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.

Comments

Oh really?

[DRJlaw]

"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.

Re:132,000 suckers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Did everyone fail math in school?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Did everyone fail math in school?

[dpidcoe]

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.

I did that once after encountering an article that was in really bad shape. Among other things, it had pretty much every spelling variant possible of words that have multiple valid spellings (e.g. aluminum-aluminium, adaptor-adapter, etc.). I spent an hour or so cleaning up some atrocious sentence structures, and then looked up what spelling wikipedia used for a word in its corresponding page (e.g. "aluminum" redirects to "aluminium") and then standardized all of the variants based on that. I even left a fairly good log of all the changes I had made. The next day the changes had been reverted by the guy who had made a bunch of edits to it previously claiming that my edits were vandalism.

Solution: time delays

[DatbeDank]

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.

Re:Solution: time delays

[omglolbah]

I tried for a while to update various details around oil rigs and sites on the articles and every single one got immediately reverted with "Reverted vandalism" as the automatic reason.
Things like changing dates of installation for a living quarters module by 3 months. Article had original planned date but the project got delayed... with automatic bots reverting changes like that how would I trust that other details can get fixed?

Switched to Infogalactic

[Anonymous Coward]

No stupid fundraising page, and a more neutral worldview

Re:I'm not surprised

[apoc.famine]

While I was in grad school I naturally looked at a couple of the pages that touched on the research I was doing. All were 20-30 years out of date, poorly written, and in many areas incorrect even based on the old research. So I spent a couple of days, re-wrote one of them, added citations to current research, and then posted the re-write. And less than an hour later it was entirely reverted.

I messaged the editor, and was met with silence. I tried to escalate the issue and got nowhere.

So yeah, no wonder that 1% of editors "write" everything. If you look at all of the solid content that was reverted by those asshats, I wonder how many actual authors there would be.

And like the rest of you, I gave up. I go to google now and find other sources, because I can't trust that anything on wikipedia is of accurate and of decent quality, no matter how it looks.

Re:Social Movement

[Half-pint HAL]

"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

That's irrelevant. First up, because everything in Wikipedia is sourced, you don't need to cite Wikipedia -- you can pick up the source and look it up in the library. Secondly, Wikipedia isn't disregarded as a citation source because it's normally inaccurate, but for two reasons: 1) it changes frequently, so it's too much work to verify it as a source and 2) the student could theoretically change it to say whatever they want to put in their essay.

Banning citing Wikipedia actually makes Wikipedia more reliable in the long term.