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

Anaconda

[webrunner]

I hear the number of anacondas has tripled in the last six months. Maybe that should be in the article?

Define: Important

[Sub Zero 992]

Well, maybe both Mr. Swartz and Mr. Wales are correct.

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 :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.

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.

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.

They still don't get it

[Metasquares]

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.

Re:They still don't get it

[ergo98]

My voice wasn't being heard because I did not have the time to make thousands of changes to the encyclopedia.

Aren't those edits how you're getting your voice heard? Or were you more concerned with gaining credibility among the Wikipedia inner cicle?

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

[the-intersocialist]

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.

Re:Editcountitis

[Maru Dubshinki]

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.

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:More Statistics & What I Expect

[qazsedcft]

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.

types of editors

[gEvil (beta)]

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.

Ignore that man

[inviolet]

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.