[WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact dangerous to Wikipedia

[Matt Brown]

On 9/4/06, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Answering "Who Writes Wikipedia?" in terms of number of surviving words is,
> no doubt, better than using edit counts.

If you rank Wikipedia editors by edit count, the bots win; in second
place are the editors who function in a very bot-like manner, by
constantly fixing small issues here and there, often with software
assistance.

I also bet that if you ranked editors by surviving words in the
encyclopedia (not project or talk) you might be quite surprised to see
who ranks high.  People get noticed on Wikipedia for participating in
project-space, for one reason or another, not for their article
contribs.

> But it is also may not be the best approach for the future, if we are really
> switching to a "quality over quantity" mentality.

Are we?  Because there are huge swathes of important stuff as-yet
undocumented in Wikipedia.  (Of course, we're probably close if not
there in terms of covering every topic covered in traditional general
encyclopedias, but Wikipedia is not just a general encyclopedia; it's
all the specialist encyclopedias too).

> At the least, there should be careful choices about
> what kinds of articles to analyze, before we put too much weight on results
> like these.  My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a
> significantly larger portion of established editors as the main
> contributors, even by the word count metric.

David points out correctly that FA is a political game and thus favors
the established.  Good Articles started off as an idea to get away
from this and actually identify informally what's actually pretty well
done, but it has now turned into mini-FA.

I do see the point of identifying which articles are established vs.
text dumps or the like - perhaps looking at articles over N edits, or
over N months old?

-Matt