Re: [Foundation-l] Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway?

2009/1/8 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)gmail.com>om>: Yes. This is old story from 2006: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia IMHO all this analysis is basicly untrustworthy - it is based on histories of "several articles", even not mentioned by the author, except only one. So, there is very little "experimental data" and quite a lot of unproved, controversial theses which do not fit well with other experimental data - for example statistics from servers. I think the real picture on "who the hell writes Wikipedia" is much more complex than just two opposites: *it is writen mainly by regular, registered users and the IP's contributions are negleblible *it is writen mainly by irregular, mainly unregistered users and the reglular, registered ones mainly play a role of editors of other's content. First of all - there are diffrent groups of registered, regular users - some indeed are focused on cleaning-up, some on other editorial works and quite a lot still simply writes articles. Second of all - there are also different groups of irregular users - some just writes several or only one article and leave, but there are also many doing simple editing works like correcting spelling. Finally, people change over the time - they might start as a unregistered writers then join "cleaning department" sysops and after that join their favorite wikiprojects and writes good articles in a team. -- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html