[WikiEN-l] The importance of anonymous contributors (Good Samaritans) to Wikipedia

[phoebe ayers]

On 10/17/07, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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."


I suspect they are talking about this study:
http://web.mit.edu/iandeseminar/Papers/Fall2005/anthony.pdf

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