesn't need to be on every page.

Anyone can share a Wikipedia article, quite easily, using the following guide:

• Visit the article.
• Click on the address bar and press Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C.
• Click where the sharing is desired and press Ctrl-V. A shared link to the article!

If you're talking about the links used for Facebook, Twitter, etc., there are a few issues with that. Those external sites may use tracking of sorts that Wikimedia is categorically against, so the use of widgets like that may compromise reader and editor privacy. Additionally, it would be an endorsement by Wikimedia of those specific sites, and neutrality is exceptionally important on projects like Wikipedia. That is the same reason you will never see advertisements on Wikipedia--it would compromise the project's neutrality to be getting funded by companies we also have articles on.

Also, it is entirely legal to copy from Wikipedia (or any Wikimedia project), provided that you follow the Creative Commons license requirements. That generally means you need to acknowledge where you got the material, and that you must leave that material under the Creative Commons license and may not change it to a more restrictive one. So if you'd like to copy a snippet of an article, or even an entire article, rather than linking, feel free! Just acknowledge where you got it and link back.

This actually has been discussed before, and the community of editors was not very receptive to the idea for those reasons. Wikipedia is an educational resource, not a social network. I'm certainly glad you find it useful (that's why I've volunteered my time to help build the thing, in hopes that it will be), but it's really not that hard to copy out a hyperlink. And you don't have to worry much about dead links--even if the article is later moved to another title, a redirect will be left in place from the old one and your link will still get your reader there.

The most easy answer to this question is "It would violate the privacy policy". Adding Facebook Like and Tweet buttons to the pages will grant both Facebook and Twitter access to your browsing habits on Wikipedia.

Think about all the weird-ass things that you end up reading on WIkipedia. Do you want other people to know about each and every one?

A more complicated answer exists, however. Let us assume that we could solve for the privacy policy issue (that is, choosing to "share" content will be an action that will explicitly tell the user that they are giving up privacy). Let's say a "share" link then opens up a list of places to share to.

Which sites should be in this list? The WIkimedia movement should be agnostic to site and platform; it's one of our ideological issues. So we'll have to put a link for everything. It will look like NASCAR, with four hundred competing logos.

What order should they be in? Most popular, worldwide? Most popular in the language of the wiki that you're currently on? Either of those sort orders will surprise you with their results, I should think.

It's an interesting design problem.

Then we have a third hurdle: the editor community's disdain for "social" layers. The encyclopedia is not something frivolous. And the community is rightfully wary of those who show up and are more interested in the social aspect than the "getting things done" aspect.

Convincing them to achieve consensus about adding social layers would be a difficult battle.

The fourth hurdle is actually one of development. This is a feature that would have to be designed, driven, and developed by the Wikimedia Foundation (for many various reasons, not the least being insurance of code quality before it gets deployed to the cluster). While volunteer developers build some impressive software, the simple fact is that they are (by and large) not focused on the nuances of our privacy policy, or the requirements of our caching layers, or how the databases are sharded, or the security requirements of cluster code.

And, frankly, such a thing really isn't anywhere on our priorities list. It might be nice to experiment, I should think, but to be honest we have so little development resources that this probably couldn't be slotted until 2014.

Wikipedia did for a while, we had a system called the Article Feedback Tool or AFT.

There were several concerns about it:

The first was that it would need moderation, and that the presumption was that the moderation would fall on the existing volunteer community. This was not popular amongst that community. It got worse when the comments started flooding in, many of fans gushing about how much they liked or loathed particular pop stars. Wikipedians were not impressed at the tools for checking through such comments looking for the occasional “yeah but he’s a pedo” type of comment that needed suppression. Worse was the attitude of certain Foundation staff at the time who didn’t see the need to patrol for and suppress such comments, and even seemed to take an attitude of “its only Wikipedia, why bother”. Not surprisingly this didn't go down well with the community and stoked a distrust of the Foundation that years later shows little chance of going away.

