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Who (Really) Writes Wikipedia
Nico ? La ! writes "Aaron Swartz questions Jimbo Wales' (Wikimedia's founder) belief and evangelized truth that only around 500 people are the most important contributors to Wikipedia. Whereas the truth is that they probably are the people who do the most editing. From the post: 'For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around).'" Which ultimately means that Wikipedia in some ways much more closely mimics a real encyclopedia, with many contributors writing the bulk of the content, but a small group massaging that text to insure standards compliance with the overall work. Interesting thing there and worth your time, although the super-computer thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I hear the number of anacondas has tripled in the last six months. Maybe that should be in the article?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
What about these statistics? Could Wales perhaps post average number of edits per page with a standard distribution? What about the same for average number of users contributing to page? What about statistics for average number of characters changed per edit?
Things that have many books written about them are going to be edited by a lot of people that read those books (like The Beatles). But if I want to read up on Procul Harum (A not-so-well-known rock band), I'm assuming that there is some die hard nutjob out there with two children named Procul and Harum that filled in most of the information in that page.
Is this a good thing? Well, yes and no. I think The Beatles' entry holds to more rigorous standards than Procul Harum's on account of the possibility of one person unintentionally inserting their personal views into Wikipedia. For instance, "Known as the World's Greatest Rock Band" may be appropriate for The Beatles' page but not for Procul Harum's. Yet, we all know how insane fans treat their favorite bands. Passion and emotion are not useful tools when authoring Wikipedia or history in general. And that, in my opinion, is Wikipedia's greatest hinderance.
My work here is dung.
Well, maybe both Mr. Swartz and Mr. Wales are correct.
:P]. Wikipedia is trying hard for quality, hence the importance of copy editors - those quick edit users who do a lot of banging articles into shape. They do an important job. These are the general-purpose-but-shallow editors.
Encyclopedias are measured by the number of articles they have, the average size of those articles and the "Quality" of the articles [here see other disputes
Of course, without the initial contribution of a large number of specialists, the working draft of many articles would never get done. These are the specialist-article-experts who know what they know, and leave the rest to others.
So, this is likely to be another case of everyone having some of the truth and only a more enlightened, liberal view of the situation can lead to insights which can be used to improve the entire content creation process.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
"although the super-computer thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me."
/.)
Be bold!
Just hit the edit button yourself! (instead of complaining at
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
The number of edits you make means nothing because an edit can mean writing an entirely new article or a very small change (some articles, such as "peerage", have hundreds, if not thousands, of such edits).
The obsession over edit count was the reason I stopped contributing to Wikipedia to begin with: My voice wasn't being heard because I did not have the time to make thousands of changes to the encyclopedia.
The fact that we are still having this discussion indicates that little has changed.
They point out that it's only a 500 people editing most of Wikipedia. But are they talking only the English version. Something to note is that many of the Top Users of Wikipedia are language bots concerned with propagating interwiki information accross languages. Number one is Hashar for the French language. I imagine the strategy is that getting a bad translation only requires someone fluent in French to correct for it to be a good article -- that person doesn't need to know the information because it's pretty much already there in broken French.
Another large contributor by number of edits is GuanoBot who's only job is to bypass redirects.
Are these bots that are helpful skewing the statistics because they are needed for maintenance?
My work here is dung.
Nope, this small group is tweaking the text the way they see fit, basing their changes on their personal opinions and feelings and not on some god-given inspiration that leads to better quality or with standards compliance in mind. So the conclusion above is almost valid - it is like a real encyclopedia, but with an anarchic structure in the team of editors and no educated QA team. It's more like an encyclopedia reworked by a non-cooperating team of censors.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
As with anything that keeps stats or running totals, there are those that seek to achieve the highest count possible. Wikipedia is not immune to this. There are those that will make 50 small, distinct edits to an article (each comprising minor changes, like punctuation, formatting, spelling corrections, etc) to increase their edit count.
It is my personal experience that those with the highest edit counts peruse any and all articles applying Style Guidelines. This results in changes like like correcting capitalization of headers ("External Links" -> "External links"), placing bullets in front of external links, formatting dates, wikifying appropriate words, updating links that redirect, etc. Once a person becomes familiar with the guidelines they can easily nitpick pretty much any article and find something to correct (or at least change to their personal preference).
