Jimmy Wales (founder of wikipedia) has said that 0.7 of wiki users, about 500 people, are responsible for 50% of all wikipedia edits!
But this article Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) sheds some light about people that not edit alot, but write alot of text.
Can anyone confirm of dismiss any of thier claims? Anyone has any knowledge of articles/studies about this subject?
Well for a start note that that article is some 8 years old. Rather more than 70,000 people now regularly use wikipedia.
Even so, I’m surprised Wales is surprised that .7% of people were writing half the content and expected “80% of the work being done by 20% of the users”. A ratio like that might apply if you had to join some sort of community to use wikipedia, and you were expected to contribute something.
But as a free product you don’t even need to register to use, of course the contibutors : users ratio would be tiny.
(sorry, don’t have answer to your actual question…)
Well you can actually check which user created and wrote each article, as well as who made each edit.
So you could start in a certain category and then check, it isn’t unsual for the bulk of articles in some obscure category to be written mostly by the same user.
I’ve often wondered who wrote the articles on, say, China, or World War Two, or Jesus Christ. One person? How often do they get changed? By whom?
You can see edit statistics in the View History page of any article. Example for Jesus Christ:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/articleinfo/index.php?article=Jesus&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia
Started by Jimbo, the Wikipedia founder who’s always begging you for money, 65% of its edits are made by the top 10% of its editors, namely Jimbo, VanishedUserABC, and FutureTrillionaire. If you really wanted to, there are other links on the View History page that will let you see what each user individually contributed or removed. That page is also curated by some 40 bots that protect or enhance it in various ways. It received most of its edits in 2005-2007, etc.
For each of those pages, you can click on the “view history” tab and see exactly who typed what and when.
For example, the China page was edited twice on 2-Sep-2014, by Dexbot and then by Nickst. The next edit after than was 8-Sep-2014. You can click on each edit and see word for word, character for character, exactly what was added or deleted. In many cases, you can read discussions about why they did it. You can even click on the user names and see what else that user has submitted and when they submitted it.
What’s not readily available is the aggregate statistic of how many people contribute what percentage of how many thousands of pages.
The thing to note about those edits, however, are they are usually very minor edits, like fixing a misspelling or reverting vandalism. The number of edits is not a good proxy for the content of the edits.
Well, I myself have written Wikipedia articles on subjets that had not been covered at all. When I do, I typically find that, 6 months to a year later, what I wrote has been drastically expanded adn re-written to the point where I can barely recognize any of my prose or take much credit for the article.
Sometimes the result is much better than what I created, sometimes it’s a lot worse (the writers don’t always show much fluency in English.)
That’s interesting. I’ve written maybe a dozen new WIki articles that did not previously exist, and basically, they remain untampered with, but in a few cases, new material was added.
In once instance, I added a couple of paragraphs to an article (all factual, relevant and well documented, re: the history and geography of a city) only to have them removed within a day by some originator who considered his article to be his little fiefdom. I went back and re-added them three times, with the same effect. Finally he figured out that I was as persistent as he was, and he has let them go now for about five years.
There are authors who have somebody monitor their Wiki page, and immediately delete anything more than what is in their book jacket blurb.
I"ve written several articles on law-realted topics, and I don’t find that they become unrecognizable over time. For the most part, the additions by other editors are usually quite helpful.
I try to avoid edit-wars because I don’t see the point, but I’ve been able to have some constructive dialogues with some editors on particular issues.
If an author of a book or someone else is trying to retain control over the wiki article on them, that is a violation of the conflict-of-interest rules. In one case like that, where a former politician tried to dictate the content, the wiki folks restricted changes to the article and explained why the politician didn’t get to dictate the content. He seemed to take the point and the disruptive editing has ceased.
This is my universal experience the few times I’ve tried to make minor but substantive non-editorial changes to wiki entries.
As such, they’ve lost me for life as a contributor.
Sorry to hear that - that’s not been my experience at all.
I think it really depends a lot on the subject-matter of the articles. Some areas seem to attract that kind of editor, but other areas do have editors with a collaborative approach who are open to reason.
It used to be a fairly trivial matter to find a useful subject that didn’t yet have a Wikipedia article. I wrote the original articles for Eddie Albert, Laura Antonelli, Blacula, Benjamin Paul Blood, Toni Braxton, Hugh L. Carey, Carmarthen by-election, 1957, Stockard Channing, Dick Clark, Rachael Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, Dead at 21, Alceo Dossena, Tananarive Due, Fantax, Fluxx, Horatio Gates, Bobcat Goldthwait, William Gordon-Cumming, Robert Guillaume, George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, Erich Hoepner, Chet Huntley, Nunnally Johnson, Fanya Kaplan, Richard Lawrence, Lyman Lemnitzer, Rich Little, Lord Ruthven, McHale’s Navy, Jenny McCarthy, Christopher Memminger, Gretchen Phillips, Bill Pickett, Portage Lake Lift Bridge, Paula Poundstone, The Pussycat Dolls, RM-2493, Jaclyn Smith, Carl Spaatz, S.M. Stirling, Betty Thomas, and Jack Warden.
Some of these articles are still substantially the same as when I wrote them. Others have been completely rewritten or deleted.
I edited some more or less in the history, politic/government section of some countries and maybe other articles. Anyone can change things but I do not falsify articles.
What were your research techniques? Why did you emphasize bios?
Who has the authority to delete articles from wiki? How often does it happen? If, say, a politician wants to remove embarrassing info, can he just delete entire articles about himself, or his rivals?
Anybody has the authority to delete whole passages from various articles. Edit wars occur all the time. That said, it’s understood that vandalism exists, so edits can also be reverted by anybody.
I’ve made a number of minor edits at Wikipedia and have had good experiences there.
Nothing special. These were mostly articles covering the basics of a subject. So some googling would usually produce the needed information. I got most of my information online but I would sometimes supplement it with offline sources.
In part because it’s easy to frame a biographical article. You just tell the pertinent facts of the individual’s life. Writing an article on a subject like carbon or the War of 1812 requires a lot more work to decide what the parameters of the article should be.
In addition, there used to be lists of needed articles. These were hypothetical articles that people had created links to but nobody had written yet. I frequently chose subjects off this list and as it happened a lot of them were people.
Can this be(/has this been) automated? Get a bot to do it?
I think the administrators have tightened up on the process somewhat since I was active on the site. The process used to be that you would propose an article for deletion and then people would theoretically discuss the merits of the article. In theory, a poor article could be saved by revision rather than deleted. But if the consensus was that the article couldn’t be fixed, it would be deleted.
This was the theory. In practice, there were people who were way too eager to delete. Dozens of articles got nominated for deletion every hour. Some people would go through the discussion pages and simply vote “del” for every article that was there. If somebody was voting to delete fifty articles in the space of a half hour, it was pretty obvious they weren’t bothering to read them much less consider their worth. So the people who wanted to legitimately discuss and revise articles were overwhelmed by the mass deleters. And as soon as they had a majority of votes, they’d declare a consensus had been reached and they’d run off to delete the article.
And this was the relatively slow process. There was also a procedure for speedy deletion in which a single person could delete an article. In principle, it was only supposed to be used for a few specific reasons but some people just used it routinely so they could delete faster without having to wait even a few hours for token discussion.
It was this kind of thing that made me quit working on articles. It was disheartening to try to build something up when there were idiots running around whose only interest was tearing things down. They could delete a hundred articles in the time it would take you to create one so it was a battle you couldn’t win.