Then there was the theory that making it easier to comment on articles rather than correcting them would divert potential new editors into doing such comments, with an expectation that the volunteering community would step in and act on these comments. At the time AFT came out Wikipedia’s editing community appeared to be dwindling in size, so something that in theory would make that worse was not viewed positively by many in the community.

Wikipedia is a collaborative effort, and we like to see useful new contributors. A small minority of articles have had to be protected and newbies who want to make changes have to suggest changes on their talkpages in the hope that others will act on them, there are some volunteers who will respond to such suggestions, but for many it is a chore that comes with their hobby of writing an encyclopaedia, not really what they want to be doing. Increasing the chore part of their hobby wasn’t something they were keen on, especially when it was done in a mushroom farming style (keep people in the dark and occasionally shovelling a new layer of shit over them).

We already have talkpages for articles where people can suggest changes and query anomalies. I sometimes use them to query anomalies that I find in articles such as bits that I don’t understand. Some of those get fixed very quickly, others wait for years. It isn’t a part of the Wikipedia project that I would suggest expanding, especially not at the price of getting fewer new editors.

Something that might work on an online retail site isn’t necessarily going to work on an online encyclopaedia. People commenting on a site like amazon are unlikely to buy less as a result, overall I assume they buy more, otherwise Amazon wouldn’t do it. Comments might increase the frequency of people using the site, but pretty much everyone who uses the internet and speaks one of the main languages of Wikipedia already uses Wikipedia. According to both theory and practise it was likely to be damaging to the community that edits Wikipedia and that’s why it was stopped.

Let me start by disabusing a notion that is implicit in the question: that there is no such social community based around Wikipedia.

There very, very much is.

Many people within this community will rail at the very idea that the Great Work is, in fact, a form of social network, or that there is indeed any social component to the editor community at all (the encyclopedia is, after all, Serious Business).

Given the number of times I've bought drinks for members of the editor, developer, and staff community - even people I've only "met" in person ten minutes ago - there's no way anyone can say there's no "social" aspect of it.

Right now, this community numbers 75,000 - 85,000 people worldwide and is declining in size. I daresay most of those people are really cognizant of this community. Most of our editors are (perhaps mercifully) unaware of it.

The community exists in talk pages, mailing lists, and on irc. We are very active and chatty, in fact - all hallmarks of social activity.

I'd peg the number of people who are that involved at around 15,000. I expect I'm being generous.

However, I'm not sure that's what you're really asking, so I'll have a go in a different direction.

I expect that what you're really asking is this: "How much would the WIkipedia social community grow if software were introduced that made engaging with the community easier?"

By this I mean things like "making it easier for users to communicate with each other, without having to use arcane talk pages" and "making it easier for users who share skills and interests to find each other to work collaboratively" and "making the software encourage positive action and gratitude versus negative action and 'bite-y-ness'".

I think the answer is that it would probably double in size but then have difficulty getting any larger. The reason is that Wikipedians - people who enjoy making an encyclopedia - are fairly rare. We'll have a standard community churn rather than what we have now, which is a community drain.

Being a "social activity" isn't the mission of the Wikimedia/Wikipedia movement. Adding social features to elevate the social graph is not what we're about. But adding features that elevate interest graphs is very much what we should be doing - all the better to make collaboration easier.

The "social" part of it is a side-effect. Like-minded people enjoying each other's company. So it goes.

I think people are confused by the difference between simple UI design and pooly done UI design. I feel that Wikipedia is a prime example of simple UI design. Just because the design is simple does not mean it is poorly done. I feel that there are so many challenges with reshaping the UI to a more sophisticated or less antiquated design, and that wikipedia has wisely chosen to go with the slow and steady route.

