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The other great mystery is that despite Clay Shirkey's romantic web 2.0 book 'Here Comes Everybody' nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its

The other great mystery is that despite Clay Shirkey's romantic web 2.0 book 'Here Comes Everybody' nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors. It's becoming hard to know who and what Wikipedia actually is https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody

thrdbndndn 5y ago
>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors Does it matter much? I assume it is considered bad because these "power editors" may have their agenda or whatever to control the way Wikipedia is written. From my experience as a frequent editor (on other language version of Wikipedia), this rarely happens. Power users edit a lot simply because it's their hobby. Or in other words, it happens because most of people just don't do any edits. Not to mention, this kind of data is misleading. The influence of each edit is very hard to compare. I surely won't measure it by just editing times or word count. A simple edit that corrected a number on an article can be just as useful and important. Also IMHO, the biggest strength of Wikipedia is not its quality, but its completeness. It's the fact you can have a central place to glance at the basic info about any subject. It shines in these stub articles about random animal, random town in Africa, random mid-size company. Even if all the "hot" articles become garbage or overly political, it doesn't affect the 99% value of Wikipedia.
- olivermarks 5y ago
  @thrdbndndn Encyclopedia Britannica was peer reviewed and written by accredited experts for decades. For all I know spooks are writing Wikipedia's more sensitive articles
furi 5y ago
>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all fit together (many many edits).
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  See http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/ http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/
lostinquebec 5y ago
The 1% don't WRITE, so much as things like formatting, grammar and spell correction. That is important, but it is not the writing of wikipedia.

thrdbndndn 5y ago

>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors Does it matter much? I assume it is considered bad because these "power editors" may have their agenda or whatever to control the way Wikipedia is written. From my experience as a frequent editor (on other language version of Wikipedia), this rarely happens. Power users edit a lot simply because it's their hobby. Or in other words, it happens because most of people just don't do any edits. Not to mention, this kind of data is misleading. The influence of each edit is very hard to compare. I surely won't measure it by just editing times or word count. A simple edit that corrected a number on an article can be just as useful and important. Also IMHO, the biggest strength of Wikipedia is not its quality, but its completeness. It's the fact you can have a central place to glance at the basic info about any subject. It shines in these stub articles about random animal, random town in Africa, random mid-size company. Even if all the "hot" articles become garbage or overly political, it doesn't affect the 99% value of Wikipedia.

olivermarks 5y ago
@thrdbndndn Encyclopedia Britannica was peer reviewed and written by accredited experts for decades. For all I know spooks are writing Wikipedia's more sensitive articles

furi 5y ago

>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all fit together (many many edits).

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
See http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/ http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/

lostinquebec 5y ago

The 1% don't WRITE, so much as things like formatting, grammar and spell correction. That is important, but it is not the writing of wikipedia.