I made a comment today to juliewolf's interesting diary Notes from a teacher to anyone who's a student about my refusal to accept Wikipedia as a scholarly source cited by my students for their research papers.
When I explain this to them, I also mention that I am a casual Wiki editor, and though Wikipedia has a wealth of information, they need to learn to check what sources are being cited for the entries, and follow the links, rather than just cutting and pasting "stuff" into their papers, as if it is all verified.
I do use Wiki, and find it useful - so this is not a wiki-bashing diary.
Many of us use it regularly here in diaries here at DKos.
Found this recent article Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway? which had some interesting data about the denizens of Wiki-world.
The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site, says a post racing up the Hacker News charts. The post pulls this number from an essay Aaron Swartz wrote more than two years ago, based on some comments by Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia's growth has exploded in the past two years, so today's number would presumably be a lot higher. But Swartz conducted his own study after hearing Jimmy's comments, and his more detailed findings are even more interesting. Swartz analyzed percentage-of-text instead of number of edits, and what he found was slightly different: The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site. The bulk of the changes to the original text, then, are made by a core group of heavy editors who make thousands of tiny edits (the 1400 freaks).
When you put it all together, the story becomes 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.
I don't fall into the category of "obsessed freak" nor have I contributed whole articles, but when I run across a piece that has misinformation, I do take the time to edit in my 2 cents on the topic.
I have only been challenged by other editors once; I edited an entry on a 60's leftist group, and someone changed it back. I discussed it and when challenged again pointed out that I did know what I was talking about since I was one of the founders of the group, and the person who had submitted the original (erroneous) piece wasn't born at the time the group was around, and was wrong on the history. My challenge stood.
A NYT article Growing Wikipedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy discussed Wiki editing a few years ago:
The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.
"A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community."
The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in their 20's. They are in constant communication — in real-time online chats, on "talk" pages connected to each entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr. Wales called "drive-by nonsense." Customized software — written by volunteers — also monitors changes to articles.
The International Herald Tribune recently covered some amusing controversy over Sarah Palin entries by "YoungTrigg:
Editing - and re-editing - Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry
YoungTrigg was a user name picked for this task; for other editing, he or she chooses other names: "I will acknowledge that I volunteer for the McCain campaign, one of thousands of people nationwide who are working to elect the best candidate for the job.
"Palin was not the nominee when I made my edits, though I am certainly excited about the selection. I don't believe I have a conflict of interest problem."
That said, nobody will be hearing from YoungTrigg again anytime soon. On the bottom was a black-bordered box surrounding the word "retired."
Since many of you spend a considerable amount of time online, either writing diaries or reading and commenting I am now curious.
I wonder how many of you contribute to Wikipedia, either full articles, or edits for errors you run across in browsing or utilizing the material there?