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Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

aaronsw.com

51–60 of 74 posts

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly to discredit it as having a political identity of its own or something because small group of people can be more biased openly than a large group?

Right, but this is Jimmy Wales pushing this.

Ego in his case, though modern forms of it are generally what the above throwaway said.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#52
post #46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities skew younger even more than the internet does. I think there is an element of the left wanting to "fix" the world which appeals to young people, and the right wanting to "protect" the world from bad changes, which appeals to older more cautious people.

The US military also skews young but leans more towards the republican party. https://news.gallup.com/poll/118684/military-veterans-ages-t...

Looks like there are 1.29 million in the US military (0.3% of US population), with an average age of 34.5. (All figures from top search result of Google.)

59% of millennials lean or identify as Democrat compared to 35% Republican https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/01/1-generations-party-...

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#53
I write/edit on Wikipedia most days. I've contributed to over 100 English articles, on topics ranging from science to music to art. In my experience, science/mathematics articles are VERY high level, often graduate-level content, and they can use some softening of jargon and domain-specific verbiage.

In the arts and music, many paintings, musical compositions, etc. don't have much written, or it's poorly written, by a non-English writer, etc.

I tried to write an article about my college a cappella group and it got rejected for not being famous enough. I thought that was a bit silly because my group was just as famous as random tiny towns in the middle of nowhere...shrug.

I'd encourage you all to join Wikipedia and make edits to anything you see that's amiss!

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#54
post #34

It would be interesting to redo this analysis now. 2006 was a long time ago. In 2006 wikipedia was in a very rapid growth phase; lots of topics still didn't have good coverage yet. In 2020, I can't remember a recent time where a mainstream topic didn't have extensive coverage on en wikipedia. Do the masses still write most of Wikipedia now that the low hanging fruit has been written?

I recently amazed several non-tech friends by mentioning that I, personally, have edited Wikipedia. It's not something a lot of people think of as something they can even do. They're not fixing typos, let alone making substantive edits or writing new articles.

I realize "do most people edit Wikipedia" is different from "are most Wikipedia edits from casual users", but it was an eye-opening interaction for me.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The political bias of wikipedia editors is horrible in most smaller countries. You mention Israel and Croatia. I can add Sweden. For an example, compare the wikipedia entries of the two largest parties in the Swedish parliament. One, Socialdemokraterna, starts with a blurb on how the party provides public welfare and the party slogan ("av var och en efter förmåga, åt var och en efter behov"). Compare with the second…

You may be correct but your proof suffers from the the fallacy of the middle ground. Unbiased reality by no means implies that the number of scandals, controversial quotes, achievements or even the relevance of the party slogan must be similar for both sides.

Given that it is politics, there could not be no scandal at all, however it be framed. I can't read it, so I won't say there were none present, though.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#56

Wales is right about one thing, though. This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. The problem is that, as a commu…

> New content is often treated as "guilty until proven innocent", and it's up to the contributor to wade through Wikipedia's idiosyncratic rules and definitions in order to justify to the moderators why their edits should not be reverted or their articles deleted

This has been EXACTLY my experience and it really really turned me off from even bothering in the future. :(

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#57
post #39

I miss Aaron so much

I miss him, and I miss people like him. At one point he embodied "web" culture. Seems like a long time ago now.

> At one point he embodied "web" culture

And is now the polar opposite of anything you might consider "web culture" today.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#58

Wales is right about one thing, though. This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. The problem is that, as a commu…

Isn't that the same for most open-source software[1]? To a Wikipedia editor going into a programming project to correct documentation, it might seem absurd that we want them to 'pass CI', 'squash the commits and correct the message column width to pass the code style', or 'sign the CLA'.

[1] It's a very prettied-up domain-specific language but it's still copyleft software.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#59

Wales is right about one thing, though. This fact does have enormous policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. The problem is that, as a commu…

It really depends on what you edit. Sci/tech/math is pretty much un-monitored in my experience. The economics pages are full of weird pet theories. Meanwhile, as you say, current events, biographies, and a lot of other less technical pages (that don't require the deep background that the article refers to) are infested with deletionists.

Re: Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006)

#60
post #3

From my experience with trying to contribute to the Hebrew version, try contributing focusing on expanding an existing article and watch what happens. In my case there was a very strong push back even against adding links that expand on issues mentioned which imho helped to balance an obvious slant. I gave up after a while. At university of course you’re warned not to use Wikipedia, it’s not acceptable as a reference…

> At university of course you’re warned not to use Wikipedia, it’s not acceptable as a reference

The reason for this is too often misconstrued as being that Wikipedia is somehow misleading. The reality is that you do you reference something that is not a primary source. When everything on Wikipedia ostensibly has to link to something, it is just lazy to cite "wikipedia" as source for something.

I mean, I imagine you couldn't just say "New York Library" as a source for a fact either in university. You'd cite the actual source.

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