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

[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.