Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, thinks the wiki is mostly run by a Gang of 500 active editors, which I refer to as “bots” because of their annoying tendency to over-edit without any sense of substance or context.
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.”
But, it turns out, Wales is wrong. The Wikipedia bots mostly do formatting. They add very little editorial content.
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 that is why it’s so frustrating for outsiders to provide content: as soon as they do, super-active editors (“bots”) come along and makea myriad of minor changes. So, best strategy for submitting content to Wikipedia: put a big chunk of relatively neutral text up there and forget about it. Lose that sense of ownership, and let the editorial bots do what they want with it. via Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought).
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