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Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written by Just 1 Percent of Its Editors
- zbentley 9y agoThe title of the article is a bit vague. "Nearly all" means 77%, which would potentially be a more accurate title for this submission. To use a common Wikipedia standard, "nearly all" seems like an example of a weasel word (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word) or otherwise vague detensifier. Not sure what the guidelines regarding deviation from linked article headlines are, though.
- vorg 9y agoEven worse than weasel words is false logic, such as these two statements: > a recent study that looked at the 250 million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years > At the time of writing, there are roughly 132,000 registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month being used to conclude that: > So statistically speaking, only about 1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day This assumes the number of daily new articles being posted in 2017 is the same as the average number of edits of both new and existing articles being made from 2001 to 2011 (averaged over all 10 years), which is a ridiculous assumption.
- zbentley 9y agoThat does seem very suspect. Is historical data on submission rates easily available?
- oldboyFX 9y agoIsn't this true of almost all ecosystems and isn't it aptly explained by the Pareto principle? 1% of individuals hold 90% of the worlds wealth 1% of actors get lead roles in 90% of holywood movies 10% of sales people earn 90% of company's profits 0.1% of product designers influenced how 90% of todays products look And so on...
- mankash666 9y ago100% of the world's science was discovered/formalized by 0.00001% of humanity. Implies nothing on the science's accuracy
- Waterluvian 9y agoDoesn't feel all that surprising. My contributions to Wikipedia are generally fixing typos, light grammar. If you count me as an editor, I wonder how many more like me there are that skew that number?
- jasode 9y agoA similar participation ratio has been observed across many online social community and not just Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- contravariant 9y agoAfter doing some googling I found an article [1] that provides a somewhat more nuanced view. While it is true that around 70% of the edits each month are generated from the top 1% of users, this is only true for the top 1% of that month. When you look over a longer period the majority of edits come from users with less than 100 edits in total (which seems to be around 90% of the population). [1]: http://asc-parc.blogspot.nl/2007/05/long-tail-and-power-law-graphs-of-user.html http://asc-parc.blogspot.nl/2007/05/long-tail-and-power-law-...
- carussell 9y agoPast work, same conclusion as your link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140803134036/http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia https://web.archive.org/web/20140803134036/http://www.aarons...
- byron_fast 9y agoSo the same as every other forum.
- karmakaze 9y agoEven if the stat held for longer than a month, it's not surprising that for each subject matter expert there are 99-ish casual contributors.