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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
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
5% of Slashdot users create 95% of the content.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
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!
1. Jew's isn't protected. 2. Apart from a select few vulnerable pages [for example, the vandalism page] protection is usually dropped very rapidly. 3. I've seen many heavily edited articles that have never been protected... ever. 4. Profit!!! ... don't make unsubstaniated claims.
Oh, t3h 1r0n4y! It's ensure. Unless standards compliance has some sort of liability associated with it these days.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
... more likely to suffer from Group-Think.
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