Also, don't forget those that run bots. That's a very easy method to rack up edit points.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
This is not a surprise. That is simply another example of nature's laws on the web. This is not much different from the now well known fact that most stories on Digg are submitted by a handful of people (see: Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg's HomePage Content).
Simpy
Any article that sees heavy editing, or is in any way involved in a current event, gets immediately locked except for these privledged users. They even go against their own policy (lauded so forcefully at all other times) when it suits them regarding protecting the day's featured page or protecting articles indefinitely (for example, Jews).
5% of Slashdot users create 95% of the content.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
> 5% of Slashdot users create 95% of the content.
That high?!
I think the problem is arising because of lack of distinction between two different types of "editors." There are people who edit the content of an article (content editors), and there are people who edit the copy (copyeditors). One is concerned with altering the actual material that is being presented to present a different subset of information. The other is concerned with making edits for grammatical consistency, readability, and style.
This guy's the limit!
The trend is also for the vandal "community". I am a retired vandal (as of September 2006). What the Wikipedia community doesn't want you to know is most of the vandals are actually ex/undercover Wikipedians who vandalize either to get revenge or to test the system. The vandals are actually very technical in their nature. and some even exploit vulnerabillities in the mediawiki code. The most infamous attacks happened in February 2005 (goatse on the main page), August 2005 (Willy on Wheels replacing the Wikipedia logo) and October 2005 (thousands of randomly generated accounts attacking pages with SUPER COOL on them).
Reecently, a lot of the vandal community has been under attack due to an eassy known as WP:DENY (basically WP:OFFICE for vandals). While loads of categories have been deleted off the Official "face" of Wikipedia, the vandal community are still at large, even when they are just lurking rather than actually vandalizing. It is the fear of vandalism that is worse than the results.
Even Willy on Wheels is harmless, he just likes to put as many pages "on wheels", and due to his method, to be "on wheels" is like the vandal version to Wikify. A point of contention is the "anti-vandal" community, which discredits a lot of Wikipedia. The CVU aka counter vandalism unit is an embaressment and just encourages vandals to play games instead of going to work on serious projects. In fact their latest "logo" features a anime girl with a riot shield. Any vandal who sees that will just laugh.
If Wikipedia wants to eliminate vandalism, they need to get to the core. Stop being "on wheels". Actually enforce policy, be liberally inclusionist, allow all points of view be addresses fairly and do not bite users and replace AFD with something more sensible, like outsourcing topic scope to Wikiprojects instead of having random people say keep or delete which is utter ignorance.
I am a vandal, I do not like vandalizing, but until Wikipedia gets the point and respects its users its going to keep attacting new ones. It will only be a matter of time before a vandal gets shell access and runs a SQL statement that vandalzes millions of pages, which will shut the Wiki down for quite a long time before it is fully restored.
Oh, t3h 1r0n4y! It's ensure. Unless standards compliance has some sort of liability associated with it these days.
They also host wiktionary. For example:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ensure
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/insure
Just saying...
Wikipedia actually has a large back log of unmaintained articles that could be improved if more editors took to it. The Wikify category was only around 2000 articles in January, but with huge newcomer influx following the Million article milestone this year, the category has over 8000 articles in it. I have wikified hundreds, but I gave up because of the elitist cabal who just "tag and dump" articles into the category.
See the category, it is an example that follows the open source community in general, that do not want to do the non sexy work such as article formatting. Instead they like to POV push and write fancruft instead. This is why I became a Willy on Wheels.
That's not on the procul harum wikipedia page! it must be lies! Bear in mind: 1) I'm not serious 2) It will be edited otherwise within 30 secs of me posting this. 3) The whole parent post could be oblique wikipedia vandalism.
And Roland Piquepaille cuts and pastes the other 95%.
Jimmy Wales is wrong, and probably on purpose...
There is no glory in being one of a million diffuse contributors.
But there *is* glory in being one of a small elite group, the group that really matters, the group that the founder adores. Jimmy is baiting his contributors with this possibility, in order to motivate them.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
TRUTHINESS! ....That is all.......
Its all about the "Truthiness"!
, to make wikipedia a closed system. They are trying SO hard to persuade people that it is worse to let everybody contribute, and better for a number of 'select' elite to do it.
Typical elitist control frenzy. They couldnt handle people actually doing something as together as in 'the people'.
