Encyclopaedic Knowledge

Aaron Swartz con­trib­utes some fas­cin­ating analysis to the study of who writes Wikipedia. Founder Jimmy Wales has often stated that a small number of people make the largest number of con­tri­bu­tions. He told Stanford University that “the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits,” for example.

Swartz decided to count the evidence in a dif­ferent way. He counted the words added to articles, as opposed to changes for the sake of grammar, spelling and struc­ture. From his analysis, it appears that, in fact, a large number of very dif­ferent people con­tribute articles or major chunks of articles. Then, a much smaller number tinker with the story from then on.

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.

This is the way it should be, of course. Experts in a subject are a lot more rare than people with general edit­orial skills. And this is, in some respects, how tra­di­tional encyc­lo­pae­dias are written. The edit­orial board recruits experts to write articles which are then edited by the board.

Wikipedia stands this normal process on its head, of course. The original con­tri­bu­tions come from anywhere, hope­fully an expert, but there are no guar­an­tees. Then the editors con­tinu­ally refine these con­tri­bu­tions to meet accept­able stand­ards. If Wikipedia were a more tra­di­tional business, and paid its editors, this would be deemed very inef­fi­cient. However, when you’ve got hundreds of thou­sands of people working for free, it works well enough.

Where the con­trib­utors vs editors ratio affects things more con­tro­ver­sially is in decisions over the running of the site. To qualify to vote on decisions, you need to have racked up a sub­stan­tial number of edits. But the people who have done this, ded­ic­ated and neces­sary as they are, may not neces­sarily have con­trib­uted many articles at all. They could feasibly have racked up thou­sands of edits elim­in­ating uses of the oxford comma because they simply don’t like it. A voting caucus based around con­tri­bu­tions as opposed to changes and dele­tions might look very different.

Swartz is running for election to the Wikipedia Foundation Board.

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