[WikiEN-l] An interesting study on bad edits and their impact

[Sage Ross]

On 10/8/07, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article
> > views, we show that an overwhelming majority of the viewed words were
> > written by frequent editors and that this majority is increasing.
>
> This depends on your definition of "frequent editors".  The paper
> doesn't make this terribly clear, but as I read it these are the key
> numbers:
>
> * 25 trillion out of 34 trillion (73%) "page word views" (PWVs) are
> from content contributed by registered users.  27% is from anons.
> *The top 10% of editors (by edit count) account for 86% of the 25
> trillion PWVs.  But that's only 63% of total PWVs, when anon
> contributions are included.  Also, that 10% is ca. 420,000 editors.
> We definitely don't have that many "frequent editors", for most values
> of frequent.
> *Top 1% of editors account of about 70% of the 25 trillion PWVs, or
> 51% of the total.  So the top 42,000 editors account for about half.
> According to Erik Zachte's statistics, that's also about the number of
> users making more than 5 edits in a give month (as of October 2006,
> the end date of the study)
> *The top .1% (4,200) editors account for 44% of the 25 trillion, or
> 32% of the total.  That's the approximate number of editors making
> >100 edits per month.
> *The PWV share of the top 10% and top 1% groups were decreasing, not
> increasing.  Only the top .1% group was increasing, and they don't
> account for a majority of content.
>
> As David Gerard points out, this doesn't fully solve the question of
> "who writes Wikipedia", but it's certainly relevant (and I would say
> it points to a middle ground between the positions of Jimbo and Aaron
> Swartz).  Unfortunately, it's terribly out of date; Wikipedia, and its
> readership, has changed a lot in the past year.
>

I think I misinterpreted the paper; I think the percentiles are based
on both registered and anonymous editors.  See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-10-08/Vandalism_study
for more.

-Sage