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.