Comments on: Counting what counts: Musing about Wikipedia and Drosophila

By: Popular WebLogs » Blog Archive » Who Makes Wikipedia Work?

Popular WebLogs » Blog Archive » Who Makes Wikipedia Work? — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 00:35:53 +0000

[...] UPDATE: JP says it better than I did now or before, which is increasingly the case. [...]

By: Clotsneeze » Late breaking news

Clotsneeze » Late breaking news — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 21:03:09 +0000

[...] UPDATE: JP says it better than I did now or before, which is increasingly the case. [...]

By: Al

Al — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 15:14:23 +0000

Britannica has authors that could be considered as reliable sources on the subject, i.e. that either like Einstein who actually submitted his theory to Britannica I believe, or the people are specialists in their fields (like Gordon Leslie Squires editor of the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg, Lecturer in Physics, University of Cambridge; Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Author of Problems in Quantum Mechanics with Solutions and others). With WikiPedia, I fear that the common denominator of mediocrity will prevail, with a pareto equation of 80% ill-informed content. Will the Wikipedian principle of â€œNo original Researchâ€ suffocate the creative or authentic content of its socially applied software, or not? To publish is the prerogative of the educated with access to the publishing media, a (optimistic guestimate) pareto 20% of the world’s population. Does this exclusivity guarantee the integrity of the content? Content analysis as above could or could not put light on the subject. It concerns the questionable applicability in that it makes an interpretation irrespective of the population definition, and also for the level of content that can not be measured in classical analyses of content. Content analysis rely primarily on the researcher’s subjective inferences about the messages within the texts and resulting interpretation of the content.

:-)
Al

By: JP

JP — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 13:56:06 +0000

I think there a number of distinctions between the old and the new models, which I will try and draw out in a post tonight.

By: devangshu

devangshu — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 13:06:17 +0000

Let’s make the big assumption that both studies are correct The results are not mutually exclusive. And if this is true, it offers a perfectly believable “old-economy” encyclo-editing model.

There is a “desk” of 500-odd people who eat /sleep. breathe Wiki and format away to their hearts’ content.

There are uncounted hordes of domain experts who contribute to their specific areas of interest.

Isn’t this just a scaled-up version of the Brittanica model? That has a full time desk of 40-50 odd and many contributors. Multiply by the number of entries and the open nature of wikification and you’d get the wiki.

By: John Dodds

John Dodds — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:02:30 +0000

It’s an interesting study for sure, but implicitly equating the size of the edits with their relative importance seems to me to be quite an assumption. Those small edits could be totally changing the tone of the text and alleged facts and arguably be making a bigger contribution to the “quality” of the entry than someone adding a larger number of words. Unless I’ve missed something in his methodology, it seems to me that the most active editors are not merely ensuring the format.

By: Ross Mayfield

Ross Mayfield — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 22:07:05 +0000

You said it better than I, here:
http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/who_makes_wikip.html

and here

http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/08/heavy_lifting.html