I dont feel that the interface is poor at all. It achieves its prime directive of providing the user with quick access to a massive amount of content. Yes, they are lacking in the bells and whistles, but that does not constitute poor UI.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedie that should provide you with information and with facts. If you start building social media elements into a system, not just normal users will come, there will also be spammers and than companies that try to reach to a new audience maybe. Most social media platforms reached the point at which the user where bombed with commercials but you do not just get spam from the platform itself, you are at the same time spammed by the companies that promote their stuff too. So IMO in the case of wikipedia it ist totally ok to stay unsocialised :P

And like Brandon Harris just sayed it, you do not want everybody to know what crazy stuff you read! :)

This question is surprisingly more complex than you'd think. The short answer is "we are working on it" but that's kind of a cop-out. The longer answer follows:

First and foremost, it is non-trivial to make any kind of changes to a top-five site that has such a consensus-driven community. And I mean every change, no matter how minor.

Wikipedia is not a privately held company. Larger sites (e.g., Facebook) can and do make radical interface changes without consulting the user-base but the reason that this is possible for them is precisely because they are privately held.

The Wikimedian community has a strong sense of ownership for the product, and rightly so: these are the people who write the articles. Thus, the community believes (correctly, in my opinion) that they should be consulted on changes to the interface.

This process takes a great deal of time. It is rather glacial in its nature.

That said, the Foundation has taken a position that allows it to make what we think are minor or important software changes as needed (such as deploying WikiLove, Feedback Dashboard, or the upcoming New Page Patrol interface). Mostly, these changes are subtle or invisible to "readers" (and most "editors").

Second, writing software is hard. You may think it isn't - especially if you have a passing history doing so - but you must understand that every Wikipedia feature must:

• Be able to be localized into over 370 languages. This is an enormous task.
• Be able to run on pretty much every browser ever made. Until the usage of IE 6 drops below .03% globally, we have to support it - which nearly always doubles development time. (We were only recently able to remove IE 5 for Macintosh from the support matrix)
• Be highly scalable. The Foundation has a shoestring budget. We do not have thousands and thousands of servers with which to generate every page; instead we make very smart use of caching systems.
• Be extremely private. Our privacy policy prevents us from doing any kind of tracking of our users. This makes developing features difficult at times.
• Be able to be used anonymously. The number of people who use the sites who do not have user accounts is astronomical. This limits our focus.

Third, we have fewer programmers. This is because of several reasons:

• We are a non-profit. As such we pay bottom-of-scale. It is difficult to attract programming talent when they can make 30% to 50% more money anywhere else.
• We prefer to employ the Free Culture-aligned. We prefer to hire people who are mission aligned or dedicated. A love of the work and what it stands for is extremely important to us.
• We prefer to think globally. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to develop things meant for a global audience. As such, we have determined that hiring from all cultures helps us to understand our weaknesses. We're not the best at this, mind you, but we're working on it.

That said, we are innovating, we're just doing it very slowly. Here are some projects you may be interested in:

• Athena, a mobile-first redesign ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Athena )
• The visual editor ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor )
• Upload Wizard ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UploadWizard )
• Liquid Threads 3.0 ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0 )
• Global Profile ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GlobalProfile/design )

If you are a Twitter, Facebook etc user you can probably add corresponding share, like, +1 etc buttons to your browser, and use them for Wikipedia plus anything else. Just look for the appropriate extensions. For what is worth many mobile browser have sharing options included out of the box.

Also note that "Twitter, Facebook" are just two of a large bunch of social / sharing services, beaten in many countries like Rusia, China etc by other local services. Deciding which services should Wikipedia promote in which countries and languages would just be a (wrong and pointless) nightmare. Let Wikipedia focus on what they have been doing best: organize a great source of independent and crowdsourced knowledge, free of any advertising and commercial ties.

Wikipedia didn't create this. It merely provided a channel for people to act upon many motivations they have for sharing content – which vary a lot in a spectrum ranging from altruistic reasons to more selfish ones. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_on_Earth_would_I_want_to_contribute_to_a_wiki for a comprehensive (but non-exhaustive) list of possible reasons.

