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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.
How does that compare to other encyclopedias ?
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
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.
>It's an open secret the site is run by little dictators.
If you've ever been part of a volunteer-based club, you've seen this is human nature. Everyone gets together for a common cause, some people are better at some tasks than others and they gain respect... which then becomes central to their identity and they fight to protect their fiefdom.
It ultimately (usually) finds an equilibrium between significance and the required effort of any particular issue - the bigger the problem, the more likely the average member is willing to fight to fix it. Sometimes you get one or more assholes with more time and with an insane dedication level and everything falls apart.
Wikipedia is still the former in most cases - few people are fighting over the dry stuff, it's pretty detailed and accurate. Nobody's willing to start an edit war (or at least sustain one) over it. Something tells me that changes drastically once you get to a subject that has 'fans'.
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?
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.
I do the same thing, although I'm registered. Most of the time, I make tiny edits to correct issues in technical articles. At one time, for example, there was a code example with a typo. It's awesome to be able to go in and fix little issues like this. So, I'm part of the vast 99% that makes very few edits.
Sorry if it makes me a bad person, but I have no interest in spending serious amounts of my time editing Wikipedia articles. Honestly, though, I'm glad there are such people. I don't understand the general contempt of Wikipedia around here. It's got its flaws, but it's an amazing concept, and generally produces really good results, as far as I've seen. And it's been worth enough to me to donate a few bucks each year. I consider it to be a wonder of the information age.
So, people complain about the turf wars by a few editors with power over their tiny pond? So what? Let me introduce you to the species we call "humans", where such things happen all the time, in every social environment you can imagine, from politics to mega-corporations to open-source development teams to your local homeowner's association board.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.