[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia’s Labor Squeeze and Its Consequences"

[Charles Matthews]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Here's another outside view of the goings-on in Wikipedia, especially with
>> respect to the current trend toward backing away from the former pure
>> interpretation of the "anyone can edit" part of your slogan.
>>
>> http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1606233&seqNum=4
>>     
>
> "The 2007 study also indicated that human Wikipedia editors, as
> opposed to anti-vandal robots, made 100 percent of the corrections,"
>
> Why do people love to misconstrue research in such bogus ways?
>
> His cited supporting evidence for this claim studied _14_ examples of
> vandalism in 2006 (and about as much in total from all prior years).
> A zero-bot result in a sample that small would still be fairly likely
> even if bots were doing a pretty considerable amount of the work.
> (E.g. 5% for 1/5 reverts)... and 2006 was really back when the
> automated anti-vandalism tools were really getting started, predates
> abusefilter, etc.
>
> I'm sure there are many interesting things to say on this subject but
> I'm too distracted by all the strawman arguments.
>
> It's fine as an opinion piece, too bad that many people feel the need
> to stuff their editorials with misconstrued data in order to look like
> research rather than an op-ed.
>
>   
"This article originated from three blog posts on Eric's Technology & 
Marketing Law Blog: Wikipedia Will Fail Within 5 Years (Dec. 5, 2005); 
Wikipedia Will Fail in 4 Years (Dec. 5, 2006); Wikipedia Revisited: the 
Wikipedia Community’s Xenophobia (Jan. 22, 2008). "

This is punditry with footnotes, but still punditry. I don't actually 
believe we shall have clearly failed within 6 months: then I have a 
stake in not believing that, as Goldman apparently has a stake in a 
prediction of that type. There is, as there always has been, a dynamic 
on enWP: currrently I have some views as to what is going on, but these 
don't match at all to many accepted "pundit" views (which therefore 
annoy me).

Charles