[WikiEN-l] "Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway?"

[Heebie]

Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about. The article is
fundamentally flawed - you can see it contradicts itself with no other
knowledge or figures to hand.

They say that "The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who
do little else but contribute to the site", but then go on to say that "The
bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of
thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions
to the site".

Huh? Most of Wikipedia's content, as Swartz himself says (but apparently
simultaneously claims otherwise) is created by tens of thousands of
different people - there's no 'core' group here. The '1400 obsessed freaks',
as he goes on to discuss, just seem to do lots of minor edits. So the
opening paragraph is seriously misleading.

So it seems to me that Swartz's work backs-up Wikipedia as being a truly
crowd-sourced project, and only goes against Wales' original remarks, which
were a bit worrying in the first place. Or am I getting the wrong end of the
stick here?

Heebie.

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 5:53 PM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Steve Summit wrote:
> >  Inclusion and notability policies
> > ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is
> > interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk
> > deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some
> > nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading.
> >
> >
> I think that is "could be", not "ought to be". The mission is not to
> maximise readership: as of early  2009, it still to "write the
> encyclopedia". You know, the old Wikipedia some of us have thought we
> are writing for a few years now.
>
> As usual, there is the argument that if this other version of the
> mission was interesting enough to enough editors, they could fork.  Not
> likely to happen, but it's a clarifying thought: really, how different
> would it be?
>
> Charles
>
>
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