Who Writes Wikipedia Articles?

Image: Although "all-round" editors helped contribute to high-quality articles, the study's findings don't negate the importance of fact-checkers, copy editors and other contributors. Wikimedia Foundation

From Discovery News:

Wikipedians who can perform a range of roles -- rather than possess a single expertise -- are key to quality articles.

It takes a village of contributors -- adding paragraphs here, inserting references there -- to craft a quality Wikipedia article, according to a new study that identifies the types of contributors who initiate and dominate the process to separate the Wikipedia wheat from chaff.

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About Wikipedia’s Handling Of Controversial Topics…Like Climate Science

From Fabius Maximus:

Summary: This is a hat trick. About effective propaganda. And climate science. And more evidence that Wikipedia cannot be relied upon as an information source regarding controversial matters — or any work of importance. (It’s always useful as a first place to look and source of links.)

Contents

1. “Wikipedia Is A Stunning Example Of How The Propaganda Machine Works“, Lawrence Solomon, National Review (reposted by CBS), 8 July 2008
2. “Wikipedia’s climate doctor“, Lawrence Solomon, National Post, 19 December 2009 – “How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.”

Update: an email reply by Wikipedia Editor Pierre Grés to Dennis Kuzara’s complaint about bias of Wikipedia Administrator William Connolley, posted at Watts Up With That, 19 December 2009 (see the actual Wikipedia file on this here):

“In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming.”

We’ll learn much about Wikipedia’s honesty by what happens now to the dozens of articles seriously distorted or outright suppressed by Connolley. Is this a structural problem with Wikipedia, or just a bad apple in the barrel?

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Wikipedia Founder Dismisses Claim The Site Is Losing Thousands Of 'Editors'

Photo: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of the site contested the claim that 49,000 volunteer editors had left in the first three months of 2009

From The Daily Mail:

Wikipedia's co-founder has called into question research which suggests thousands of volunteer editors across the world had left the site thereby undermining its usefulness.

Jimmy Wales contested the claim that 49,000 volunteer editors had left in the first three months of 2009.

'Our internal numbers don’t confirm all the claims made. We do agree that the number of editors has stabilised, as one would expect, since we're already the fifth most popular website on the internet...[however] our own data shows that the number of active editors across all projects is stable – i.e. the new editors are replaced at about the same pace as existing editors are leaving,' he told the Telegraph.

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Report: Wikipedia Losing Volunteers

From CNET:

Wikipedia's exponential growth over this decade is due to the efforts of the millions of volunteers who write, edit, and check its entries. But could that volunteer effort now be in danger?

Volunteers have increasingly been quitting Wikipedia en masse for a variety of potential reasons, according to Monday's Wall Street Journal.

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Convicted Murderer Sues Wikipedia, Demands Removal of His Name

From The Threat Level:

Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990.

Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter (.pdf) demanding removal of Werle’s name from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”

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Q&A: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Founder)

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

From The Guardian:

'My greatest hope for the next 10 years? That we will, on the internet, continue to forge a new cultural dialogue of reason and respect for the individual'

Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.org in January 2001. It is now among the top five most visited sites on the web; in 2006, Wales was named one of the world's most influential people by Time magazine.

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The 15 Biggest Wikipedia Blunders

From PC World:

Wikipedia's just announced plans to restrict the editing of some of its articles. Under the new system, any changes made to pages of still-living people will have to be approved by an "experienced volunteer" before going online.

The change marks a significant shift in the philosophy of the openly edited user-controlled encyclopedia -- and that may not be a bad thing. Here are 15 of the biggest Wikipedia blunders the new editing system might have prevented. These false facts, according to widely published accounts, all appeared on the Wikipedia site at some point.

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Wikipedia To Color Code Untrustworthy Text

From Wired Science:

Starting this fall, you’ll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

More than 60 million people visit the free, open-access encyclopedia each month, searching for knowledge on 12 million pages in 260 languages. But despite its popularity, Wikipedia has long suffered criticism from those who say it’s not reliable. Because anyone with an internet connection can contribute, the site is subject to vandalism, bias and misinformation. And edits are anonymous, so there’s no easy way to separate credible information from fake content created by vandals.

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Wikipedia To Launch Page Controls

From The BBC:

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is on the cusp of launching a major revamp to how people contribute to some pages.

The site will require that revisions to pages about living people and some organisations be approved by an editor.

This would be a radical shift for the site, which ostensibly allows anyone to make changes to almost any entry.

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After The Boom, Is Wikipedia Heading For Bust?

From New Scientist:

Wikipedia has rapidly become one of the most used reference sources in the world, but a new study shows that the website's explosive growth is tailing off and also suggests the community-created encyclopaedia has become less welcoming to new contributors.

Ed Chi and colleagues at the Palo Alto Research Center in California warn that the changes could compromise the encyclopaedia's quality in the long term.

"It's easy to say that Wikipedia will always be here," says Chi, a computer scientist. "This research shows that is not a given."

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Doomed: Why Wikipedia Will Fail

From Ars Technica:

A cyberlaw professor argues that Wikipedia is doomed. The online encyclopedia will need to choose between being "high quality" and "open," but both choices are fraught with risk.

Law professor Eric Goldman loves Wikipedia, but he's also convinced that the site contains the "seeds of its own destruction." In other words, not to put too fine a point upon it, Wikipedia will fail.

Goldman made his provocative point at the Silicon Flatirons conference this weekend in Boulder, Colorado, standing at a heavy wooden podium in a multiuse room that had been donated to the University of Colorado by a graduating class back in the 1960s. Those students could not have foreseen Wikipedia at the time, but by 2008, everyone gathered in that room—from corporate vice presidents to think tank bosses to academics—had made use of the collaborative online encyclopedia.

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Wikipedia Reconsiders Editing Process

From CBS/CNET Tech News:

The User-Generated Resource Looks At Allowing Only Trusted Users To Immediately Publish Content Changes

(CNET) Just as Encyclopedia Britannica is moving in the direction of user-based entries, Wikipedia might soon be clamping down on theirs.

Wikipedia is apparently considering instituting a new editorial process that would put better safeguards in place and require all updates to be approved by a "reliable" user. The so-called Flagged Revisions process would allow registered, trusted editors to publish changes to the site immediately. All other edits would be sent to a queue and would not be published until they get approved by one of Wikipedia's trusted team of editors.

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73.4 Percent of All Wikipedia Edits Are Made By Roughly 1,400 People

From College On The Record:

Most college professors discourage students from using Wikipedia as a reliable source of information, and if you’ve ever wondered why, here is the reason:

There are millions of people who browse Wikipedia in any given month, but only 2 percent of them (roughly 1,400) are responsible for editing nearly 75 percent of the information on the entire website.

In other words, Wikipedia, while editable by anyone, is fueled almost entirely by the knowledge of a small, select group of individuals.

Consider them the Illuminati of Wikipedia; they control the flow of information that often finds its way into our college essays, despite our professors’ best attempts to dissuade us from citing it.

The source of this startling revelation? The face of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales.

But, [Wales] insisted, the truth was rather different: 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."

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The Shirt That Sums Up Wikipedia

Hat Tip Gizmodo.