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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.
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
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.
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.
But on the other hand, the more people view an article the more it is likely to be corrected and balanced for NPOV. This is a little-bit like free market price-correcting mechanisms - it isn't perfect, but in the opinion of many the results are fairly acceptable.
5% of Slashdot users create 95% of the content.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Another way to look at it would be that Wikipedia has an enormous number of policies that newcommers shouldn't be expected to memorize before contributing. So newcommers contribute the meat of an article, and people who have been around for a while apply all the style rules, find a couple categories for it, make sure it has the backlinks it should, etc... Sure, there's room for editorializing there, but hopefully there's enough established people around that they can review each other's work and make sure they're sticking to policy...
And this is a problem, how?
Wikipedia is not a video game where you need to gain exp-points to level. It is an encyclopedia. People spending their days correcting punctuation are also contributing and if ranking higher in the statistics is their motivation, that is fine by me.
Those who make great contributions in the form of content are recognized in another way then statistics: their articles become featured, and that is a far greater honor then beeing the top contributor by means of spellchecking.
Even if edit counters didn't exist though, I think more established editors would still spend a lot of their time keeping things organized and consistent. Sure, the edits you mentioned are nitpicky things that aren't worth adding a line of history for, but there is non-nitpicky cleanup that needs to be done, and it'll be the experienced people that do those. Even just counting things like spelling checks, it's => its, fixing links to disambiguation pages.... those are relatively minor, but they still definitely need to be done.
So explain to me, how does 56% of the content is submitted by the top 100 Digg users relate to the assertion here that the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia content is not controlled by the "Wiki-Elite."
Personally, I think this policy of focusing on total edits for Wikiality is brilliant: it keeps the generalists/prestige mongers focusing on copy editing -- where they can help -- and away from content creation -- where they usually can't. Wikipedia is largely the creation of a bunch of specialist nuts. The "Wiki-Elite" are the nuts whose speciality is Wikipedia. Better to keep them away from the content; otherwise, it's akin to having someone with a degree in journalism reporting on a technical issue.
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
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.
There's a big difference between "heavily edited" and "often vandalized by anonymous users".
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Actually, I think most of those people with the largest number of edits really are tweaking it towards complying with internal standards. Most of them are adding references to unsourced material, or adding {{fact}} tags to mark where unsourced material is so that someone with better knowledge of the subject can find a reference for it, or making stylistic changes towards standardised article structures, categorising information, fixing spelling or grammar errors, debating editorial decisions about what should and shouldn't be included, and things like that. These jobs aren't glamorous, but a lot of wikipedia's biggest contributors work on them.
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?
Err... according to the list of protected pages, the longest any page has been protected is George W. Bush, which has now been protected against moving only for 13 months and against editing by recent or unregistered users for 2 months odd (although it was only unprotected for 7 hours before that, it was vandalised 10 times, compared to 3 edits that were actually kept in the period).
Other than that, there's Gregory Lauder-Frost, which is protected apparently because he threatened to sue, and a couple of other extremely controversial topics that have been protected for over 2 months. Nothing has been protected "indefinitely" unless by that you mean "longer that you're willing to wait for unprotection".
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.
Please. An encyclopedia is a form and genre, not a classification of quality. Your post is as silly as claiming "The Phantom Menace" was not a real movie because it sucked so much.
Encyclopedias are reference sources containing information on a variety of topics. (Don't believe me? Take a look at the many definitions Google pulls up for the query "Define:encyclopedia".) Wikipedia is a reference source which contains information on a variety of topics in an explicitly encyclopedic format. Case Closed. Issues of quality and reliability are entirely separate and unrelated.
Enquiring minds want to know!
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.
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l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
"But on the other hand, the more people view an article the more it is likely to be corrected and balanced for NPOV."
The more people that view an article the more likely the article is to reflect the views of more people. Sometimes that will tend towards a NPOV and sometimes not. The article will increasingly reflect popular opinion (which may not be neutral at all).
"it isn't perfect, but in the opinion of many the results are fairly acceptable."
Perhaps, but not definitive. How do you justify that claim?
When an article can be objective without threatening the views of people it stands a decent chance of being so. Wikipedia is, by its nature, not an objective resource. It is a useful one, though.