Hi Michael, > David Gerard, who is on vacation, found that the bulk of WP was > originated by occasional editors. While admins and wannabes had > lots of edits, they were not the main source of useful content. This > contradicts statements by Jimbo about who is contributing.
I am not sure I know what you mean by occasional editors but I have the feeling this contradicts also the result of that experiment I have read about elsewhere. (AaronSw on 'who writes wikipedia'). That was the only collection of data I could find around - now my knowledge of the topic is in fact very limited but I am sure I am not wrong when I say that a systematic analysis of how wikipedia is working has never been done. I don't know why this happened and the only hypothesis I could put forward is that simply nobody was expecting such an explosion of WP and so we weren't really prepared to handle the situation. This is a great pity in my view and it would be even worse to repeat the same mistake again. Ideally one should be able to know as much as possible about the work of the authors and the editors: byte by byte. When something goes wrong in an experiment first thing you do is run to the data and trying to figure out what was wrong indeed. Here we cannot do it. As a matter of fact we don't even know what the structure of wikipedia is. Anyway, if the data you mention are real, meaning that only a small part of the crew does the big part of the job (I confess this is hard to believe for me) than this issue should be taken in the deepest consideration because it would change things. You don't need anymore, for instance, to give too much power to the majority of users since their contribution is minimal; that would lower the noise in the system (reads: less vandals). > You are calling for people who really understand to explain things. Right, but it is not as easy as that. Before explaining something you need to make your mind clear and have the problem well figured out. And you need a method. A professional, for instance, would NEVER write anything without introducing the proper references or by giving error rates when talking about statistics. This is something the average citizen never does because it is really matter of method; either you learn to do that or you don't. > When Feynman ran out of brain to figure things, he explained 'em: I am not sure I follow this, sorry. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cafelamarck.it _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
