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Comment by matteoraso | Hacker News Reader

>I don't know the right solution to this problem, but I wish there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society against activist superminorities.

Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website their playground, though[0]. If you get rid of the superminority, the website literally couldn't function. The inner workings of Wikipedia are actually a fascinating rabbit hole to fall into, but the takeaway is that this behaviour seems to be ingrained into human nature. Basically, the majority consume, a minority produces, and a minority of the minority produces a lot. You can see this in any participatory system as well, not just Wikipedia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_...

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I'm reminded of an old saying, "The world is run by those who show up."

I prefer this one:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

The small group doesn't have to be thoughtful (and they often aren't), they just need to be committed.

The strong commitment and resolve within a small group inspires others to join.

Oddly enough, in Margaret Mead's case, that seems to mean lying to the world about Samoan promiscuity to rationalize her own adultery (implying that in the "state of nature", whatever that means, it's no big deal), thus contributing in her own way to the groundwork for the disaster that was the sexual revolution.

I've never heard of this. Can you give me the TL;DR?

Coming of Age in Samoa is controversial but the claim that Mead was actively lying is pretty untenable.

The main point of contention is that some of Mead's subjects, 40 years and a conversion to Christianity later, denied having had casual sex as young women and claimed that they were playing a practical joke on her.

Whether they were telling the truth then and if so to what extent they're representative of Mead's other subjects is a thorny issue, to say the least.

>a minority of the minority produces a lot

They produce a whole lot of edits. They don't actually contribute an especially large amount of content, which is the thing with real value.

The content is mostly written by subject matter experts that contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few articles each.

> The content is mostly written by subject matter experts that contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few articles each.

That sounds like the ideal scenario. Any evidence that it is or isn’t this way? I would guess it’s skewed more towards a handful of folks simply writing many articles about things they’re moderately knowledgeable about.

I actually ran a full character-level diff with move detection over the entire wikipedia edit history (few thousand machines) back in ~2008.

The vast majority of content was created by a long tail of users, with a very small minority of users being the last to "touch" a particular piece of text (copy edits, moving things around, etc).

Probably should have published that.

It's a really neat division of labor. Subject matter experts provide the facts from a subject matter-focused viewpoint. Those are known to be rough around the edges, so editors make sure they fit together in a more or less cohesive picture of the world.

As with most human efforts, the emergence of a political layer is inevitable. But overall they seem to be doing a pretty good job keeping their shit together. Even though I have no way of knowing whether the information on Wikipedia is correct as a whole, at least it presents as self-consistent.

>The content is mostly written by subject matter experts that contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few articles each.

I'm not too sure about that, actually. Wikipedia has a lot of special interest groups to handle niche topics, so I don't think that there's much room for experts outside of the group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject

> Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority

We're talking about totally different minorities here.

Yes, a tiny proportion of Wikipedia users create a vast portion of the content. But that doesn't mean their views are minority views.

If those, say, 1% of users who are contributors, still map roughly to the same distribution of gender, race, nationality, political leanings, etc. as the group of all users, then there's no superminority issue. If they set policy according to their own discussion and voting, we wouldn't expect that to be substantially different from a larger group.

The problem is with superminority views -- if you asked 100 randomly selected users of Wikipedia whether all instances of "is comprised of" should be replaced with "comprises", probably only a tiny minority would agree. This is a superminority viewpoint, which is the whole reason why this story is generating so much discussion.

A superminority viewpoint imposing its beliefs is a problem. While a small group of editors that is merely numerically a "superminority" is in no way a problem, unless they turn out to be substantially unrepresentative of the larger population in their views.

> Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website their playground, though[0].

It's more like the minority of the minority does a lot of spellchecking and editing, but it seems, much more plausibly, that a group much larger than a minority does the bulk of writing.

Any discussion of Wikipidia on HN is incomplete without a reference to Aaron Swartz's analysis of how Wikipedia is written:

"[He] concluded that the bulk of its content came from tens of thousands of occasional contributors, or "outsiders," each of whom made few other contributions to the site, while a core group of 500 to 1,000 regular editors tended to correct spelling and other formatting errors.He said: "The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Wikipedia

The minority wants you to think that the website wouldnt work without them.

Reality is that their rules are only for you. They dont judge their own edits with same standards. If edits were anonymized tons od admins would get banned.

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