"get used to going to the—gasp—library and reading—cringe—books."
Which are edited by what? 3 people? 10 people?
All sources of information have varying degrees of unreliability. Personally, I trust well-cited Wikipedia articles more than I do most books, journals, and other more academically accepted sources.
This "don't trust Wikipedia" story pops up in various places a few times a year. It just reeks of a bunch of academics trying to justify their existence and shouting at kids to get off their lawns.
I'm not sure who are these people who still feel threatened by Wikipedia. (The author of this article -- and I use the word article liberally -- is no academic, just a random blogger trying to drum up some pageviews.) In my experience, it's mostly print journalists who're still leery of this whole 'web' thing that tend to have a problem with Wikipedia. Just give them a couple of years, their publications will go bankrupt and they will find other jobs :-)
I predict that this phenomenon will be connected with the fact that most people buy the same few bestsellers from Amazon and rent the same few big hits from Netflix, will be dubbed "The Fat Body", and will become the big meme of 2009.
This crude simplification may indeed become as prevalent as the opposite "fat tail" simplification.
It would be nice, however, if people looked at this discussion and started to realize the "fat body" or "fat tails" often depend on the yardstick that we use rather than either case being "the reality".
"The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site, says a post racing up the Hacker News charts."
There is other interesting commentary on the facts reported in originally linked blog post in the Silicon Alley Insider article.
Turns out, the top 1,400 account for 17% of the edits. Even the top 4,000 listed on that page together account for only 28%.
I've been on Wikipedia since mid 2002. That statement by Jimbo sounds like exactly the sort of thing he would have said back in 2003 or 2004, because it was true back then. He did know a whole lot of editors personally. But in 2009, those numbers are way off the mark.
Furthermore, as someone else said, these top editors are mostly admins doing janitorial duties such as rolling back vandalism semi-automatically. If you remove this component, the distribution would be even more equitable.
Finally, this is just the English Wikipedia, which is only about one-fourth of the total, by article count. And different languages have mostly disjoint authorship. So I'd say the true impact of the top thousand globally is around 2-5%.
"these top editors are mostly admins doing janitorial duties such as rolling back vandalism semi-automatically."
If you'd taken a cursory look at Rjwilmsi's user page, you'd have seen:
"I'm not a bot. I use [[Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser]] to assist my editing, but each edit is reviewed by me. Any mistakes are my own."
These people are not trolling, they perform an invaluable service to the site for no reward except the labor of love. To use a technical term, they clean up your shit after you.
Nearly all products online, with user generate content and participatory actions, all that comes from usually less than 1% of the user base. Everyone else is just reading, consuming, watching, etc. This is FUD as you can see the same breakdown on almost any product with free user generated content.
Aaron Swartz had a great blog post about how this is just not true at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia. The core of people who incessantly edits do make a lot of edits, but they're cleaning up vandalism or bringing articles into the proper Wikipedia style, not actually writing articles and contributing new facts. If you think about it, it makes complete sense. The combined knowledge of 1,400 people just don't isn't enough to write all the articles about Magical Trevor AND Godel's Incompletenesss Theorem. A mathematician might come once to put in the bulk of the theorem, and then leave because he has better things to do, while obsessive Wikipedia janitors will edit it over and over again.
The obsessive-compulsive editors at Wikipedia wield disproportionate political power there. Political power at Wikipedia is based upon display of obsessive-compulsiveness.
randomwalker said it best, but I'll remind you that WP admins and devotees use scripts to mass-edit for all sorts of things; there's typos and misspellings, but there's also all manner of WP:MoS changes, standardized subheds, and recategorization pages.
Racking up an edit count is the #1 thing people do to become admins.
Edit-count gaming has to be a major component of this. Status on Wikipedia (whether you're given sysop/admin privileges, which include blocking users who annoy you, etc.) is roughly proportional to one's edit count, so people who are trying to raise their <s>avatars</s> user accounts to <s>level 60</s> higher social status and privileges tend to generate large numbers of low-content edits.
Even if these numbers are supposed to sound surprisingly low, I'm guessing its far better than how the input was managed for the set of "Britannica's" we had sitting on a shelf when I was a kid. And that's not a bash against the old way, which had good content for its day.
Some things really are getting better. You will always need to filter information. No news here.
26 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] threadhttp://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Which are edited by what? 3 people? 10 people?
All sources of information have varying degrees of unreliability. Personally, I trust well-cited Wikipedia articles more than I do most books, journals, and other more academically accepted sources.
This "don't trust Wikipedia" story pops up in various places a few times a year. It just reeks of a bunch of academics trying to justify their existence and shouting at kids to get off their lawns.
I'm not sure who are these people who still feel threatened by Wikipedia. (The author of this article -- and I use the word article liberally -- is no academic, just a random blogger trying to drum up some pageviews.) In my experience, it's mostly print journalists who're still leery of this whole 'web' thing that tend to have a problem with Wikipedia. Just give them a couple of years, their publications will go bankrupt and they will find other jobs :-)
Wait, what? 2% of "millions" cannot be 1400. Ah, I think the quote by Jimmy Wales implies that this is 2% of registered users.
[citation needed] [No Original Research]
It would be nice, however, if people looked at this discussion and started to realize the "fat body" or "fat tails" often depend on the yardstick that we use rather than either case being "the reality".
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikip...
"The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site, says a post racing up the Hacker News charts."
There is other interesting commentary on the facts reported in originally linked blog post in the Silicon Alley Insider article.
I wrote a simple script to parse the numbers on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_o...
Turns out, the top 1,400 account for 17% of the edits. Even the top 4,000 listed on that page together account for only 28%.
I've been on Wikipedia since mid 2002. That statement by Jimbo sounds like exactly the sort of thing he would have said back in 2003 or 2004, because it was true back then. He did know a whole lot of editors personally. But in 2009, those numbers are way off the mark.
Furthermore, as someone else said, these top editors are mostly admins doing janitorial duties such as rolling back vandalism semi-automatically. If you remove this component, the distribution would be even more equitable.
Finally, this is just the English Wikipedia, which is only about one-fourth of the total, by article count. And different languages have mostly disjoint authorship. So I'd say the true impact of the top thousand globally is around 2-5%.
Seriously, this is pure trolling.
i.e:
November 2008: #1: Rjwilmsi 230816
September 2008: #4: Rjwilmsi 170750
That's 60,000 "edits" in 2 months. 1,000 edits per day.
The thing is, that all those #s, don't actually rate the quality of edits.
"these top editors are mostly admins doing janitorial duties such as rolling back vandalism semi-automatically."
If you'd taken a cursory look at Rjwilmsi's user page, you'd have seen:
"I'm not a bot. I use [[Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser]] to assist my editing, but each edit is reviewed by me. Any mistakes are my own."
These people are not trolling, they perform an invaluable service to the site for no reward except the labor of love. To use a technical term, they clean up your shit after you.
or google the username, the wikipedia page usually comes up.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Why are people voting this up?
Racking up an edit count is the #1 thing people do to become admins.
Some things really are getting better. You will always need to filter information. No news here.