A recent recycling of Aaron Swartz's analysis of the difference between who-makes-the-most-edits, versus who-contributes-the-most-content:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
I think we all know the real story, but it's fascinating how much traction the "bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks" meme still gets (including, for example, the referenced blog post http://www.collegeotr.com/college_otr/734_percent_of_all_ wikipedia_edits_are_made_by_roughly_1400_people_17499 from last week).
Yet another reason to Shun Any Reliance On Raw Edit Counts. (But boy, is it easy to depend on them, since they're so easy to get your hands on. And did Jimbo really once assert that "Wikipedia was actually written by 'a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers' where 'I know all of them and they all know each other'"?)
This should be required reading - it completely upends fundamental assumptions about our content, and has huge implications for things like deletion. The sense that our inclusion and notability policies put us at odds with readers who are not major parts of the community has always been there, but this troublingly nails it: the population of people who write articles and people who delete them are nearly exclusive.
That's a huge issue.
-Phil
On Jan 3, 2009, at 10:53 AM, Steve Summit wrote:
A recent recycling of Aaron Swartz's analysis of the difference between who-makes-the-most-edits, versus who-contributes-the-most- content:
<http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
I think we all know the real story, but it's fascinating how much traction the "bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks" meme still gets (including, for example, the referenced blog post http://www.collegeotr.com/college_otr/734_percent_of_all_ wikipedia_edits_are_made_by_roughly_1400_people_17499 from last week).
Yet another reason to Shun Any Reliance On Raw Edit Counts. (But boy, is it easy to depend on them, since they're so easy to get your hands on. And did Jimbo really once assert that "Wikipedia was actually written by 'a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers' where 'I know all of them and they all know each other'"?)
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2009/1/3 Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
This should be required reading - it completely upends fundamental assumptions about our content, and has huge implications for things like deletion. The sense that our inclusion and notability policies put us at odds with readers who are not major parts of the community has always been there, but this troublingly nails it: the population of people who write articles and people who delete them are nearly exclusive.
That's a huge issue.
We've know this for over a year. The counter is the question of if it holds true for new articles where most deletion actually takes place.
On Jan 3, 2009, at 11:39 AM, geni wrote:
2009/1/3 Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
This should be required reading - it completely upends fundamental assumptions about our content, and has huge implications for things like deletion. The sense that our inclusion and notability policies put us at odds with readers who are not major parts of the community has always been there, but this troublingly nails it: the population of people who write articles and people who delete them are nearly exclusive.
That's a huge issue.
We've know this for over a year. The counter is the question of if it holds true for new articles where most deletion actually takes place.
Well, though the flip side is that deletion of new articles tends to be the area that is least controversial in any sort of lasting sense. You get individually outraged people on the new articles area, but the deletions that lead to external controversies tend not to be the new article deletions.
-Phil
Phil wrote:
This should be required reading... The sense that our inclusion and notability policies put us at odds with readers who are not major parts of the community has always been there, but this troublingly nails it: the population of people who write articles and people who delete them are nearly exclusive.
You're right, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
For one thing, there's nothing *necessarily* wrong with having policy set by a relatively small number of insiders -- a consistent policy, like a consistent look and feel or editorial tone or categorization scheme, is something better realized by the dedicated few than the madding crowd.
The problem, of course, is that we confront the second of Wikipedia's great contradictions, the first being that anyone can edit, including people (namely vandals) we don't like. Vandals we can deal with pretty well, but the the second contradiction, which I'm not at all sure we've figured out a way to cope with, is that anyone can set policy, including people (like narrow-visioned tiny-minded wonks) who do it spectacularly badly.
(And this is not at all a new observation, of course; it's at the core of Clay Shirky's classic essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", which should also be required reading.)
Another complication is that it's not just "people who write articles" versus "people who delete them". What really matters -- or ought to -- is the people who *read* them. Like the Lorax who speaks for the trees, Wikipedia desperately needs some verifiable, NPOV channel through which we could learn the wants and needs of our readers. Inclusion and notability policies ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading.
Steve Summit wrote:
Inclusion and notability policies ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading.
I think that is "could be", not "ought to be". The mission is not to maximise readership: as of early 2009, it still to "write the encyclopedia". You know, the old Wikipedia some of us have thought we are writing for a few years now.
As usual, there is the argument that if this other version of the mission was interesting enough to enough editors, they could fork. Not likely to happen, but it's a clarifying thought: really, how different would it be?
