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From: "Architexturez." <interface.services@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:29:14 +0530
| to blow the anonymous community myth!
I first met Jimbo Wales, the face of Wikipedia, when he came to speak at
Stanford. Wales told us about Wikipedia's history, technology, and
culture, but one thing he said stands out. "The idea that a lot of
people have of Wikipedia," he noted, "is that it's some emergent
phenomenon -- the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing
-- thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit
of content and out of this emerges a coherent body of work."† But, he
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."
The difference, of course, is crucial. Not just for the public, who
wants to know how a grand thing like Wikipedia actually gets written,
but also for Wales, who wants to know how to run the site. "For me this
is really important, because I spend a lot of time listening to those
four or five hundred and if ... those people were just a bunch of people
talking ... maybe I can just safely ignore them when setting policy" and
instead worry about "the million people writing a sentence each".
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."
cont'd....
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia