Who writes Wikipedia

[mmcirvin]

Via Daring Fireball: Who Writes Wikipedia?

This is a very interesting and not obvious result. Jimbo Wales thinks the bulk of Wikipedia's writing is done by a small core group of heavy users who all know each other, but according to Aaron Swartz, he's wrong. The vast majority of all edits are done by the core users, but the bulk of the content seems to be provided by people who contribute relatively few edits and often do not even have accounts. The core group are mostly doing maintenance and cleanup and reorganization on this material.

This makes some sense to me. The bulk of my Wikipedia contributions by word count happened when I was a rank newbie. Today I'd probably be too self-conscious to make them, too conscious that this article isn't encyclopedic enough or that article has what somebody thinks is the wrong tone.

It also means that the people who provide the bulk of the policy infighting, cliquish antics and IMMINENT DEATH OF WIKIPEDIA PREDICTED jeremiads are not the people who actually write most of the content. Those insiders are crucially important, since things wouldn't get cleaned up or wikified or de-vandalized as effectively without them. But I've always found it strange that, when some controversy comes along that is claimed by many of the insiders to have broken Wikipedia forever or revealed it to be a horrific farce, more often than not I have no idea what they are even talking about, and it doesn't seem to slow down the pace of contributions either.

Comments

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

This makes some sense to me. The bulk of my Wikipedia contributions by word count happened when I was a rank newbie. Today I'd probably be too self-conscious to make them, too conscious that this article isn't encyclopedic enough or that article has what somebody thinks is the wrong tone.

Also, I suspect that the major impulse for starting to write wikipedia articles is, "oh, shit, is that ever wrong/incomplete!"

And once you've written a few articles to correct that flaw, the overlap wherein you have a clue and wikipedia doesn't shrinks accordingly.

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I wonder to what extent it also has to do with potential contributors becoming jaded. I've had a couple of experiences where carefully-made contributions on topics where I have expert knowledge were destroyed with insult by people who thought they knew better. Now, if I see an edit that should be made and is ten words, I'll make it; but if I see one that's a thousand words, I'll say "Fuck 'em, let it stay broken" where once I would have put in the time to make it right.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

In the physics pages the problem is more that too many of the real experts can't write comprehensibly. They'll see something that is technically wrong in a well-written exposition, and patch up the hole with a digression that is all dense jargon and equations and breaks the flow of the article. Rewriting the page to satisfy both them and a more naive reader would be an immense task in itself.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I should also add that things seem to have gotten better since 2004, though the writing quality goes down as you get further into the weeds of advanced topics.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a lot of my early major contributions were about quantum field theory, and I reached my limit quickly.

Part of it, I suppose, is jadedness too, as mskala said. The quantum field theory sections of Wikipedia are inhabited by these mathematical physicist types who make lots of extremely mathematically abstruse additions to things. They know more than I do, and I'm loath to just cut their contributions out (and probably would get into a fight if I did), but their stuff is unreadable to non-physicists and difficult to fold in with the kind of scientifically-educated-generalist introductions that I'd want to put in there (the core Wikipedia insiders complained that even my stuff was too abstruse to be encyclopedic, with some justification). And after a while it got too difficult.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Yaay, I love being proved right.

For some time now, I've been (as you may have noticed) been pushing the agenda that registrations impedes worthwhile discussion and contribution, while anonymity and lack of registration encourages it. (The linked text was written by a friend, and it's a decent enough summary of the topic.)

You say it's an unexpected result, I say it's completely expected. Skilled people do not become regular contributors to sites like Wikipedia, they have better things to do with their lives. They may, however, drop by and help out once in a while, but they're not going to bother with registering accounts or spending a lot of time on it. Nevertheless, these are the most valuable people, because they are skilled enough to have better things to do with their time.

Another recent article relating to this is here. Once again, experience flys in the face of the accepted internet wisdom that anonymous and unregistered posting makes for less worthwhile content.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...what actually spurred my last paragraph was this (http://community.livejournal.com/wikipedians/90659.html): the latest apocalyptic final war of all against all that has divided the Wikipedia community against itself, or, at least, it really got a few people upset. Apparently this is a fight over somebody's admin status that is delayed fallout from a previous flamewar involving userboxes mentioning pedophilia, or something like that.

I'm sure it's all extremely upsetting and everyone involved has genuine concerns, but I'd guess that the vast majority of people who have written a long article for Wikipedia would have absolutely no idea what these people are going on about.