Encyclopaedic Knowledge
Aaron Swartz contributes some fascinating analysis to the study of who writes Wikipedia. Founder Jimmy Wales has often stated that a small number of people make the largest number of contributions. He told Stanford University that “the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits,” for example.
Swartz decided to count the evidence in a different way. He counted the words added to articles, as opposed to changes for the sake of grammar, spelling and structure. From his analysis, it appears that, in fact, a large number of very different people contribute articles or major chunks of articles. Then, a much smaller number tinker with the story from then on.
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site - the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
This is the way it should be, of course. Experts in a subject are a lot more rare than people with general editorial skills. And this is, in some respects, how traditional encyclopaedias are written. The editorial board recruits experts to write articles which are then edited by the board.
Wikipedia stands this normal process on its head, of course. The original contributions come from anywhere, hopefully an expert, but there are no guarantees. Then the editors continually refine these contributions to meet acceptable standards. If Wikipedia were a more traditional business, and paid its editors, this would be deemed very inefficient. However, when you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people working for free, it works well enough.
Where the contributors vs editors ratio affects things more controversially is in decisions over the running of the site. To qualify to vote on decisions, you need to have racked up a substantial number of edits. But the people who have done this, dedicated and necessary as they are, may not necessarily have contributed many articles at all. They could feasibly have racked up thousands of edits eliminating uses of the oxford comma because they simply don’t like it. A voting caucus based around contributions as opposed to changes and deletions might look very different.
Swartz is running for election to the Wikipedia Foundation Board.
