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

[Fastfission]

On 2/28/07, Sage Ross <sage.ross at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> One of the central conclusions is "edits beget edits", though this is
> in terms of correlation, not causation.  But assuming causation, how
> many edits does an edit beget?  That is, as a function of total edits,
> time since creation, and number of new edits in a recent time slice,
> how many extra edits are edits are expected in the next time slice and
> beyond?  If I make 50 edits in one day to a 1000-edit article of age
> 50 weeks, how many extra edits will others contribute the next day,
> and how many extra over the next year?


There is also no real way to know whether those edits are "valuable" edits.
One would hope that bad edits beget better edits, and that vandalism begets
correction!

I must say that my primary objection here is the use of the term "democracy"
as if it were unproblematic -- everybody has a different idea of what
"democracy" means and stands for, and I'm not sure it is at all the right
term to describe the functioning of Wikipedia (however rosy it sounds). If
Wikipedia is a democracy then the term democracy has taken on a new and
bizarre meaning. My wild guess is that the people who gave it that
designation have not spent much time contemplating political theory, or even
understanding the dynamics of complex organizations. My anecdotal experience
would lead me to think that different areas of Wikipedia -- editing
high-visibility articles, editing low-visibility articles, arbitrating
article content disputes, arbitrating user disputes, article or image
reviews, etc. -- function in totally different ways, and since many of these
functions are *not* regulated by any strict set of guidelines I would not be
surprised to find all sorts of slightly different ad hoc dynamics involved
in each realm which become somewhat self-reinforcing in respects to the type
of people who frequent each (I would be interested to know if there is much
overlap between people who edit heavily, people who write new articles
heavily, people who help out at the reference desk, and people who vote for
article deletion). But anyway I haven't juggled any data so I admit to just
playing the armchair methodologist.

FF