[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia, Emergence, and The Wisdom of Crowds

[Sj]

On 5/4/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Sj wrote:
> > The swarm does the bulk of the writing, especially finding and
> > providing current facts, starting new articles, and adding neglected
> > POVs.  The roving groups are sensitive to dozens of policy pages, and
> > implement them as they rove... they also take on large projects, one
> > at a time, and try to implement certain changes across thousands of
> > pages at once.
> 
> "The swarm does the bukl of the writing..." hints at a testable hypothesis.

Definitely.    Note that the above is still under the earlier clause
"Currently, I imagine Wikipedia as..." and may or may not reflect
reality.  My guess is that depending on how you classify the 'swarm'
and the 'roving groups', you can find the swarm producing more or less
than 50% of the encyclopedia content.   My personal conceptual
swarm/coordination division doesn't break along user lines; most users
do some swarm work, and most active users do some coordinated roving.

> My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged
> in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users.  It would be extremely

What are "logged in users" here?  Users who made some kind of edit
over the same time period?
I would be interested in what percentage of edits in the article
namespace are made by anonymous or very-new users, after excluding bot
edits.  I'm guessing more than a third.  (new users: a proper newbie
check would work; red usernames is a quick substitute; it misses some
newbies, and overcounts some users with a red fetish)  Of the
remaining edits, I would again guess that over a third will be
uncoordinated and 'swarm-like' for some sane definition of swarming.

> interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles,
> old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily
> trafficked articles, etc.
> 
> A deeper understanding of all these issues can have some interesting
> implications for us in terms of understanding certain policy issues.

Good point.  

Chad Perrin wrote"
> even when the "regulars" aren't involved, what's going on is 
> actually carefully composed edits by individuals who, though a
> chaotic sort of collaboration, are building something as a team.
> These are not insects contributing intelligence to a central thinking
> process that produces good works...  
< It's easy to lose sight of the individual contributions 

Hmm.  I regularly see "regulars" making careless edits, or tossing up
new pages in swarming fashion.  I do it myself sometimes... other
editors in a different mindset inevitably come by, and start to fit
the contribution into an appropriate category, style template, etc.

The canonical "swarm" edit is a very individual contribution.  Someone
who uploads an entire unwikified essay, or a set of references, or  a
two-paragraph stub about a minor historical figure.

-- 
+sj+