Wikipedia bills itself as the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit. And while indeed that is true, do you ever wonder who does the bulk of the work? Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia has the surprising answer:
Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from "people who [are] contributing ... a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix ... or something like that."
Aaron Swartz of Raw Thought has the full story: Link - via Silicon Alley Insider
And I thought that wikipedia was a place for corporate hype...
i just wonder if the percentage also relates to the involvement of those who translate the articles and wikipedia itself into languages other than english...
In one of my history classes we had to create a Wikipedia article and boy was it a process when you are new. I can see why these thousand or so people make so many edits. It's difficult to get it exactly in the right format.
It is a good thing to have many opinions. The truth can be easily suppressed by this type of operation. This is just another example of globalization using marxistic methods to control societal thought.
The same can be said with webMD.
wake up the sheeple!
There are editors and there are experts. These are not the same people. And quantity of edits is not quality of edits.
People have bought in way too much to the 80/20 rule.