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Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors (vice.com)
From a report on Motherboard: According to the results of a recent study that looked at the 250 million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years, only about 1 percent of Wikipedia's editors have generated 77 percent of the site's content. "Wikipedia is both an organization and a social movement," Sorin Matei, the director of the Purdue University Data Storytelling Network and lead author of the study, told me on the phone. "The assumption is that it's a creation of the crowd, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Wikipedia wouldn't have been possible without a dedicated leadership." At the time of writing, there are roughly 132,000 registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month (there are also an unknown number of unregistered Wikipedians who contribute to the site). So statistically speaking, only about 1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day.
So what you're saying is that the main premise of Wikipedia is false.
It is not a crowd-sourced documentation of knowledge. It is the exact same encyclopaedia, written by a few experts, that Wikipedia was supposed to supplant.
Oh, except that instead of having verified and accountable experts like we had in the old format, we now have unverifiable non-experts that aren't accountable, and may put whatever biased crap they want in there.
If it's all the same to you, I'll stick with the merit-based format.
Somehow, I don't think this what founder Jimmy Wales envisioned.
There is a Wikipedia clique that won't accept any additions or changes by anyone who isn't in on it. I have tried to contribute to Wikipedia in the past and have had every single edit reverted. It wasn't because I was breaking rules or adding unsourced data, it was because it conflicted with what the self-appointed arbiters of the articles in question believed or wanted readers to believe.
Because of this, I have given up on Wikipedia completely. I have seen incorrect information and outright vandalism, but I won't lift a finger to help because it will probably get reverted without even being checked.
nothing surprising, this is a pareto distribution which seems to govern any creative endevor. Nearly all songs downloaded are from just 1% of the musicians, for example.
Really nothing to see here I think.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
A lot of Wikipedia articles are just filling in the blanks on some table somewhere. There's probably a Wikipedia article about every place in the US people live, but the article only exists because a bot scanned the Census and built a page for each location found to contain people.
"Wikipedia wouldn't have been possible without a dedicated leadership" who have created bots, notifiers, and other mechanisms to zealously "curate" Wikipedia content by reverting any editing contributed by the other 99% of Wikipedia users.
"The assumption is that it's a creation of the crowd, but this couldn't be further from the truth" because Wikipedia tolerates these practices and cannot be bothered so long as donations far in excess of its operating needs continue to roll in in response to never ending "we need money" campaigns.
So how many Morons did it take to create GNU/Linux?
How many Morons volunteer for lifesaving charities?
The only Moron i see here is you.
How does that compare to other encyclopedias ?
I'd be shocked if was even as many as 1%. First, they admit openly that there are a huge number of unregistered editors... I know that I've made plenty of edits and new pages there without ever thinking to register. Who wants to deal with yet another set of login info?
Second, the numbers are not showing that there is a group of editors, and 1% of that group is making nearly all of Wikipedia. In the article they even admit that who is in this "1%" is changing over time (whoever came up with this whole 99/1 percent recurring theme is an annoying idiot).
For those that are unaware, this is what's called a "push piece", where the point of view (the importance of a dedicated leadership) is determined in advance and then numbers are chosen to make it seem like it's the only valid one.
Surprise, surprise, surprise.
It's an open secret the site is run by little dictators.
The solution to all of this is rather simple, time delays.
You make an edit or any type of change and you are forbidden from make any more changes for a pre-determined amount of time.
Here the raw number is a bit more informative than the percentage. In any very large open creative endeavor, there will be a massive number of people making a small handful of trivial edits to say they did and/or see if they can or because they notice one little thing in a very isolated incident. Such a large volume of trivial changes will bloat the total contributor list to unreasonable levels and distort percentages.
Similarly, take any big github hosted project. One I looked at had 3000 contributors, which seems incredible. But then look at the contributor graph, and it's clear there's a sharp dropoff after the first 6 or so and you get to moderately trivial volumes of commits and code well before you get up to 100. It does speak to popularity but it does not mean you have a 3,000 developer team suddenly working significantly on it. It also doesn't diminish the effort of the 1% of the developers that are still more numerous than most commercial software development teams working on the same sort of porject.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's probably because:
1% signed up with an honest intent to be an editor and with knowledge to back it up.
4% signed up as a lark and to see what it was all about.
5% signed up with good intentions but don't have any knowledge to create pages with.
