[WikiEN-l] Rethinking Community

[Guettarda]

On Dec 17, 2007 1:57 AM, Relata Refero <refero.relata at gmail.com> wrote:

> From the Phoenix article linked elsewhere:
>
> <snip>
> "Almost every time I saw a substantive edit," he writes, "I found the
> user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They
> generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually
> on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account."
>

Without knowing the methodology, it's really hard to evaluate a statement
like this.  I agree with the statement - if anyone adds more than a
paragraph in a single edit, it's usually an IP or new editor.  And more
often than not, it's a long essay unsuitable for Wikipedia, or a chunk of
text cut out of some other online source and pasted into an article.  Once
you discount the copyvios and text dumps, is this still the case?

In addition, of course, there's the whole issue of "collaborative editing".
Ideally, you make a change.  Someone else adds to it.  And so it proceeds.
Writing a substantive article from scratch takes several hundred edits, and
most of them are going to be small.  Taking a newbie's text dump and
incorporating it into the article also involves a lot of small edits.

That said, of course, IPs get zero respect - in my experience, if you edit
without logging in you get all sorts of rude comments and threats, you get
reverted without comment...I think the community's attitude to new editors
is horrible (and is probably hurting the project).  And there are far too
many people who seem to have forgotten why we're here.  But at least in the
articles I edit, the idea that useful new content is mostly added by anons
and new editors doesn't appear to hold.