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. The post pulls this number from an essay Aaron Swartz wrote more than two years ago, based on some comments by Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia’s growth has exploded in the past two years, so today’s number would presumably be a lot higher. But Swartz conducted his own study after hearing Jimmy’s comments, and his more detailed findings are even more interesting.
Swartz analyzed percentage-of-text instead of number of edits, and what he found was slightly different: The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site. The bulk of the changes to the original text, then, are made by a core group of heavy editors who make thousands of tiny edits (the 1400 freaks).
If you can still manage to delude yourself into thinking Wiki is useful- read the rest, which includes this stunning stat
… it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”
what percentage of the population that reads peer-reviewed, academic journals actually contribute to them? how about encyclopedias?
what difference does it make how many people contribute? i’d like to see the implementation of a credibility system (which is coming) that would keep the nut jobs out and responsible writers in.
Dear Bob Cargill,
How would you prevent the nuts from entering the Credibility System? As far as I am concerned, I have abandoned (almost) all hope to see the Wiki reach an acceptable standard, at least as far as the humanities are concerned.
However, I confess that I have another fear that is bigger: that nonsense from the Wikipedia (and similar sources) enters “official” science.
Example one: Lunatic theories that the Jewish temple was not on the Temple Mountain in Jerusalem have for almost a year been part of that Wiki article, and I can show you a book by a Dutch professor who has copied that.
Example two: D.L. Lewis refers, in his excellent God’s Crucible. Islam and the Making of Europe (2008) to a Suren-Pahlavi clan in Sasanian Persia, perhaps believing nonsense that was added to the Wiki by a contributor whose incompetence was so great and whose sockpuppets were so obvious that they were recognized even by the Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_sockpuppets_of_Surena).
Example three: the National Geographic has recently quoted from the Wiki article on the Cyrus Cylinder. (Admittedly, the NG has printed an erratum.)
That being said, I was glad to read that the Wiki has announced to try to cooperate more with professional scholars and scientist, and I am glad that you say that a credibility system is coming. Still, I think that the real solution is that the universities, which can spend millions on advertising, start to take their responsibility, and make an online encyclopedia of their own.
The basic principle of the Wiki, that everyone can contribute, is simply wrong. It means that the pressure group with most money or energy, can determine what will be in the articles. This is perhaps very democratic, but truth is never established by majority vote.