The other 90% are trolls that signed up to graffiti pages of politicians they don't like, or to edit Taylor Swift's page to talk about how she really has a penis.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Probably more editors than Encyclopedia Britannica.
No stupid fundraising page, and a more neutral worldview
Most people are consumers, only few are producers.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
A lot of people sign up as an editor to correct their personal pet peeve issue or mistake. Others sign up because they think it might be a fun hobby, but the interest doesn't last.
The fact of the matter is that not everyone is qualified or given to the dedication to be a regular editor. For those who feel pulled towards regular contribution, great! Have at it! But why folks here expect that everyone who signs up will have the same dedication and quality of work once they are signed up is somewhat mysterious to me.
Check your premises.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The problem is that Wikipedia allows current events and therefore the political arguments that inevitably occur.
In such a situation, the strongest group always wins an edit war, not the best arguments.
It's unprofessional to claim such information has any place in an encyclopedia.
They should, as a rule, point information under dispute to other sites.
That in itself should be reason enough for the disputing parties to eventually come to an agreement.
1% are smelly neckbeards who have nothing better to do in life than camp their personal fiefdom 24/7, and push their trash ideology.
99% can't compete with such unwashed autism, and are repulsed by the whole thing.
So there you go... stats down the toilet. Motherboard is a suspect source of information anyway.
Conservapedia is significantly more reliable as a source, it also gets like 10 times the traffic and is a primary source for hundreds of well known historian authors like Bill O'Reilly.
What more amazing about that is that these 1% people do have a broad range of knowledge!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
According to wikipedia stats, I had over 4500 edits on more than 500 pages in a little over 5 years. Rather large edits, with an average of >300 bytes per edit. I completely gave up editing when the main subject I was interested in (History of Romania and the Republic of Moldova) was hijacked by what I believe are institutional accounts with multiple editors, which enforced the presentation of only the official government view (and trust me, I do understand WP:POV). At the time I was pretty bitter about it, but then I came to believe that this outcome was predictable. However, the overall result was that I no longer edit.
Of course, these "1 percenters" have changed over the last decade and a half. According to Matei, roughly 40 percent of the top 1 percent of editors bow out about every five weeks.
So there's a tremendous turnover in this 1%. This is *exactly* what one would expect - someone comes in, writes an article on something they know about, make it nice, and then drop out.
They also don't seem to say what "70% of content" means since they are talking about edits. Are people writing 70% of the actual words by count, or are they making 70% of the edits? I actually have an account, but I rarely log in to make edits. The edits that I make nowadays are usually fixing a typo or grammatical error and not worth logging in. If I'm actually adding content I'll log in.
Do you have ESP?
Well tecnicaly AC is right, it is the linux kernel with GNU toolchains and applicstions, since technicaly Linux is just the kernel.
Wikipedia used to be written by anonymous IPs and refined by the veterans. After ten years of banning any new user who gets into a content disagreement with the 1%, the 1% have successfully secured their hold on the site from any new editors.
Thanks commentators on Wikipedia, your ability to contribute lies by obfuscating them with statistics is something that I can now cite!
Based upon my experience trying to edit some articles, I would tend to agree with the assessment. I've tended to stop using the convenience of Wikipedia when I try to cite references, instead digging a little deeper into the web to find material closer to the original source and unaffected by the Wikipedia hoverers.
....this is pretty much par for any volunteer thing that I've participated in.
99% do nothing, 1% do 90%+
(I'm not trying to virtue-signal here, I've been a member of both groups depending on the project.)
-Styopa
And boy do they love pokemon.
"Wikipedia is both an organization and a social movement,"
That, is why it fails.
Remember boys and girls,. citing Wikipedia is still a reason for an automatic fail for most university professors
Who certifies an editor as an expert?
Do we get to see their credentials?
You have no way of knowing if theses"experts" are real or just some bored house wife.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Think about it... When the 1% deletes anything written by anyone else, then everything will be written by the 1%.
I gave up contributing to Wikipedia a very long time ago.
I worked really hard (read all the guidelines, etc) to correct some technical information about 3270/5250 terminal emulators and it was reverted with no explanations!
Never tried again, so I guess they won?
