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On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Steve Summit wrote:
Heebie wrote:
...The article is fundamentally flawed - you can see it contradicts itself with no other knowledge or figures to hand.
They say that "The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site", but then go on to say that "The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders...
My impression was that the first paragraph was an attention- getting "teaser". He was not trying to say that the bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks. He was instead trying to suggest that there's a claim that the bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks (but the claim is wrong).
Quite right. Basic reading skills would reveal the article follows the standard formulate - 'Claim, investigation, claim affirmed or debunked'.
"Curious and skeptical, I decided to investigate...."
"Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that's not at all what I found...."
"In other words, if you use Wales's methods, you get Wales's results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors."
"With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result completely reverses."
"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 so on. It's a careless reader indeed who concludes that the article contradicts itself.
- -- gwern