Given what we that active editors have been declining since about 2006, I have to wonder if a 2015 study would produce very different results from the earlier period.
>From an entirely anecdotal perspective, I do observe that there is a lot of housekeeping edits that go on. I create a lot of new articles and would characterise my own editing as writing a lot of new content in new and existing articles; this is my primary interest. However, I am both amused and annoyed at the way that within moments of my edit, there can be a rash of people wanting to add project tags, add esoteric categories that I cannot imagine being used for navigation by real readers, replace a dash of one length with a dash of another length, remove the word comprised (one of the most annoying!), and so on. Many of these folks have massive edit counts and appear (from a quick look at the last screen of recent contributions) to devote themselves entirely to this kind of editing. Indeed, I go so far as to say many suffer from editcountitis, a condition that often can be diagnosed by the User page being largely devoted to reporting on their number of edits :-) IMHO, I would have to say that the value-add of these housekeeping edits is mixed. Some are genuinely useful (people pick up mistakes Ive made) or add categories I am unaware of that are relevant to the topic. Some are useful if you happen to believe the reader experience is genuinely improved by rigid adherence the Manual of Style (I would be interested in a study on how important the consistency of the use of various-length dashes and other MoS detail is to the reader experience). Some like project tagging appear to be utterly pointless as most of the projects involved are moribund. Other than meeting some deep need to mark your territory like a dog (or get your edit count up), what earthly point is there to project tagging unless the project has some active processes to improve articles? Some are just annoying (like the user who dislikes the word comprised) and many of these people create edit conflicts for me as I add further content which is ****ing annoying. Edit conflicts is a particular problem trying to do your second/third edit to a new article, as new articles attract housekeeping edits like vultures to a carcass. The folks I particularly despise are the ones who try to add multiple quality tags or speedy delete a new stub after its first edit (which is sometimes cut short because I am interrupted folks, give me 5 minutes please to come back and do a little more work on it). I teach Wikipedia editing (indeed I am off to a local university to do it this morning) and I see first hand how this kind of housekeeping behaviour is really disruptive to new contributors (even the more useful and well-intended housekeeping) because of the edit conflicts it creates. New contributors spend a long time writing and previewing before SAVE, which is probably a desirable behaviour if it wasnt for the housekeepers. Whereas anyone who studied my patterns of edits would see me saving very frequently, because of this issue with edit conflicts from the housekeepers. I try to teach people to SAVE, SAVE, SAVE as often as possible. Having seen the impact of edit conflicts in edit training sessions where I am there to explain whats happening, I suspect that housekeeping edits are probably frightening off or frustrating away new contributors who dont have someone leaning over their shoulder to advise them on dealing with edit conflicts. Because it is quick and easy to do a housekeeping edit and slow to write good content with citations, the housekeepers can easily drive away a content contributor. Kerry _____ From: wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Wednesday, 24 June 2015 3:24 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Aaron Swartz Hypothesis on WikipediaAuthorship On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Finn Årup Nielsen <f...@imm.dtu.dk> wrote: One interesting original study is this one: "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia" from 2007 by Reid Priedhorsky and others. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1316624.1316663 Yes, this is the best study of which I'm aware. - J best regards Finn Årup Nielsen On 06/23/2015 04:46 PM, Krzysztof Gajewski wrote: Hi all, I wonder if you know if somebody verified and / or further researched Aaron Swartz's thesis on structure of Wikipedia participation. You can find it here: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia Best, Krzysztof Gajewski _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Finn Årup Nielsen http://people.compute.dtu.dk/faan/ _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>
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