So that's normal, right? It's called a power law.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Wikipedia is refined from the wisdom of the crowds. But crowds, by and large, are pretty dim. So, naturally, the more wise the knowledge, the fewer people carry it. I would expect the graph to look somewhat exponential.
I spent some time creating an article for Wikipedia with many references, one major reference containing the very title of the article I submitted. Wikipedia rejected it saying that there was insufficient evidence that the article was valid.
There was an excellent article about General (Major at the time) Eisenhower's conflict with General McAuthur. I showed what a petty, churlish person McAuthur was. One of the politically correct Wikipedia socialist took the event out.
The Wikipedia socialist editors love to rewrite the history of the world to their own liking.
This distribution of outcome is a natural phenomena that appears in almost every social science:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
"For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
Since Mr. Torvald's kernel was the enabling contribution, I propose calling it "Linux-GNU."
I edited Wikipedia a little bit a long time ago. There were a few articles that I knew I could improve easily, so I did.
Once that was done, there wasn't a lot I could contribute without doing a whole of research. I didn't have the time or the drive to do it. Honestly, I expect this is the norm. Most contributors will start with the low-hanging fruit, and they will drop out as it becomes increasingly difficult to contribute further.
If someone is smart, detailed-oriented, and dedicated then Wikipedia could be their ideal hobby or volunteer cause. A small group of those people can do a lot of the day-to-day work. As long as new information and corrections come in from professionals and experts periodically, there is nothing seriously wrong with the organization.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Think about it... When the 1% deletes anything written by anyone else, then everything will be written by the 1%.
Yep. That's the problem. There are a small number of editors who believe that they personally own the articles they wrote, and will revert any changes made by anybody else. And, since they do this deletion a lot, they are very good with the Wikipedia bureaucracy and know exactly how far they can go without getting counted as "edit warring"-- and how to entice novice editors into breaking one of Wikipedia's invisible rules and getting banned.
The article says : "As detailed in a 2013 feature in the MIT Technology Review, the decline of active editors with more than 10 edits under their belt has been attributed to the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the editing process. The semi-automation and stricter editing process was initially launched as a way to combat vandalism on Wikipedia pages. Although the new protocols did result in a decrease in vandalism, it also resulted in a steep drop off of new editors that stayed 2 months after their first edit."
No. It's not the semi-automation, it's the bureaucracy being used by the "deletionists" who don't want you-- if you fail to follow obscure rules when responding to the asshole who deletes the stuff you just wrote, you will be banned.
In this case, the winners being the ones that have the time/money/inclination to keep pushing back with their own particular edits until the people with less time/money/inclination give up. I'm not sure how you could expect a different outcome given the (lack of) organizational structure.
Given this, I think they're going to have to do something significant to increase transparency (e.g., a pane that shows the top 5-10 contributors for the page and the percentage of content each contributed, and/or other comparable metrics) or what credibility they have is going to go downhill really fast.
It is also images, videos, wikidata, etc.
That's how you end up with the hot garbage that is the GamerGate article, where a tiny minority of editors (Ryulong, NorthbySouthBaranof, etc.) that are ideologically aligned make certain that opinion pieces presented as facts with no evidence control the narrative.
Somehow that figure seems a bit low. Perhaps they are responsible for edits but I doubt they've done all of the submissions.
Twinstiq, game news
This isn't really news. 1% of a large number is still a large number. 132k people is more than enough.
1% owns all the Wikipedia content while another 1% owns all the money, by not paying taxes.
Who does more for humanity?
I saw that someone who was already banned by the Wikipedia community was editing articles again, so I reported it in the proper forum.
A Wikipedia administrator blocked me. That's right: I followed all the rules, reported someone else breaking the rules, yet I was blocked.
There are clearly rogue administrators out there, using their power in ways that should not be sanctioned.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
According to Wikipedians everything I wrote is "Not Relevant" and deserves to be deleted. I prefer to store knowledge on the Internet Archive now. http://www.archive.org/
The cognitive style of your remarks demonstrates that you have none of the attributes of the superforecaster as described by Tetlock's book. To begin with—to a good first approximation—Wikipedia resembles no other project in the history of human endeavour.
So let's ponder a moment the long human history with green field idealism.
For example, the Greek invention of democracy (which really didn't last that long), or the French revolution which rapidly devolved into the Reign of Terror, or the American re-invention of democracy, about which the best one can say lately is that it continues to limp along, and it may possibly yet live to see a better day.
