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Infrequent Anonymous Cowards Reliable on Wikipedia
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at Dartmouth University have recently discovered that infrequent anonymous contributors, so called "Good Samaritans," are as reliable as registered users who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain. A graph from page 31 of the group's original paper (pdf file) shows that the quality of contributions of anonymous users goes down as the number of edits increases while quality goes up with the number of edits for registered users."
Unlike what some users may tell you, many anonymous users contribute content and not vandalize. The quality of the edits per se is all over the place, but this is to be expected, as there is no way a new contributor can know all the nuances of the in-house referencing system, or the indications made by the Manual of Style. But they do try.
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RESPECT ME!
This is to be expected. A lot of people read wikipedia to look up stuff and learn and all that. They never really wanted to edit it though cuz they're lazu. And then when they look up a topic near and dear to their heart like a specific video game or show and find something incorrect or totally lacking and just can't bear to not do something about it. But that's as far as the motivation takes them. I'd assume the majority of editors are like that. Who has like hours and hours to write really good articles all the time?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Which is why I should be allowed to accrue karma.
Doing such a study requires checkuser access, which is something only a few people on Wikipedia have. Fortunately, I am one of them. I just sampled ten users out of the new user log. I am assuming a 1:1 mapping between IP and user (that is, that a user made no anonymous edits except with the IP he used to register his account). The number of anonymous edits prior to registeration for each user was:
A - 0
B - 0
C - 0
D - 2
E - 0
F - 0
G - 0
H - 0
I - 0
J - 0
In short: most of the people registering accounts had made no edits prior to registering. It's common knowledge on Wikipedia that something like half of all accounts registered never make any edits at all, so this makes sense.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You have described the dilemma of the Wikipedia editor/administrator.
There are edits that are obviously unhelpful; there are others that are clearly helpful. But there is a gray area of edits that falls in between, and for which editors' reactions vary a lot.
A good example is an anonymous/new editor adding unsourced information to a carefully-sourced Featured article. You can't let the information just remain there, as editors have gone through that page, double-checked the citations and validity of the statements, and generally polished the article to have its prose crisp and clean. But you cannot just revert the edit wholesale, as the edit was not done in bad faith. While sometimes the edits can be fixed, there are many times that the edits are incorrigible, and need to be completely reworked or removed (such as introducing widespread, irrelevant rumors on the biography of a celebrity).
So, at this time, some editors remove the text, with an explanation in the edit summary. Sometimes anonymous editors read the edit summaries, sometimes they don't. Often they wonder why their text got removed, justifiably so. Some users take that personally and begin accusing us of being "grammar Nazis", or even "suppressors of the truth" (I've heard that one before). But in a way, we're just trying to keep everything in order.
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I often don't log in when i want to edit an article, because i don't care how my "rep" is, i just want to fix something.
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!