Alejandro@Oxford

Thanks to Jonathan Zittrain I rediscovered what Aaron Swartz wrote in his blog Raw Thought about Wikipedia a couple of years ago. It is a six-part article on wikimedia and wikipedia, which includes a section on Who writes Wikipedia? which I found interesting and quite relevant again when the Wikipedia foundation has managed to get $6 million in donations to push forward the project, and some talking of changes is going on.

Aaron challenges Jimbo Wales’s assumption that Wikipedia is written basically by a reduced group people in the first thousands. By counting not the number of edits by the length of the contributions he claims that many people contribute very few times but with long edits, by introducing at once what they know about one or more subjects – he uses the article on Alan Alda as example. He then says that

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.

He finishes with a conclusion I reckon it is still relevant for the future of Wikipedia:

“I’m not a wiki person who happened to go into encyclopedias,” Wales told the crowd at Oxford. “I’m an encyclopedia person who happened to use a wiki.” So perhaps his belief that Wikipedia was written in the traditional way isn’t surprising. Unfortunately, it is dangerous. If Wikipedia continues down this path of focusing on the encyclopedia at the expense of the wiki, it might end up not being much of either.