Wikipedia contribution - mass or elite activity? The question answered?!
Some new research I just heard about has set out to answer once and for all a key question for Web 2.0 fans and Wikipedia fans in particular. Are Wikipedia entries predominantly written by a small elite (as one of the founders, Jimmy Wales, has maintained) or are they written at least originally by a fairly broad spectrum of users (and then edited into shape by those elites, as Aaron Swartz maintains). Priedhorsky et al have introduced an additional lens through which to analyse the significance of contributors - who writes the words that get read the most on Wikipedia? It turns out (startlingly) that .1% of contributors produce nearly half the value as measured by number of words read. Of course one could poke holes in this metric of measurement as well - does the value of Wikipedia rest primarily on its ability to tell millions of people about Harry Potter (the third most popular page at the moment) or on its breadth? Nonetheless an interesting new data point to think about…
November 11th, 2007 at 2:44 am
OK, posting problem appears to have gone away.
(original post)
It’s interesting, but ultimately, you have to consider why this might be the case, rather than make blind assumptions from the numbers. The Priedhorsky study looked for words and sentences that tended to stay over multiple viewings of the article (they called them “persistent word views” [yes, "word", not "world"] or “PWVs”). This means that “content” in this context could also be cleaning up existing content with better prose, in both grammar and style, rather than actually writing everything by hand. This is because content that is clean tends to stay, while questionable or ungrammatical material is usually revised. Would it be any surprise, then, that those
0.1% of editors, the core group that cleans up Wikipedia content, has the greatest number of persistent combinations of words? The statistics are remarkably misleading in this sense if not read critically. Hope this is enlightening.
(addendum)
Although the results are so unbalanced, I believe that that is the case because the cleanup PWVs cut off the PWVs of the original author - though certainly there is something to be said for the core group of creators.
November 2nd, 2008 at 7:19 am
[...] they continue to post? Are they the new posting elite? Is there power from posting? This blog post, seems to think so. So does this article by Jakob Nielsen, who’s been pushing for a useable web since the [...]