Anonymous or low activity editors can contribute high quality content,
certainly, but quantity (and by extrapolation, most quality) comes from
registered ones.
(Case in point: no GA or FA can be written by an anon, or a SPE; and
most of the primary contributors to those articles likely have many high
quality edits to a large number of other articles).
--
Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's
laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 10/29/2012 12:49 PM, Felipe Ortega wrote:
----- Mensaje original -----
De: Piotr Konieczny <[email protected]>
Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<[email protected]>
CC:
Enviado: Lunes 29 de octubre de 2012 6:41
Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] War of 1812 and all that
I believe we have a number of studies which have shown that majority of
content was written by the small minority of most active editors. This
does not invalidate the comment about automated editing; bottom line -
most of anything on Wikipedia, i.e. both content and non-content support
infrastructure, was and is being done by a small group of very dedicated
people.
Well, actually there are many different cases. For example, there is a very
good article on the good
quality contributions from "casual" editors that is frequently overlooked:
Anthony, Denise L., Sean W. Smith, Timothy Williamson. 2009.
"Reputation and Reliability in Collective Goods: The case of the online
encyclopedia Wikipedia."
Rationality and Society 21(3): 283-306.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~socy/pdfs/reputation_and_reliability.pdf
The previous version of this paper was published back in 2005. Then, it came a series of
publications remarking the large fraction of work (usually measured in number of edits over total
number of contributions per week or month) carried out by very active editors. Thus, using the same
terminology as in the paper above, it is true that a lot of work comes from "zealots",
but we should not forget "good samaritans". Specially now that Wikipedia is even more
popular, making it more difficult to fight vandalism (as we can see from the last reports on the
growing number of reverts).
Best,
Felipe.
--
Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on
one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 10/28/2012 5:57 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
My comments on the top editors came from what I read here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits
Editors who use automated tools to do various little fixes can generate
large edit counts. Of course it does not follow that all large-edit-count
editors are doing this.
Sent from my iPad
On 29/10/2012, at 8:47 AM, "Yaroslav M. Blanter"
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, 29 Oct 2012 08:13:48 +1100, Kerry Raymond wrote:
As far as I can see most of the top 10000 editors appear to be
making
a lot of of their contributions in terms of administration and
quality
control (eg fighting vandalism) rather than in content. I think the
"long tail" of (good faith) editors are mostly
contributing content
on
a range of topics that I believe will continue to grow. I believe
that
once a WYSIWYG editor for WP becomes available we will see a growth
in
the long tail of editors and the topics they write on because I
think
wiki markup is a barrier for many people currently
under-represented
in the demographics of WP editors.
I actually have quite the opposite impression. I think most of the top
contributors are actually creating content. I myself am somewhere in
the
top 3000, and 90% of my edits are in the article space. I would be
interested to see a study on this if it exists.
I agree WP has moved into a new phase different from its earliest
years and probably its policies and processes might need to change
to
reflect that. For example, it's fine to "be bold"
with a stub, but
woe
betide the newbie editor that decides to be bold with a
well-developed
article whose current words may have been carefully crafted to
capture
the right nuances to keep all the warring factions happy.
Personally
I
believe mature articles need more of a curated approach to
incorporate
new material contributed by anyone but where the edits are done by
more experienced editors of that topic. Not that they should be
"gatekeepers" but that the material be added in the right
place and
in
a way that reflects prior agreements in relation to reflecting
differing viewpoints. I think the WP policy on mature articles
should
be "be careful not to break what's already there".
With this I agree.
Cheers
Yaroslav
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