Turns out that reforming governance models is hard. Who knew reforming governance could be so complicated (and difficult)?
Any superforecaster worth his or her salt would have constructed a suitable idealism filter concerning Wikipedia right from day one. Big ideals? Fine. Are people involved? Yikes. Low barrier to the unwashed. Double yikes.
Yet somehow you seem to have absorbed the Propaganda of Brave Beginnings (largely invented by journalists to soothe the huddled and surprised masses concerning this Frightening New Thing) exactly in so far as it inflated a convenient strawman toward which your bile could be directed without rubbing two working brain cells together.
Here's a thing. Do you suppose that the top 1300 contributors to the Linux kernel are responsible for less than 75% of the total work volume (by whatever reasonable proxy one chooses to wield)? Linux also features a very long tail of public participation, yet I suspect the top 100 Linux contributors have all been mega prolific.
Furthermore, Linux has the advantage of being 70% objective. If your virtual memory subsystem is shit, there's no feasible way to hide this. The other 30% brought us systemd. How did that go? How has that worked out to champion Linux as a flagship of sober fraternity?
My own suspicion is that about 1% of the Wikipedia content generates 99% of the carping about Wikipedia having become destructively cliquish and exclusionary.
I make 90% of my edits in the 90% of Wikipedia that most people don't give a shit about. Very little of my work generates any notice or opposition whatsoever. I deploy my superpowers of reading and absorbing the editorial guidelines, decoding community standards, and persisting in my efforts despite a few episodes of annoying/frustrating blowback. It's a hard lesson to learn, but in this sphere, it's not right to expect the best argument to prevail in every battle. The right response is to spread out, rub shoulders less aggressively, and let the larger sweep of time take its due course.
What many neophyte contributors fail to recognize is their interlocking-gradient blindness. Newbies tend to rush into one contentious paragraph insisting upon operating within a truth monoculture. That's not how it works. Worst of all, they don't understand the topology of bias. Bias is like zero degrees Kelvin. Matter does not cease to move. There is no intuitive zero. Mainly you're just trying to stamp out electrons that jump three orbitals all at once (bias way up in the x-ray spectrum is not good, and really can be eliminated).
Wikipedia has little to do with truth. It's a condensate of received opinion, where the majority of its value lies in its topic graph (which is why the expertise argument is, and always has been, largely bogus). Larry Page's Page Rank algorithm is/was also a condensate of received opinion (does any recognizable trace remain?) To a large degree, Wikipedia is a condensate of a condensate of a condensate, because Google'
Wikipedia is just a categorized, sanitized, summarized internet forum. All the problems you see in any discussion held on a web forum are duplicated there; only the format is different. Oh, and all threads are CLOSED! Some first time contributors just haven't found out yet.
Not everyone is a WRITER. They're called EDITORS for a reason. The only editing I do on Wikipedia is primarily fixing grammar, spelling typos, or updating links for relevant sourced content. This isn't authorizing articles, so I'm not part of this "1%" group of writers, however these contributions are just as valuable.
I posted a picture of the Kennewick man, a bust that sits at the entrance of the library. DRM kicked in, while fought for by Wikipedia, lost it's place under that subject.
That entry was easy, it was a transition time, program after program was being required to make posting easier. It got to the point one needed a dedicated system just for that purpose. I haven't attempted to add or edit an entry since.
Aaron Swartz reported this exact finding like 10 years ago, no? Google "aaron swartz who writes wikipedia"
There was a time Encyclopedia Britannica fought against Wikipedia. The flame wars were intense, a paid service against a free and open-source one. The outcome important and far reaching to us all.
Read the article haven't read the academic paper
Depending on how the study counts deletes and reverts it could be even more, if the haven't accounted for edit warring it would massively distort the results. Bots and scripts allow a small number of editors to appear be massively more "active" on Wikipedia.
Logged in users can make edits under their own userspace, and then later copy those edits across to actual articles. It's a good way to create an article but having already got it to a stage where it is less likely to be deleted. Again it is another way to inflate your edit count.
At one point Wikipedia took books from the public domain including at least one out of date encyclopedia and merged that into Wikipedia. That will account for a large chunk the data for sure.
shaddap moran
They actually don't, which is why you find extensive articles on geography, cities and stars, movies and a hundred other topics that are easy to understand and easily found in a Google search. But when you get into difficult subjects, a large number of articles are basically extended stubs that look like someone edited together a summary of the first 10 hits of a Google search. No in-depth information, less than five links to other sources, half of which are newspapers or magazines who published one article about this subject ten years ago.
