(Just a sort of followup here)
Our very own AaronSw has been writing some articles on his blog when
he's not busy running for the Board. I found the second of them quite
interesting since it seems to have some direct ramifications for our
discussion of blocking article creation by anons.
"Who Writes Wikipedia?" (
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia )
"But, he [Jimmy] insisted, the truth was rather different: 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". Really, "it's much like any traditional organization.""
....
"Wales presents these claims as comforting. Don't worry, he tells the
world, Wikipedia isn't as shocking as you think. In fact, it's just
like any other project: a small group of colleagues working together
toward a common goal. But if you think about it, Wales's view of
things is actually much more shocking: around a thousand people wrote
the world's largest encyclopedia in four years for free? Could this
really be true?""
.....
"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. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I
found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the
site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around
10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an
account."
.....
"I don't have the resources to run this calculation across all of
Wikipedia (there are over 60 billion edits!), but I ran it on several
more randomly-selected articles and the results were much the same.
For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written
by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire
site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user
who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the
edits were all deleting things and moving things around).
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."
....
Aaron essentially concludes with:
"Wales is right about one thing, though. This fact does have enormous
policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional
contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more
rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze
more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to
broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.
Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional
contributors, their opinions aren't heard by the current Wikipedia
process. They don't get involved in policy debates, they don't go to
meetups, and they don't hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that
might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they're even
proposed."
Submitted for your consideration....,
~maru