2% Wikipediaholics Account for 73.4% of All Wikipedia Edits

By Alex in Blogs & Internet on Jan 4, 2009 at 1:45 am

Wikipedia bills itself as the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit. And while indeed that is true, do you ever wonder who does the bulk of the work? Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia has the surprising answer:

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."

Aaron Swartz of Raw Thought has the full story: Link – via Silicon Alley Insider

Tags: Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia

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Christophe
Jan 4th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Very interesting.

And I thought that wikipedia was a place for corporate hype…
Paulina
Jan 4th, 2009 at 10:53 am
interesting, but not that surprising, i suppose. it’s a similar situation with blogging – how many people read and how many people maintain their blogs active and interesting.

i just wonder if the percentage also relates to the involvement of those who translate the articles and wikipedia itself into languages other than english…
just a guy
Jan 4th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Darn that wikipediahol! its just as bad as choclahol or shopahol.
Justin
Jan 4th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I think it is important to note for those who may have missed it or skimmed the article. The majority of “content” provided is by outsiders and not that 2%. This fact is rather comforting when trying to look at wikipedia as an educational tool. It’s nice to know that experts in their particular subject are actually providing the bulk of the content in articles.

In one of my history classes we had to create a Wikipedia article and boy was it a process when you are new. I can see why these thousand or so people make so many edits. It’s difficult to get it exactly in the right format.
Nathan Miller
Jan 4th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
It’s like architecture! I once read that 2% of architects sign off on 90% of the buildings built in America. [i.e. cookie cutter houses, etc.]
open
Jan 4th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Everybody needs to think carefully about the concentration of authors. This means controlled information and stinks of manipulation.
It is a good thing to have many opinions. The truth can be easily suppressed by this type of operation. This is just another example of globalization using marxistic methods to control societal thought.
The same can be said with webMD.

wake up the sheeple!
Brent
Jan 5th, 2009 at 2:21 am
And 90% of my edits are overturned despite being mere spelling mistakes. If I see “teh,” or “annyware,” or the like, I tend to correct them. It is like picking up a bit of litter on the street and putting it in the bin – simply being a conscientious denizen of the community. But my corrections are almost always reverted!
fwhigh
Jan 5th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Shear number of edits isn’t the most enlightening statistic. I’m willing to bet that the most active majority is editing articles for style and not content. For example, these are probably the guys tagging “citation needed”.

There are editors and there are experts. These are not the same people. And quantity of edits is not quality of edits.
pwb
Jan 5th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Wales is way off. Read the Aaron Swartz article referenced. While most of the *edits* are made by a small number of lame-o’s, a much broader number of people have contributed actual content.

People have bought in way too much to the 80/20 rule.
liphttam1
Jan 6th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I eddeted wiki once. They didn’t take it off like they do to people who mess up the site. Yay! Alot of my freinds write on wiki, but they just change words and the wikipedia people get angry at them. I wrote about the band state radio. So I can easily belive the numbers up there.

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