Whenever I am researching something that's tricky or technical, I don't even bother with the WP article. The exception is if I need to write a very simple high-level summary for lay people (executives and managers). In that area there's a 50% chance that the WP article will be useful.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Well its not thats stange. I tried to write and article about a Series of books (https://www.wired.com/2012/06/space-opera-without-explosions-nathan-lowells-solar-clipper-series/) as i loves thois book serie. And I cant get it throu the validation process.
I did - atleast to my mind as this is the first page i did write - a good writeup with a a lot of refernses and so on, but they dont accept it. Im almost so anoyed that im thing if canceling my monthly payment to them. Here is the link to the draft by the way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:The_Golden_Age_of_the_Solar_Clipper
...and wholly in line with what we currently know about communities of practice, i.e. a small core of frequent and skilful participators spreading out into greater numbers of less frequent and less skilful peripheral participators. The measure of whether it's a community of practice or a rigid hierarchy is how many peripheral participators regularly make their way towards the centre/core thereby becoming experts. AKA centripetal participation. The percentages of contributions in general don't tell us this. It's just a snapshot of the state of a complex system - not all that informative.
What more amazing about that is that these 1% people do have a broad range of knowledge!
More importantly, all 26,000 forms of news; newspapers, magazines, radio, television, etc, are run by 6 corporations.
Are any of them biased? nah.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Did Brittanica or The World Book employ more than 1300 people as core staff? They certainly hired more if "you write the article on Slovenia" counts as "hiring" but "writing one article" describes the other 99% of the 132,000 people, so you have to talk core staff.
There were 2300 *sales* staff at peak, but the editorial staff in the home office, number in the dozens. A figure I googled for extensively, but only found ... in the Wikipedia.
It's Gaga who "supposedly" has one. Citation required.
Do you suppose Encyclopedia Britannica ever had 1300 editor-writers?
Most people only edit wikipedia articles once or twice. Duh.
The bots that patrol for vandalism should not revert edits that make simple date changes or other noncontroversial text changes, and I have never seen them do that. A bot that did start undoing such changes for no reason would be shut down pretty quickly. If you were editing as an anonymous user on a public terminal, it's possible that someone else made vandalizing edits from the same terminal, causing a bot to revert all the edits from a period of time.
If you get inspired to try again, create a user account. It's easy and quick, and logged-in users get less scrutiny from the bots.
Human editors sometimes mistake small changes like the ones you described as vandalism and revert it. The key to avoiding that is to fill in the "edit summary" field when you make your edit. By describing what you are doing ("Fix date since project was delayed 3 months.") you make it much more likely that your edit will not be reverted. Being logged in helps there too.
If you read the fucking summary they accounted for those unregistered users you nitwit.
But alas; this is slashdot.
ok, i hear everybody's concerns about Wikipedia. so i'd like to seek out something better.
what is there? is there an alternative that even comes close?
it should be free to use, no registration necessary to read articles, and ad-free. also, it should cover a fantastic wealth of topics ranging from obscure math equations to pop singer albums. it should also have nearly perfect uptime, fast server response, and be easy/pleasing to read.
so...and i'm not being sarcastic...WHAT ELSE IS THERE? please provide links.
Well, it's the linux kernel with toolchains, applications, etc. provided by several other sources of which the GNU project is but one. Calling the system GNU/Linux presumes that the GNU portions of the system are as critical to the existence of a functioning operating system as the kernel, but pieces like init and X11 are not.
Is he a libtool?
Ezekiel 23:20
You are such a stupid fuck.
Wikipedia does nothing to shut down bad editors or grossly political hacks. Take this guy Scjessey, he feverous protected all Hillary Clinton pages ,reverting and removing anything negative all the way up to election, now he is on a role editing all Donald Trump pages https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind....
Doesn't matter because his craziness aligns with the majority of editors so they do nothing to stop his obnoxious edits no matter how wrong they might be. Everyone that disagrees with him is a sock puppet of some other user.
Considering the Hillary Clinton email scandal or the IRS targeting scandal are called "Hillary Clinton email controversy" or "IRS targeting controversy" , shows the insane bias of editors.
