Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written by Just 1 Percent of Its Editors | Hacker News Reader

Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written by Just 1 Percent of Its Editors

motherboard.vice.com

18 pointssds11111 comments

The title of the article is a bit vague. "Nearly all" means 77%, which would potentially be a more accurate title for this submission. To use a common Wikipedia standard, "nearly all" seems like an example of a weasel word (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word) or otherwise vague detensifier.

Not sure what the guidelines regarding deviation from linked article headlines are, though.

Even worse than weasel words is false logic, such as these two statements:

> a recent study that looked at the 250 million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years

> At the time of writing, there are roughly 132,000 registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month

being used to conclude that:

> So statistically speaking, only about 1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day

This assumes the number of daily new articles being posted in 2017 is the same as the average number of edits of both new and existing articles being made from 2001 to 2011 (averaged over all 10 years), which is a ridiculous assumption.

That does seem very suspect. Is historical data on submission rates easily available?

After doing some googling I found an article [1] that provides a somewhat more nuanced view. While it is true that around 70% of the edits each month are generated from the top 1% of users, this is only true for the top 1% of that month. When you look over a longer period the majority of edits come from users with less than 100 edits in total (which seems to be around 90% of the population).

[1]: http://asc-parc.blogspot.nl/2007/05/long-tail-and-power-law-...

Past work, same conclusion as your link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140803134036/http://www.aarons...

Isn't this true of almost all ecosystems and isn't it aptly explained by the Pareto principle?

1% of individuals hold 90% of the worlds wealth

1% of actors get lead roles in 90% of holywood movies

10% of sales people earn 90% of company's profits

0.1% of product designers influenced how 90% of todays products look

And so on...

Doesn't feel all that surprising. My contributions to Wikipedia are generally fixing typos, light grammar. If you count me as an editor, I wonder how many more like me there are that skew that number?

A similar participation ratio has been observed across many online social community and not just Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Even if the stat held for longer than a month, it's not surprising that for each subject matter expert there are 99-ish casual contributors.

100% of the world's science was discovered/formalized by 0.00001% of humanity. Implies nothing on the science's accuracy

So the same as every other forum.

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