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Most college professors discourage students from using Wikipedia as a reliable source of information, and if you’ve ever wondered why, here is the reason:
There are millions of people who browse Wikipedia in any given month, but only 2 percent of them (roughly 1,400) are responsible for editing nearly 75 percent of the information on the entire website.
In other words, Wikipedia, while editable by anyone, is fueled almost entirely by the knowledge of a small, select group of individuals.
Consider them the Illuminati of Wikipedia; they control the flow of information that often finds its way into our college essays, despite our professors’ best attempts to dissuade us from citing it.
The source of this startling revelation? The face of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales.
But, [Wales] insisted, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia was actually written by "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" where "I know all of them and they all know each other". Really, "it's much like any traditional organization."
[…] So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from "people who [are] contributing ... a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix ... or something like that."
You know what that means: Wikipedia will never be accepted by professors, so get used to going to the—gasp—library and reading—cringe—books.







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Today, that number is more like about 15-20%, and the types-of-edits caveat still applies. Posted 12/30/2008 9:26 PMReply
Many hidden forces want to see Wikipedia also follow the school of profit oriented monopoly companies who raise fund from advertisement or directly from customers. Because, availability of free information is affecting their business climates.
It is like the behaviour of weird-life-promoters who tried to supply condoms at the venue of World youth meeting organized at Australia.
Whoever coming against my way of life – suppress them, oppress them, pull them, push them, KILL them. Posted 12/31/2008 05:37 AMReply
...in 2006.
There are now 8,594,382 registered users on Wikpedia. The 2% rule applied today would mean that about 172,000 users are responsible for editing nearly 75 percent of the information on the entire website. Posted 12/31/2008 07:34 AMReply
"startling, as few as 2000 individuals are responsible for the production of 80% of all new academic writing on an annual basis."
and then you'd go and supply a list of 2000 people who were editors of traditional academic journals like Nature or Lancet.
why should any of us be startled and concerned to learn that articles have authors and editors? furthermore, why should anyone find it unusual that a small number of highly productive individuals are responsible for the lion's share of the work? isn't that the exact same pattern in nearly every industry? haven't you ever worked in a typical office where there are 2 guys who do everything and 18 jerk-offs who play solitaire and check their e-mail all day? Posted 01/03/2009 02:35 AMReply
The author states: "There are millions of people who browse Wikipedia in any given month, but only 2 percent of them (roughly 1,400) are responsible for editing nearly 75 percent of the information on the entire website."
2% of just one million is 20,000. Where 1,400 comes from? Posted 01/03/2009 02:52 AMReply
Sorry... how does this mean that at all? That's like saying... "Eggs a blue. You know what that means? GASP! You can't fly. Posted 01/03/2009 03:06 AMReply
Sorry... how does this mean that at all? That's like saying... "Eggs are blue. You know what that means? GASP! You can't fly. Posted 01/03/2009 03:07 AMReply
Encyclopaediae are not research sources. They are general overviews and pointers to research sources.
If you're going to get laughed at for citing Wikipedia, you're going to get exactly as laughed at for citing Britannica. Posted 01/03/2009 03:18 AMReply
-Michael
Muckbeast - Game Design and Virtual Worlds
http://www.muckbeast.com Posted 01/03/2009 05:06 AMReply
how many editors are there for the encyclopedia? *gasp* 4000 or so? can you say conspiracy?
more like, a lot of the entries contain common knowledge that almost anyone would know, enough with the bashing, jackass Posted 01/03/2009 05:10 AMReply
"The reason Wikipedia is a total failure is related to the point of this story... It is an absolute disaster."
If your argument against Wikipedia is based on the outdated info on this (rubbish) article or because your edits to "Rick Santorum" keep getting reverted then you're missing the point. Wikipedia is a massive success. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate or cover everything in the world, it just has to be good enough for a free, publicly editable encyclopedia.
