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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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