To achieve the same kind of effect, one would simply have to give people means (a platform) to achieve the goal of sharing, without getting in the way of their motivations, whatever they are. For instance, Wikipedia wouldn't have succeeded without the instant publishing nature of wiki editing. One might want to cater to a different demographic, using different community rules – and it is especially important that the goal and motivations don't overlap with Wikipedia's, since due to its popularity, it leaves little room for "competitors".

I feel like something Wikipedia can learn from Quora is being more accessible to content creators.

Wikipedia's complicated set of rules and regulations make the barrier to entry fairly high. On Quora, I can write whatever I think, and if its a good source of information, its quickly upvoted. But its easier on Quora because you answer questions, on Wikipedia you try to accumulate all possible knowledge on a given topic, the latter is a much harder problem.

Wikipedia is one of the earliest social systems on the web, I feel like if Wikipedia had a better system for people talking to the editors and gaining approval (I'm thinking along the lines of a friendly code review process) instead of making edits and then seeing it reverted (which happens a lot to new users) as it happens right now would make it much easier for a new Wikipedia user to feel comfortable with creating content.

Yes and no.

Some of Quora's interface innovations are only possible because they're targeting a different use case.

Quora is looking for quick contributions that don't have to be verified, marked up, or even edited by anyone else. So they can use a simpler text editor.

Wikipedia has the universe in a textarea, the need for verifiable references, and the legacy of almost ten years of convention. It's powerful, but hard to use.

But the more interesting question is about community design. Quora is more explicit about satisfying the user's need to be valued -- you get to own answers, you have an avatar, you can list your claimed expertise. With Wikipedia, it's all about the article, which has no single author -- and therefore leads to much more contention and sometimes acrimony, but also to greater collaboration.

Quora has really slick design -- sometimes in very subtle aspects -- and I take my hat off to their team. As for making an editor that's as easy to use on Wikipedia, this is going to be hard, but we're committed to that. It's a matter of technology.

As for community design that's a more fundamental question. It's not clear yet that questions on Quora will evolve and get better over time. That said I think you may see more experiments from the WMF in the future about social identity on Wikipedia, as a way of promoting more civility and community involvement.

@Brandon Harris gives the proximate and official answer: that inserting these buttons in their usual forms leaks the fact that a person has visited a page to Twitter or Facebook (when the feature-supporting Javascript or images are fetched).

However, it is possible with some effort to implement these buttons with no leak until the user actively chooses the option. (It's easier to do with 'Tweet this' than Facebook's 'Like'.)

That Wikipedia has not prioritized such effort is most likely because there's no pressing need to privilege these particular two mechanisms (and companies) with prominent placement on every article. As you've noted, the fallback of copying and pasting the URL is easy enough.

If this is a common need, you can make it even easier with a 'bookmarklet', which adds to your browser a small script, as if it were a bookmark, that can run inside any page you'd like.

Here's an official 'share on Twitter' bookmarklet: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/share-bookmarklet

Here's info about an unofficial Facebook 'Like' bookmarklet: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_like_anything_on_the_web_safely.php

Each of these can be used on any internet page. Neither will leak info about the pages you're viewing to Twitter or Facebook until the moment you choose to activate them.

You could even go one step further, and customize either your browser, or your own Wikipedia interface skin (if you are a logged-in Wikipedian) to insert a 'tweet this' or 'like' button into the pages that you view. To do this in your browser, you would use a utility such as 'Greasemonkey' (Firefox) or the 'User Scripts' feature (Chrome) to add your own bookmarklet-like Javascript to Wikipedia pages. To do this via a Wikipedia skin, you'd use the often-overlooked 'personal scripts' feature of MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia. (See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/JavaScript#Personal_scripts )

In many cases, that article may not exist. Wikipedia only has articles on subjects that have been covered in reasonable depth by multiple independent reliable sources. Most websites haven't been covered that way, and so aren't appropriate subjects for an article at all.

They also probably want to present their own "branding" and "marketing", and Wikipedia explicitly disallows that. Companies are not given any favorable editorial control over Wikipedia articles about them, and are in fact discouraged from directly editing the articles at all. Any attempts at "whitewashing", if noticed, quickly lead to reverts, and if necessary administrators protecting the page in question or blocking the offending editor.

