User-Generated Content Vs. Experts

Jay points out a Newsweek piece which suggests that the era of user-generated content is going to change in favor of fact-checking and more rigorous standards. The author points to Google's Knol and the "people-powered" search engine Mahalo as examples of the demand for more accurate information sharing. Quoting: "User-generated sites like Wikipedia, for all the stuff they get right, still find themselves in frequent dust-ups over inaccuracies, while community-posting boards like Craigslist have never been able to keep out scammers and frauds. Beyond performance, a series of miniscandals has called the whole "bring your own content" ethic into question. Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the reference site's users make more than 50 percent of its edits. Perhaps more notoriously, four years ago a computer glitch revealed that Amazon.com's customer-written book reviews are often written by the book's author or a shill for the publisher. 'The wisdom of the crowds has peaked,' says Calacanis. 'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'"

Comments

"1% doing 50% of edits" is not bad

[1 a bee]

The fact that 1% of users do 50% of the edits at wikipedia should not surprise anyone. There are 2 things that a "user" can do at a wiki: read or write. Reading is much easier and faster than writing (duh). So you'll expect a lot more reading to go on, than writing. The "surprise", apparently, is that this writing is not distributed evenly among users who both read and write. In fact, this one data point suggests a power law may be at work here, e.g. 1% of users do 50% of edits, 2% of users do 75% of edits, 4% of users do 87.5% of edits, ... Now what would be so surprising about finding a power law in an organic, social phenomenon like a wiki?

Actually, I find this 1/50 statistic for wikipedia quite impressive. I would have thought--mod me down, I don't care--that there would be even fewer industrious wiki-heads doing even more of the editing. (And hey, don't forget, a lot of this editing *is* simply tedious work that most of us cannot bother with.)

--
Statistics? Sure, just tell me what you want me to prove..

Re:Wtf

[Gromgull]

Actually - the 1% are the users who hang around and correct grammar and punctation mistakes, they clearly make many edits because each edit is only a few chars. The majority of NEW content on the other hand is added by users who may make few other edits. Aaron writes more on this: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia