NP "How Wikipedia entries get written"

[pynchonoid]

 http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/04/how_wikipedia_entrie.html

How Wikipedia entries get written
Aaron Swartz, who is running for the WIkipedia
executive, has done some data-crunching using a rented
supercomputing cluster, against many Wikipedia entries
to determine how Wikipedia entries get written. It
turns out that while the majority of edits come from a
small group of 500 core editors, the majority of new
content is inserted by drive-by, unregistered users
whose contributions are then massaged into
encolopediahood by the core 500.

    When you put it all together, the story become
clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of
information, then insiders make several edits tweaking
and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up
thousands of edits doing things like changing the name
of a category across the entire site -- the kind of
thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result,
insiders account for the vast majority of the edits.
But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the
content.

    And when you think about it, this makes perfect
sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere
near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of
information about an incredibly wide variety of
subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing
all the background research seems impossible.

    On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure
things that, for one reason or another, they've come
to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit
link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At
the same time, a small number of people have become
particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning
its policies and special syntax, and spending their
time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

    Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much
smaller scale: a large group of people write articles
on topics they know well, while a small staff formats
them into a single work. This second group is clearly
very important -- it's thanks to them encyclopedias
have a consistent look and tone -- but it's a severe
exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia.
One imagines the people running Britannica worry more
about their contributors than their formatters. 



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