Read radical news here
It makes total sense.
If you only know a few bits of information, you're not about to post to more articles than you can contribute to.
If you know how things are supposed to look under wiki-formatting but not about its actual content, then you're just going to 'fairy' up the text with links and bolding and breaking chunks up into paragraphs, but you're going to do a lot MORE of it because while Wikipedia only needs a certain amount of information, it always needs wiki-fairies to make it all look coherent.
Edit count, like post and reply counts on any forum (including Slashdot) is a great big joke, and anyone who doesn't get that hasn't been on long enough.
I would also guess that most of the editors are single white mails, age 12-25. Thank God for the lack of social skills that allow hundreds to stay at home and spend a weekend making Wikipedia changes! Woohoo!!
Of course! Those dastardly mails, white and brown and purple.
I bet you it's all because of postal workers -- I mean, if you were raised by postal workers, you'd be lacking in social skills, too!
The 5% are the ones that are unaware that their "b0xen" have been hijacked and are being used for crapflooding /.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
I am a Wikipedia contributor, with around 5800 edits. I started editing in 2005. Most of my edits are minor ones, cleanup, etc. Although I have contributed a lot of text to many articles, I also enjoy contributing free-use images and providing references for articles in order to improve the reliability of an article; too many articles on Wikipedia do not cite their sources. Jimmy Wales should not state that only several hundred users are the most important editors on Wikipedia, because in reality everyone on Wikipedia who is contributing, whether by adding text or by cleaning up articles or doing maintenance, they're all helping out in one way or another. Most people all work on different stuff, so nobody can be called the "most important", its too broad a term.
Having a background in traditional encyclopaedias, how can Wales even imagine that it is possible for his 500 core users to have created the thing? I'd imagine it takes more than 500 people to make a regular encyclopaedia. For 500 people to have the knowledge to essentially make wikipedia beggars belief.
Perhaps he imagines that he has somehow created a congregration of 500 incredibly knowledgeable polymaths. Rather I would believe that he has a group of 500 obsessive pedants and count-watchers. The pedants I don't mind, for I am one of those. But people who are only interested in their edit count? Can a person with 25,000 edits really be doing anything useful?
Could very well be so. I registered at Wikipedia in order to write an article about speedrunning. I have contributed to many other articles, but like stated, that's just copyediting and generally banging it into one cohesive shape that complies with the rest of the site. Frankly, I'm okay with that. If everybody were to sign up and write an article about the one thing they liked best, imagine how many good articles that would bring. Then all you need is a handful (a few million, perhaps) editors who are able to remove any bias or POV (point of view) the original authors might have added, and that's where it gets interesting.
If you are no longer contributing, then your voice still won't be heard. Reputation on Wikipedia is immensley important. That makes sense: why would policy decisions be made by those who haven't proven they understand the goals of the project or those who don't have a track record of improving the site by contributing articles?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They are very different words.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
Did you know that Procol Harum has had 13 albums which didn't do very well in the states but did excellent in the UK?
eldavojohn
Every time I hear someone like you complaining that his voice wasn't being heard, or that his edits have been reversed without valid reason, I ask him to show me the article(s) where this has happened, so I can check the history log myself and see what really happened. And you know what ? I never get an answer...
This tends to make me think that such complains about wikipedia are generally exaggerated and/or groundless. In other words, the edits have probably been reversed for a valid reason.
So, Metasquares, show us the articles as well as the history log entries corresponding to your edits, so that we can all see whether what you say is true or not.
I personally find that one cannot just go and pour in all the information in as much as 1000 of pages. Anywhere on the internet. Wikipedia is no exception. Any serious editor who wants to contribute positively knows that most of our knowledge is prejudiced (received-knowledge). Most of us when get down to write something which needs accountability, we just write what we are absolutely sure of. Of course there are different levels of how-much-surety-means-i-am-correct for every individual, but that is why one cannot have 1000 edit counts (let alone edits on 1000 different pages) all referring to content addition. Those edits include spelling corrections, reversions after vandalism, discussions and many other things.
Number of edit counts do show one thing though: your obsession with Wikipedia - to stay there and do something. Having higher priority in discussions, becoming an admin, etc. are all rewards for that, and come on guys, it is nothing unexpected! Wikipedia has long passed the point of just being a site anyone can edit, it is more of a community.
PS: Slashdot is different because it demotes accountability and promotes heated discussions. Wikipedia is just opposite of it.
Colbert.
Wikipedia could help crack this whole logjam with some simple user interface improvements. Each titled section should have a "trackback" link for linking to it in another page (eg. if I linked/quoted it in this post). They've already got the "id" HTML tag. In fact, each paragraph should have a "link/quote me" link, maybe even a link that adds an ID to a sentence, phrase or paragraph fragment upon linking to it.
Wikipedia is an "open reference" site. It should include much more support for embedding its content into other content. Each entry could have stats of who links/quotes to it. And an interface with a customizable formula with user-specified weighting to factors like linking/quoting, editing, initiating, commenting. Then we could all easily use the Wikipedia at a meaningful level of granularity, encouraging much more quoting (which encourages more chance of editing by a wider audience), and backfeeding more data about how Wikipedia is created and used.
--
make install -not war
If you examine anything political you'll find that there seems to be groups of people with agenda's trying to "rewrite history" by organising and controlling web pages.
I did a few simple editing experiments and found that there is a definate slant depending on whether the page is a politically conserverative or liberal page. Bottom line: Political organization are definately looking at the Wikipedia as a way to influence voters, especially those in the 18-21 age group.
Also, 78% of all statistics are just made up on the fly.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
We had a session about it at Wikimania 2006. It confirmed my own experiences as founder of WikiFur. I rarely get the time to make content edits, as "management" issues take priority.
"text to insure standards"
I've been looking for a way to protect my heraldic flags aginst fire or theft.
Thanks Slashdot.
Ga
Sturgeon's Revelation... 90% of everything is crap...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
But it's still the dumbest place to go for facts. Let's get a whole lotta of know it alls together who only want their view of the world heard and then we can determine what gets written into wikipedia. Genius!
The bottom line is that, while technical articles (on most disciplines and fields) on wikipedia are very good (better than anywhere else on the internet even), articles that are about history, religion, politics,movies, personalities, or recent events are hopelessly (though not always systemically) biased and full of unrepresentative crap. This is because wikipedia runs on de-facto consensus (though it's not supposed to) and only the most (and biggest) noisemakers get their edits on the article, and detractors cause endless revert-wars, edit-wars, vandalisms, admin intervention, article protection/semi-protection, insults in user talk pages (some nasty ones too), blocks, mediation cabals, RfC's, RfA's, secret edit-cabals, tag-warring, NPOV, TotallyDisputed etc. etc. and all sorts of things that are part of the dark and invisible underbelly of wikipedia that you DON'T see.
An encyclopedia is not (IMHO) supposed to contain articles that are highly controversial and subject to different interpretations. It should be about objective and verifiable facts. 90% of the articles on wikipedia that are non-technical contain maybe 10% of verifiable facts, and 90% noise.
The sad truth is that the high visibility of wikipedia (Google Searches usually point to wikipedia articles on the search subject first or second or third, if an article on the subject exists) means that people READ all this nonsense and, unaware of the many problems of wikipedia, assume it to be the truth based on a facade of legitimacy that wikipedia presents (at least, as far as the cats I listd above are concerned). These edits that are put there by cabals of editors, many of whom hold extremist views or represent organisations that have such extremist views are thus propagated into the masses of readers as facts, without the right balance to them, which is very damaging.
That's what I think anyways, feel free to flame me down or whatever. Any replies and/or responses would be interesting to me as it would give me an idea as to how many people on slashdot regard wikipedia articles as canonically true and always NPOV.
~~~~
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Wait, Slashdot has content now?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
... just the other day, which is: With all that history data available, why doesn't wikipedia have a "blame annotation" mode so I can see who last touched a given line of an article, and when?
"Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should." *grin*
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
and the number of users in that contributing 5% has tripled in the last 6 months!
I'm sure this comment is redundant (so mod me down) but Wikipedia doesn't "mimic a real encyclopedia", it is an encyclopedia; a real encyclopedia.
From the dictionary:
Can we ever have a REAL site with "news for nerds, stuff that matters" rather than this faux "site" that closely mimics a real nerd site? Someone should mod the fucking blurb itself "flamebait". Taco, take away all your own points, wanker! "Real" encyclopedia, indeed.
