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.

Comments

More Statistics & What I Expect

[eldavojohn]

But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit -- this one! With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result completely reverses.

With the shear mass of people writing on Wikipedia, I think you'd be able to find examples of the articles that were heavily contributed to by a large group of people (say things like Fermat's Theorem) and also things that are primarily the work of one person. Frankly, that's what I expected of Wikipedia.

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.

Editcountitis

[Dan East]

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

Re:Editcountitis

[Chacham]

It is an encyclopedia

It *pretends* to be an encyclopedia. It is not, however. Due to its very nature it is a mixture of current thought and old grudges, with the latter being less influential. Calling it an encyclopedia is like mixing all Slashdot comments into one comment and modding it informative.

Much like Digg

[otisg]

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).

Re:Define: Important

[pmc]

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.

Depends what you mean by quality - grammatically correct and logically ordered is one thing. Actual content - possibly in rough and ready form - is another.

What JW is (apparently) arguing is that what he considers the contributions to wikipedia is best measured by "edits", and that by this metric there is a hardcore of 500 users that do most of the work.

What the article argues is that the a better measure of of contribution to wiki is raw material, and that far from 500 people doing it, it is actually orders of magnitude more than this.

My opinion is that anyone treating all edits are equal and using that to derive a metric for measuring user contributions to the site is using a seriously flawed method. Selling the output of this method as "The Truth about who Created Wikipeida (or the Tale of the Noble 500") is just trying to invent history to fit their preconceived notions.

Nobody is the most important

[wackymacs]

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.