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

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2009/1/8 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at gmail.com>:
> 2009/1/8 Milos Rancic <millosh at 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.

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html