Henry Blodget, of Silicon Alley Insider, wrote a post on an open question "who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway" but the hard fact still remains here. An article of Aaron Swartz, which changes a general assumption supported by Jmbo Wales, the Wikipedia founder: "Wikipedia was actually written by a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" where "I know all of them and they all know each other". Really, "it's much like any traditional organization."
Aaron Swartz conclusions are quite different and they deserve a careful reading.
Why? In depends if you do the math with the contributions' number or the contributions' lenght: In the first case you have the Wales results, in the second Swartz' findings
"When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content."
The difference between author and editor, perhaps.
Sunday 4 January 2009
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