Tech 4D

Earlier I posted a map of Wikipedia contributors comparing the most active users with general Wikipedia users. In his essay Who Writes Wikipedia, Wikipedian Aaron Swartz proposes that the contributions of the “core” group of Wikipedia contributors are significantly overstated. In addition, he suggests focusing on this small, but important portion of the Wikipedia community to the exclusion of the broader group of contributors is a big mistake.

If this is true, then my Wikipedia Contributor Map oversimplifies what is happening (as was pointed out in a reader comment).

Aaron Swartz wrote a script to analyze the entire history of a group of about 200 articles and conlcuded that while the majority of edits are done by the “core group”, the actual bulk of the words in the articles were done by a much broader group of contributors who have “…generally had made less than 50 edits…“.

Some quotes:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

Here’s another paper that comes to a similar conclusion, with some great charts and graphs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.