On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 9:51 AM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > Aaron Swartz found that most of the text is written by IPs, with the regulars > then formatting the heck out of it.
Like I was saying, that does not match my experience with mathematics articles. I very rarely see significant amounts of content (say, a new paragraph) added by an anonymous user. I randomly picked a few mathematical logic articles and ran a script on them to see how much text had been added by anons (see below). This is obviously not intended to be scientifically rigorous. But the data does cast doubt on the claim "anons add most of the content" being valid over our entire set of articles. My hypothesis is that the claim is more likely to be true for broadly-known topics or current events. For example, "Normal distribution" has had much more anonymous editing than "Cumulant". But the depth of Wikipedia comes from the latter sort of articles, and for every one of the former kind we have lots of the latter kind. Also, about half of our articles are stubs, and new articles cannot even be created by anonymous users without going through some hoops. I would assume the majority of content in stubs was added by registered users. - Carl -- Data -- I wrote a script that goes through all the revisions of a page in chronological order and tracks the absolute size of each change. So if an anonymous user adds 100 byes, then a registered user adds 100, then an anonymous user removes 5, and then a registered user adds 10, the script will say "anonymous: 105" and "registered: 110". I do not try to take reverts into account at all. Here is the data for a selection of mathematical logic articles. You can see that several of these have had a relatively small amount of information added by anonymous users. Article: Projection (set theory) Total edits: 17 Anon users: 102 bytes in 3 edits Registered users: 1224 bytes in 14 edits Current size: 1074 bytes Article: Borel hierarchy Total edits: 29 Anon users: 165 bytes in 2 edits Registered users: 9265 bytes in 27 edits Current size: 8850 bytes Article: Algebra of sets Total edits: 90 Anon users: 1542 bytes in 25 edits Registered users: 17181 bytes in 65 edits Current size: 11941 bytes Article: Indicator function Total edits: 149 Anon users: 1550 bytes in 22 edits Registered users: 15114 bytes in 127 edits Current size: 10922 bytes Article: Complete theory Total edits: 37 Anon users: 12 bytes in 1 edits Registered users: 2893 bytes in 36 edits Current size: 2691 bytes Article: Background and genesis of topos theory Count: 56 Anon: 133 in 9 Registered: 11662 in 47 Size: 10807 Article: Background and genesis of topos theory Total edits: 56 Anon users: 133 bytes in 9 edits Registered users: 11662 bytes in 47 edits Current size: 10807 bytes Article: Association for Logic, Language and Information Total edits: 14 Anon users: 21 bytes in 1 edits Registered users: 1982 bytes in 13 edits Current size: 1985 bytes Article: Extension by definitions Total edits: 20 Anon users: 4 bytes in 1 edits Registered users: 8123 bytes in 19 edits Current size: 7887 bytes Article: Unfoldable cardinal Total edits: 32 Anon users: 23 bytes in 2 edits Registered users: 3124 bytes in 30 edits Current size: 2933 bytes Article: Gluing axiom Total edits: 37 Anon users: 302 bytes in 4 edits Registered users: 9271 bytes in 33 edits Current size: 8843 bytes Here are some other articles I picked off the top of my head. Again, notice that anonymous edits are dwarfed by registered edits. Article: Group ring Total edits: 151 Anon users: 1761 bytes in 23 edits Registered users: 33828 bytes in 128 edits Current size: 16851 bytes Article: Product topology Total edits: 97 Anon users: 3804 bytes in 22 edits Registered users: 20526 bytes in 75 edits Current size: 8858 bytes Article: Linear multistep method Total edits: 107 Anon users: 1573 bytes in 28 edits Registered users: 18287 bytes in 79 edits Current size: 18890 bytes Article: Normal distribution Total edits: 1985 Anon users: 355031 bytes in 582 edits Registered users: 502215 bytes in 1403 edits Current size: 82984 bytes Article: Cumulant Total edits: 342 Anon users: 2528 bytes in 52 edits Registered users: 35277 bytes in 290 edits Current size: 31639 bytes _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l