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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
You forgot those who signed up with good intentions and the knowledge but gave up in frustration because all of their edits are reverted by trolls or people with an agenda.
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?
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.
"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.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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.