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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.
It's an open secret the site is run by little dictators.
The solution to all of this is rather simple, time delays.
No, the solution is to have Wikipedia content managed by Wikipedia employees who are held accountable, just like the employees of any company.
Wikipedia currently has approximately 300 employees, NONE of whom are involved in creating or editing content. That is done entirely by unpaid volunteers.
Wikipedia currently has annual revenue of approximately $80 Million. About $3 Million is spent on the actual expense of webhosting and maintaining servers. NONE of the remaining $77 Million is spent on creating/maintaining content on Wikipedia.
But they did spend £1,335 on business cards one year for the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. And €18,000 in Germany to send people to pop concerts as "accredited photographers". And €81,000 to people paid to photograph politicians. And €81,720 paid to a researcher to study... editing. And lots of fancy, expensive office space in major cities around the world.
And so on . . . . .
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.
I too have made an edit to an article about lava caves in Washington state. I had explored those caves many times, and knew some elements of the article were just wrong. I edited those portions so they were correct, and it stood. I think Wikipedia is a modern marvel, and I turn to it often. And I too never bothered to register, so I am among what I assume is a vast army of unrecorded editors.
And it still won't matter. They'll argue your sources are bad (even if those sources are considered acceptable in other articles), that you're not using proper secondary sources (the author of a novel is not a valid source of what the novel is about, it must be some 'appropriate magazine' or such), that you're being contentious and not listening, that it's 'original research', then have a wiki court toss your stuff out if you persist in taking it up. Controversial just means 'against what the policing group wants', doesn't actually require being something most people would have considered debatable or political.
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!
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
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.