The problem is too many people lack in maturity. :|
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein
Mostly I just contribute to other articles. Things I do:
* Fixing typos (Firefox 2 has built-in spell checking).
* Fixing disambigious links so they point to where they should.
* Fix links so they don't have to redirect.
* Add categories.
* Add templates, stubs and infoboxes.
Sometimes I create own articles, I've probably created around 15, most of which are small though.
The "edit count" fanaticism is indeed a problem for Wikipedia. The edit histories of some of the editors with the highest edit counts are disappointing. Some of them never actually write anything; they just make administrative edits. Others make vast numbers of very minor edits.
Better metrics are possible. A metric like "number of words added which stayed in an article for at least 30 days" would measure useful contributions.
But this isn't the real problem with Wikipedia. The real problem is "churn". Articles do not steadily improve over time. They typically reach about 80% of the "good article" level, and then slowly change over time, with edits of varying quality.
For a striking example of this, see Horse. Take a look at the article at three month intervals. The article is so heavily edited that it changes almost completely every few months. Yet today's version is really no better than the versions from three and six months ago. That's churn.
Napoleon said "Gosh" not "God". It's an important distinction as Jon Heder who plays Napoleon is Mormon, as is the writer, and many of the movie's euphemisms are common to Mormons.
This seems to me to support the recent article protection system that the German edition is working on: allow anyone to make changes, but (for protected articles) require a logged-in user to make the changes visible to non-logged-in users. If the statistics are that most of the content is written by infrequent and unregistered authors, but that a group of 500 people touches everything before it gets very far, primarily doing copyediting, the new protection idea should be very effective. The expected result would be that the masses who generate the bulk of the content wouldn't notice a difference with respect to their own edits, since some registered user will integrate the changes before long anyway (i.e., before they're likely to be browsing in a new session), but they'd see better results for other people's content, because they don't see versions of contraversial articles before they're edited (under the assumption that the real issue with contraversial articles is that different people's versions are partially correct but biased and lack inconveniant details; between all of the versions, there exists the raw text for a good article).
Fucking furries. I've raided your website tons of times. ANONYMOUS DOES NOT FORGIVE, DESU~
... more likely to suffer from Group-Think.
But 150% of all statistics habe blatantly obvious errors.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"Which ultimately means that Wikipedia in some ways much more closely mimics a real encyclopedia, with many contributors writing the bulk of the content, but a small group massaging that text to insure standards compliance"
/.'s standards are met? ... what kinda coverage you all have?
Who insures
Note to editors: in future, please in^H^Hensure standards of English remain high in submissions.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A lot of these people are editing wikipedia as full time jobs - they're on it 8 or more hours a day, often editing controversial entries. And a lot of these people have a distinct discussion style - constant repetition of their point with care not to address any points of the opposition. They will often find the least common denominator to argue with - that is when faced with stern opposition, will stop responding to those with valid points and spend more time arguing with those who write poorly and are not arguing effectively. They also edit in a very insidious manner - making many small edits, many of which are reasonable, to mask or make difficult removal the unreasonable or undiscussed controversial edits.
How difficult would it be for the governments and corporations of the world to hire 500 goons to do this all day?
Zionists
funny you should say that... it was really Elephants... but there has been a lot of confusion about that.
the great things about wikipedia is no truthiness.
-pyrrho
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
My anaconda don't want none unless you got buns hon'!
The "supercomputer thing" was needed to crunch the edit history data for wikipedia. go look at the edit history for some of the pages. Some of them have thousands of edits. Each edit needed to be analysed for how it affected the page and for who did it and then all of that info needs to be cross correlated with the same info for EVERY OTHER EDIT! 100's, possibly thousands of millions! (pinhead!)
This is spot on. Editcountitis is a problem.
Or individual users contribute a whole lot, only to have a small group of twits changing stuff around for a quick ego boost. ;-)
There needs to be a way of stopping people gaming the voting system. It would not be hard for someone to create multiple accounts and vote if it were not for these measures. How else would you stop abuse of the system?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Did you significantly contribute to one or more featured articles, or at least make the attempt? Or perhaps you helped with cleanup or a backlog of tasks. I would say that makes you valuable. For the later, the more edits made the more valuable you will be to the project, for the former it's not so important because writing one featured article is equivalent to hundreds or even thousands of minor edits.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.