Anonymous or low activity editors can contribute high quality content, certainly, but quantity (and by extrapolation, most quality) comes from registered ones.
(Case in point: no GA or FA can be written by an anon, or a SPE; and most of the primary contributors to those articles likely have many high quality edits to a large number of other articles).
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 10/29/2012 12:49 PM, Felipe Ortega wrote:
----- Mensaje original -----
De: Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org CC: Enviado: Lunes 29 de octubre de 2012 6:41 Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] War of 1812 and all that
I believe we have a number of studies which have shown that majority of content was written by the small minority of most active editors. This does not invalidate the comment about automated editing; bottom line - most of anything on Wikipedia, i.e. both content and non-content support infrastructure, was and is being done by a small group of very dedicated people.
Well, actually there are many different cases. For example, there is a very good article on the good quality contributions from "casual" editors that is frequently overlooked:
Anthony, Denise L., Sean W. Smith, Timothy Williamson. 2009. "Reputation and Reliability in Collective Goods: The case of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia." Rationality and Society 21(3): 283-306. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~socy/pdfs/reputation_and_reliability.pdf
The previous version of this paper was published back in 2005. Then, it came a series of publications remarking the large fraction of work (usually measured in number of edits over total number of contributions per week or month) carried out by very active editors. Thus, using the same terminology as in the paper above, it is true that a lot of work comes from "zealots", but we should not forget "good samaritans". Specially now that Wikipedia is even more popular, making it more difficult to fight vandalism (as we can see from the last reports on the growing number of reverts).
Best, Felipe.
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 10/28/2012 5:57 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
My comments on the top editors came from what I read here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edit...
Editors who use automated tools to do various little fixes can generate
large edit counts. Of course it does not follow that all large-edit-count editors are doing this.
Sent from my iPad
On 29/10/2012, at 8:47 AM, "Yaroslav M. Blanter"
putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
On Mon, 29 Oct 2012 08:13:48 +1100, Kerry Raymond wrote:
As far as I can see most of the top 10000 editors appear to be
making
a lot of of their contributions in terms of administration and quality control (eg fighting vandalism) rather than in content. I think the "long tail" of (good faith) editors are mostly
contributing content
on a range of topics that I believe will continue to grow. I believe that once a WYSIWYG editor for WP becomes available we will see a growth in the long tail of editors and the topics they write on because I
think
wiki markup is a barrier for many people currently
under-represented
in the demographics of WP editors.
I actually have quite the opposite impression. I think most of the top contributors are actually creating content. I myself am somewhere in
the
top 3000, and 90% of my edits are in the article space. I would be interested to see a study on this if it exists.
I agree WP has moved into a new phase different from its earliest years and probably its policies and processes might need to change
to
reflect that. For example, it's fine to "be bold"
with a stub, but
woe betide the newbie editor that decides to be bold with a well-developed article whose current words may have been carefully crafted to capture the right nuances to keep all the warring factions happy.
Personally
I believe mature articles need more of a curated approach to incorporate new material contributed by anyone but where the edits are done by more experienced editors of that topic. Not that they should be "gatekeepers" but that the material be added in the right
place and
in a way that reflects prior agreements in relation to reflecting differing viewpoints. I think the WP policy on mature articles
should
be "be careful not to break what's already there".
With this I agree.
Cheers Yaroslav
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