Charles
2009/1/3 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
I think that is "could be", not "ought to be". The mission is not to maximise readership: as of early 2009, it still to "write the encyclopedia". You know, the old Wikipedia some of us have thought we are writing for a few years now.
As usual, there is the argument that if this other version of the mission was interesting enough to enough editors, they could fork. Not likely to happen, but it's a clarifying thought: really, how different would it be?
Charles
You are free to model a reverse of most of user:TTN's last few thousand edits to get some idea. In terms of complaints on forums and blogs I see if you ignore the complaints more focused what people want to write the loss of a significant chunk of our coverage of TV shows and various popular media is the most complained about.
Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about. 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, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site".
Huh? Most of Wikipedia's content, as Swartz himself says (but apparently simultaneously claims otherwise) is created by tens of thousands of different people - there's no 'core' group here. The '1400 obsessed freaks', as he goes on to discuss, just seem to do lots of minor edits. So the opening paragraph is seriously misleading.
So it seems to me that Swartz's work backs-up Wikipedia as being a truly crowd-sourced project, and only goes against Wales' original remarks, which were a bit worrying in the first place. Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick here?
Heebie.
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 5:53 PM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
Steve Summit wrote:
Inclusion and notability policies ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading.
I think that is "could be", not "ought to be". The mission is not to maximise readership: as of early 2009, it still to "write the encyclopedia". You know, the old Wikipedia some of us have thought we are writing for a few years now.
As usual, there is the argument that if this other version of the mission was interesting enough to enough editors, they could fork. Not likely to happen, but it's a clarifying thought: really, how different would it be?
Charles
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Heebie wrote:
So it seems to me that Swartz's work backs-up Wikipedia as being a truly crowd-sourced project, and only goes against Wales' original remarks, which were a bit worrying in the first place. Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick here?
A two-layer model of how content evolves is more helpful than not. Actually there are many more "layers" than that, but the details may not be very illuminating to the general public.
But also going back a couple of years is to refer to a time when the new content contribution was possibly at its peak (in proportion to the total), and people were just getting the idea that they could post to WP about their pet interests. In other words it was still in a phase where we were looking at quantity over quality. The site is dynamic.
Charles
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).
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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
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Phil wrote:
This should be required reading... The sense that our inclusion and notability policies put us at odds with readers who are not major parts of the community has always been there, but this troublingly nails it: the population of people who write articles and people who delete them are nearly exclusive.
You're right, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
For one thing, there's nothing *necessarily* wrong with having policy set by a relatively small number of insiders -- a consistent policy, like a consistent look and feel or editorial tone or categorization scheme, is something better realized by the dedicated few than the madding crowd.
The problem, of course, is that we confront the second of Wikipedia's great contradictions, the first being that anyone can edit, including people (namely vandals) we don't like. Vandals we can deal with pretty well, but the the second contradiction, which I'm not at all sure we've figured out a way to cope with, is that anyone can set policy, including people (like narrow-visioned tiny-minded wonks) who do it spectacularly badly.
(And this is not at all a new observation, of course; it's at the core of Clay Shirky's classic essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", which should also be required reading.)
Another complication is that it's not just "people who write articles" versus "people who delete them". What really matters -- or ought to -- is the people who *read* them. Like the Lorax who speaks for the trees, Wikipedia desperately needs some verifiable, NPOV channel through which we could learn the wants and needs of our readers. Inclusion and notability policies ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading.
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Your post seems to contradict itself. You say above that policy should be set by "the dedicated few rather than the madding crowd." On that, I agree.
I think you would find nontrivial numbers of readers interested in reading video game guides, detailed plot summaries with no other information, guides to where to find illegal copies of said works of fiction, articles about their best friend's garage band or their favorite uncle, and so on. That doesn't mean we should have that stuff.
2009/1/3 Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com:
A recent recycling of Aaron Swartz's analysis of the difference between who-makes-the-most-edits, versus who-contributes-the-most-content:
<http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway>
As often is the case, the last paragraph is well worth highlighting:
"Even if all the formatters quit the project tomorrow, Wikipedia would still be immensely valuable. For the most part, people read Wikipedia because it has the information they need, not because it has a consistent look. It certainly wouldn't be as nice without one, but the people who (like me) care about such things would probably step up to take the place of those who had left. The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around."