Joseph Reaglehttp://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/swartz-outsider-contributionsJoseph Reaglehttp://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/swartz-outsider-contributionsCopyright 2003-2010 Joseph Reagle
PyBlosxom http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/ 1.4.3 01/10/2008
2006-09-04T15:08:36ZOutsider Contributionshttp://reagle.org/joseph/blog/2006/09/04/swartz-outsider-contributions2006-09-04T15:08:36Z2006-09-04T15:08:36Z
<p>When I make a substantive contribution to Wikipedia, I tend to edit
"off-line" until I'm satisfied with the text, and then post it in a single
chunk. While I am only a WikiGnome in any case, the typical Wikipedia metric
of "edit counts" would underestimate the contribution made by people who edit
in a similar fashion. My own <a
href="http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/wikipedia-history-scraping?showcomments=yes">simple
Python script</a> exhibits this problem. To get some sense of the substance
of any given edit, one would have to go beyond screen-scraping and perform
analysis on the Wikipedia database -- something beyond my desktop computer.
Fortunately, Aaron Swartz purchased "some time on a computer cluster" and
came up with the following <a
href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia">novel result</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm looking forward to seeing these findings replicated.</p>