Folks,
Science Daily reports on Dartmouth research on the value of anonymous
contributors to Wikipedia.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071017131854.htm
"The beauty of open-source applications is that they are continually
improved and updated by those who use them and care about them. Dartmouth
researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if
the
anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable
as
the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.
The answer is, surprisingly, yes. The researchers discovered that Good
Samaritans contribute high-quality content, as do the active, registered
users. They examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia
content
as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed
or
corrected.
"This finding was both novel and unexpected," says Denise Anthony,
associate
professor of sociology. "In traditional laboratory studies of collective
goods, we don't include Good Samaritans, those people who just happen to
pass by and contribute, because those carefully designed studies don't
allow
for outside actors. It took a real-life situation for us to recognize and
appreciate the contributions of Good Samaritans to web content."
which came out in the fall of 2005. It's a lovely study that could do with
some updating. The question of whether anonymous contributors contribute
most of the content (as Aaron Swartz postulated last year) and how good
those contributions are is still quite an open question.
-- phoebe