And these figures are way out of date. More recent research suggests most *content* comes from random contributers who make a handful of additions. Bots and scripts account for these "master wikipedians" everyone talks about. Posted 01/03/2009 09:22 AMReply
grow up! Posted 01/03/2009 10:19 AMReply
But obviously the original content has to come from somewhere, ya think they just pulled it out of Funk & Wagnall?!?! Posted 01/03/2009 10:55 AMReply
Also when writing a college paper Wikipedia should be a starting point since it cites sources for you to go and research yourself, the professors are probably wikipedia hating because they're afraid of the internet... Posted 01/03/2009 11:10 AMReply
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061127-8296.html Posted 01/03/2009 12:07 PMReply
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html Posted 01/03/2009 12:08 PMReply
Also, Wikipedia itself is amazing when you realize
the quality of the content and the revenue it generates.
thanks from tony at:
http://www.ntopics.com/ Posted 01/03/2009 1:24 PMReply
Eric Wright Posted 01/03/2009 1:37 PMReply
How many people contribute to an Encyclopedia? I'm sure far less... Posted 01/03/2009 1:47 PMReply
provided with skepticism, and if needed I will verify the information with other sources. Wikipedia also provides links to sources, which many are of great use. I understand that Wikipedia can be improved, but I appreciate all the free info it provides. Posted 01/03/2009 4:23 PMReply
According to the lists found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits
One of the authors, "Rjwilmsi" made some 60'000 edits between 16 September 2008 and 20 November 2008. That's 924 edits a day, 462 an hour or 8 posts a minute, or one post every 6 seconds!!! How does he do it? When does that guy eat, sleeep or take a crap? Obviously these can not be "quality" posts.
However, it's not just the top guy, who is over-posting. In the same period half of the top editors posted posted at the rate of more than 1 post a minute. If they work 8 hours a day, Spend 8 hours posting to Wikipedia, and 8 hours sleeping, and take no weekends or holidays, that still makes one post every 20 seconds. The educational value of such posts is clearly in doubt. Maybe many of them make thousands of worthless changes to useless pages in order to get their edit score up and beat the next guy.
If Jimmy Wales were correct that only 1400 users make 75% of the edits, then that would imply that each of these users makes thousands of edits a month (unlikely).
I find that a short edit, such as finding an article, locating something which COULD be changed quickly, (- like the word order, although not always needing such a change), and editing, changing and saving, takes a minimum of 5 minutes for me. Any meaningful edit would of course take much longer. I think if the statistics showed "meaningful" edits, then the numbers would be more like the 80/20 that Jimmy Wales originally expected to find. If I spent 8 hours a day editing Wikipedia, just for the Hell of it, then the most I could do would be 80 edits a day, all of low quality.
There are around 9 million registered users of Wikipedia, of whom around 1 in 10 have a "user page" implying that they are active in some way, i.e some 900'000. However only around 150'000 registered users actually edit in a typical month. This implies that the active users represent less than 2% of the Wikipedia user base. This is in line with Jimmy Wales assertion that 2% of users edit 75% of Wikipedia, but the number of individuals this represents must be well in excess of the 1400 people he mentions.
Wikipedia gets around 60 million unique visitors every month, yet of those only around 150'000 or 0.25% actually edit anything. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wikipedia.org/?metric=uv Posted 01/03/2009 7:36 PMReply
To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version.†Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article.
If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales's methods, you get Wales's results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.
But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit -- this one! With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result completely reverses.
I don't have the resources to run this calculation across all of Wikipedia (there are over 60 million edits!), but I ran it on several more randomly-selected articles and the results were much the same. For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around). Posted 01/03/2009 10:28 PMReply
they said "millions of people"
hey dumb^#$!s, 2%= 0.02 times (even 1m) = 20,000 people, if 2%= 1400, thats only 700,000 people total.
God, whats the world coming to...douche bags Posted 01/04/2009 01:47 AMReply
Even if the numbers were to be taken seriously, it still stands: if 75% of wikipedia are written by 1400 people, then 25% of the edits are by experts in their specific field. And actually there are "Approximately 100,000 active editors (defined as users who made more than 5 changes in the last month)" according to the wikimedia foundation.
So the whole article is biased, wrong numbers, and tries to make a critique point ignoring the common knowledge about the "long tail" Posted 01/05/2009 06:58 AMReply
they said "millions of people"
hey dumb^#$!s, 2%= 0.02 times (even 1m) = 20,000 people, if 2%= 1400, thats only 700,000 people total.
God, whats the world coming to...douche bags"
700,000*0.02=14,000
70,000*0.02=1,400
So you got it wrong too, by a factor of 10. Douchebag. Posted 01/06/2009 10:00 PMReply
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