Ditto.
I with a few others were contributing to an article when suddenly some undergraduate deleted all of the content and replaced it with his crappy, meandering school essay. We got into an edit war with him and his friends who now suddenly appeared from no-where to side with him and support this editorial lunacy.
Because the adults had jobs and he and his buddies had all day to dick around on Wikipedia, guess who won?
After that I gave up on Wiki.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
I edited some articles about Apple software that I knew works differently from what the article said. But I am unlikely to write a feature article. Probably half the edits is for grammar and tpyos?
Is there a reason that the posters complaining that their edits were reverted never give the name of the WP article and the edit they proposed? I would think the best way to convince me that the reversion was incorrect would be to post the details. Otherwise it is just "he said" without the "she said" and no evidence at all. I have to say that I have made two edits, both correcting errors and both have been accepted. In one case I expected to be reverted, since the correct information was widely contradicted in low quality sources. I did have a cite to an official publication, however.
A 40% turnover of the 1% of articles being edited.... sounds about right. Plus this data is open and there for you to analyze too, even become more of a troll than the troll blocking your edits. It's yours... you're free to contribute, and even check the history of pages and all reverts etc. Do it!
Witness BitZtream getting pwned!... twice.....three times!
Ditto ditto. I tried correcting the 5-string banjo article. It's totally bogus. But there is a cadre of editors. Kind of reminds me of the trolls on usenet.
yesterday, and the day before, and a bunch of days prior?
yes. I did.
I think one possible solution is for Wikipedia to introduce a randomized element that allows for unbiased ratings of users. As in, a kind of meta-review, that allows a disinterested party to say, "OK, this kid obviously understands the review system, but he's a dick and he doesn't seem to understand what he's writing about", or "This drive-by editor actually seems to have a valid point".
I.e. there needs to be a system that can't so easily be manipulated by those who spend all their time on Wikipedia.
The
so easy for military and industry to control all of Wikipedia. all you need is 1300 shills to troll the site- delete competitor content- ban citizens- etc. this is why today the site is made up entirely of propaganda. it's censored and controlled. power. control. money.
can't believe how many times I have seen government crime covered up and kept off the Wikipedia pages even when we had classified documents confirming it. in place of the truth false information to slander anyone who believes the government commits crime was provided.
https://www.trumpsweapon.com/
of shit I have ever seen on Slashdot. Congratulations.
Yes and no, in practice.
If you dream up a new theory about Evolution (which is controversial), then yes, you had better get it published elsewhere properly. But people are less concerned about non-controversial details like a particular cave. And most of the maths articles are largely referenced.
So there is an element of common sense here. No Original Research is a way to get rid of wacky theories without getting into arguments into the details.
There certainly are Wikipedia Nazis that love to revert everything. But by and large it works pretty sensibly. Amazingly so given that it is so completely open.
Bureaucratically minded people hate the idea of Wikipedia, and cannot believe that a fairly naive system based largely on good will could ever work. Particularly with vested commercial interests hacking away. But the proof is in the pudding. Most articles are surprisingly good. Generally much better than the fluff produced by Journalists.
Wikipedia is a good news story on human nature.
got up to ranking at 400th with most individual edits (not an indication of the size of the edits, though) and im small fry, and i dedicated a LOT of time to that before i tapered off. damn straight its a small community. we/they nearly have their own language now. prod, deprod, reflist, afd, etc. i actually dont have any real point, im just amazed i did this. i feel like i contributed to building the Sistine Chapel.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
That's way less than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
An operating system with Linux and Gnu on it is still an operating system. People can do things with it. Linux itself isn't. The kernel can't rebuild itself. The kernel with Gnu can.
There's a definite difference between Linux and Gnu and everything else that makes things that work work better.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Conservapedia is actually more factual
Citing RMS (thanks Wikipedia!)
"Since a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv becomes absurd, at some point you will have to set a threshold and omit the names of the many other secondary contributions. There is no one obvious right place to set the threshold, so wherever you set it, we won't argue against it ... But one name that cannot result from concerns of fairness and giving credit, not for any possible threshold level, is 'Linux'. It can't be fair to give all the credit to one secondary contribution (Linux) while omitting the principal contribution (GNU)."
– GNU/Linux FAQ