[WikiEN-l] Study finds that Wikipedia has evolved from an oligarchy to a democarcy

[George Herbert]

On 2/27/07, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
> G'day folks,
>
> Nature has published an article on studies on Wikipedia editing patterns.
>
> http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html
>
> I have added some highlights of the article:
>
> *Highly edited*
>
> Instead, there is an abnormally high number of very highly edited entries.
> The researchers say this is just what is expected if the number of new edits
> to an article is proportional to the number of previous edits. In other
> words, edits attract more edits. The disproportionately highly edited
> articles, the researchers say, are those that deal with very topical issues.
>
> And does this increased attention make them better? So it seems. Although
> the quality of an entry is not easy to assess automatically, Wilkinson and
> Huberman assume that those articles selected as the 'best' by the Wikipedia
> user community are indeed in some sense superior. These, they say, are more
> highly edited, and by a greater number of users, than the less visible
> entries.
>
> Who is making these edits, though? Some have claimed that Wikipedia articles
> don't truly draw on the collective wisdom of its users, but are put together
> mostly by a small, select élite, including the system's administrators.
> Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has admitted that he spends "a lot of time
> listening to four or five hundred" top users.
>
> Aniket Kittur of the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-workers
> have set out to discover who really does the
> editing2<http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html#B2>.
> They have looked at 4.7 million pages from the English-language Wikipedia,
> subjected to a total of about 58 million revisions, to see who was making
> the changes, and how.
>
> The results were striking. In effect, the Wiki community has mutated since
> 2001 from an oligarchy to a democracy. The percentage of edits made by the
> Wikipedia 'élite' of administrators increased steadily up to 2004, when it
> reached around 50%. But since then it has steadily declined, and is now just
> 10% (and falling).
>
> *Weight of numbers*
>
> Even though the edits made by this élite are generally more substantial than
> those made by the masses, their overall influence has clearly waned.
> Wikipedia is now dominated by users who are much more numerous than the
> elite but individually less active. Kittur and colleagues compare this to
> the rise of a powerful bourgeoisie within an oligarchic society.
>
> It concludes:
>
> This diversification of contributors is beneficial, Ofer Arazy and
> colleagues at the University of Alberta in Canada have
> found3<http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html#B3>.
> In 2005, when *Nature*'s news team arranged for expert comparisons between
> articles in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica online, the experts found
> only a moderate excess of errors in the Wikipedia
> articles4<http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html#B4>.
> (The idea that the two sources were broadly similar was vigorously
> challenged by the Encyclopaedia Britannica; see
> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html and
> http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060327/full/440582b.html.) Arazy's team says
> that of the 42 Wikipedia entries assessed in the article, the number of
> errors decreased as the number of different editors increased.
>
> The main lesson for tapping effectively into the 'wisdom of crowds', then,
> is that the crowd should be diverse. In fact, in 2004 Lu Hong and Scott Page
> of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor showed that a problem-solving
> team selected at random from a diverse collection of individuals will
> usually perform better than a team made up of those who individually perform
> best — because the latter tend to be too similar, and so draw on too narrow
> a range of options5<http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-6.html#B5>.
> For crowds, wisdom depends on variety.
>
> Regards
>
> *Keith Old*

Excellent find.  Thank you for posting that, Keith.

The full paper's preprint is up at:
http://xxx.arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0702/0702140.pdf


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com