A friend of mine put my attention to this blog post [1]. I didn't read it as it is too late now (I just heard friend's description of the article), but I think that there is no sense to wait tomorrow for sharing it. The issue is important enough to be analyzed.
[1] - http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
I do.
2009/1/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
A friend of mine put my attention to this blog post [1]. I didn't read it as it is too late now (I just heard friend's description of the article), but I think that there is no sense to wait tomorrow for sharing it. The issue is important enough to be analyzed.
[1] - http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
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The one thing he seems to have missed so far is the sub-communities of people on individual groups of topics.
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:49 AM, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I do.
2009/1/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
A friend of mine put my attention to this blog post [1]. I didn't read it as it is too late now (I just heard friend's description of the article), but I think that there is no sense to wait tomorrow for sharing it. The issue is important enough to be analyzed.
[1] - http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
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Hello,
Aaron Swartz is right in so far that the "Jimmy Wales method" of looking at the number of edits of users is not enough. I would like to know whether Swartz counts really letters (for an encyclopaedic text), as he says, or bytes.
According to him, most of the Wikipedia texts are written by IP users, and the "500 heroes", the steady editors, are only the editors who make the texts look more beautiful and fit into a concept. He says that most contributors (IP users) do not even see the need to register, and they only make a limited number of edits. They, meaning ten thousands of mostly unregistered users, write the Wikipedia, not the 500 or 1400 or 1000-2000 community members Wales mentions in public.
I believe that the weak point of Swartz' research is that we cannot really identify the users who contribute. I just looked at [[de:Georg Michaelis]]: The core of the text was entered in 2004 by an IP user who actually did less than 30 edits. But - it is possible that this IP user later contributed under a different IP, or that he later registered, or even has several accounts.
The next essential contribution to that article were some works of or about Michaelis, and the third was made by a registered user. This confirms our thesis that most of the articles are essentially written by a small number of users. The question is in how far we can call them a "community", also seen the volatile character of many users who are part of the community maybe only for a couple of years.
Ziko
2009/1/8 David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com
The one thing he seems to have missed so far is the sub-communities of people on individual groups of topics.
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:49 AM, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I do.
2009/1/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
A friend of mine put my attention to this blog post [1]. I didn't read it as it is too late now (I just heard friend's description of the article), but I think that there is no sense to wait tomorrow for sharing it. The issue is important enough to be analyzed.
[1] -
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:49 AM, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I do.
Bots do.
2009/1/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
A friend of mine put my attention to this blog post [1]. I didn't read it as it is too late now (I just heard friend's description of the article), but I think that there is no sense to wait tomorrow for sharing it. The issue is important enough to be analyzed.
[1] - http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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2009/1/8 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
A friend of mine put my attention to this blog post [1]. ... [1] - http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
Is the date on it correct? I remember reading this or something very similar months ago, if not years.
It is a yet-another proof that responsible anonymous editors are a good thing all-in-all and that forcing people to create accounts is counter-productive.
2009/1/8 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com:
2009/1/8 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
A friend of mine put my attention to this blog post [1]. ... [1] - http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
Is the date on it correct? I remember reading this or something very similar months ago, if not years.
It is a yet-another proof that responsible anonymous editors are a good thing all-in-all and that forcing people to create accounts is counter-productive.
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.
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