Besides, if you want to find the Wikipedia article on anything, it just takes one googling of it. The article will show up in the top two or three results.

In Germany we have a little platform called Twick.it which aims at improving the first sentence of a Wikipedia article, to find a good explanation in a maximum of 140 characters which is intelligible to the average reader.

Twick.it has a good connection to the German speaking Wikipedia community and also the German section of Wikimedia. Achim Raschka, Pavel Richter, Frank Schulenburg and Nando Stöcklin are among the supporters to name but a few: http://twick.it/show_users.php Twick.it has recently started a podcast of Free Knowledge in cooperation with the German Wikimedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twick.it#Podcast Every day two of the explanations (which are under CC-licence) are read and published across various channels.

Twick.it does not define itself as a social network though http://twick.it/blog/en/twickit-is-not/ So far there are no discussion sites and no chat functionality. It is the aim of Twick.it do deliver only the best possible explanation without the Edit War and without the need for admins. Have a look at the concept http://twick.it/blog/en/concept/ or the FAQ http://twick.it/blog/en/faq/ for more detail.

At the moment Twick.it is trying to find more supporters in English speaking countries. So we would be happy if you join us.

Thanks for asking!

Creating a new Wikipedia article is difficult. Editing an existing article is easy, so start there. I recommend that your first edit be to correct a spelling, punctuation, or grammar error, or maybe to add a hyperlink if you come across a term that you don’t fully understand.

Your biggest hurdle will be to learn the mechanics of editing. There is a visual (WYSIWYG) editor and a wiki markup editor. I prefer the latter, because I am old-school and was familiar with markup languages before I started editing Wikipedia, but you will probably want to start with the Visual Editor, because learning how to use it is faster. For details on how to edit, see: Wikipedia:Tutorial/Editing - Wikipedia.

After you have become comfortable with very simple editing, you can start making more substantial contributions, like adding a paragraph or two. That is really a fairly major jump, as you will want to become familiar with Wikipedia style guidelines and policies. You should start by looking at: Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia - Wikipedia. There is a lot to read there, but it is worth the effort if you want to make good contributions to Wikipedia.

Global watchlists would be helpful. Many wikimedians edit multiple wikis among the thousand hosted by the Wikimedia foundation. Global watchlists would mean that an editor who speaks three languages and is active on three language versions of wiktionary and two of Wikipedia could have one watchlist for all five wikis.

“Watch section” would be very useful, often there are many active sections on one talkpage and only one you are really trying to follow.

Watch for x days would be an extremely useful - often when you drop a message on someone’s talkpage you want to see responses, but not further clutter your watchlist. If I could either watch a section or only watch for 30 days I would happily opt in to watching all talk sections that I comment in.

Ignore reverts would be a useful feature - currently many of the articles on my watchlist will include an entry that such and such a user has reverted to the edit by some other user. But if all that has happened is that an IP editor has vandalised an article and someone has fixed that I really don’t need that cluttering up my watchlist.

For understanding how Wikipedia works, The Signpost weekly newsletter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single

For discussing how Wikipedia works, or doesn't work, there are the Village Pump discussion boards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump

For answers that aren't already in a Wikipedia article, the Reference Desks (a bit like Quora): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk

For help finding references, the Wikipedia Library: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library

For resolving editing disputes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution

For collaborating, the WikiProjects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject

For new editors, the Teahouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse

I can actually think of several things that could be done;
- First, allow people to have non private watchlists. Why do they "have" to be secret. Sure you might want to make some private, but if others can see what is on your watchlist it might increase visibility of the topic.
- Allow Watchlists permission to be given by the individual to others they trust
- Allow more flexibility of maintaining the watchlists using bots such as removing deleted files, notifying users of items on their watchlists up for promotion or deletion.
- Allow a count of how many people are watching that article besides you
- Allow the user to categorize or highlight certain things or even group by something like category.