The Phoenix Network:
 
 
 
About  |  Advertise
 
Comic Strips  |  Lifestyle Features

Wikipedia rules

By MIKE MILIARD  |  December 12, 2007

Wikipedians are a diverse group. Poke around their user pages and you’ll see arrays of multi-colored “user boxes” proudly announcing that the contributor is nearsighted, or an atheist, or Catholic, or gay, or Swedish, or a teenager, or a backgammon player, or a golden retriever lover, or a pilot, or a Zen Buddhist, or a Jedi, or a Red Sox fan, or an advanced C++ programmer, or an Islay malt drinker, or a Tolkien reader, or a Lovecraft fan, or a guitarist, or a snowboarder, or a pagan, or someone who “advocates the use of more cowbell.”

For his part, GlassCobra (username: GlassCobra), 20, a Northeastern third-year, is a Gryffindor, likes to watch Adult Swim, and prefers New York–style pizza. He’s also a tireless reverter of vandalism and corrector of misinformation on thousands of Wikipedia’s pages.

Although he’d been using the site since high school, GlassCobra confesses that the “stigma of being a nerd” prevented him from getting too involved, at first. Finally, this April, he registered an account and started editing. In just eight months, he’s already logged more than 7000 edits across a wide spectrum of articles, from Cam’ron to César Chávez to Insane Clown Posse.

GlassCobra’s written some from scratch, as well — such as the entry on the Philippines’ Manila Hotel. He’s also gotten heavily involved in Wikipedia policy discussions. And, this past month, his diligence and tenacity helped him ascend to the rank of a site administrator, which allows him to block harmful users, delete pages, and send some of the more contentious entries into temporary lock-down. Administrator is an elite title: there are only 1427 administrators on the English-language site.

But “we try not to act like it’s a status symbol,” says GlassCobra. “We see ourselves as janitors, mainly. The symbol of the administrator is a mop. We are humble servants, just doing our best to clean up.” (So it’s not something he uses to impress the ladies at Northeastern keggers? “Oh, dear God, no.”)

While GlassCobra confesses that his dogged monitoring and editing of others’ contributions may stem from “being a bit of a control freak,” he’s adamant that, on Wikipedia, “no one person should have control of anything. Wikipedia is run and governed entirely by community consensus just so that control freaks don’t let their heads get too big, and so that any one person can’t screw something up too much.”

Many and few
Looking at the Wikipedia “community,” it can sometimes seem that the site is actually written and edited by a small cadre of diehards. In fact, even one of its co-founder believed that to be true.

“The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia,” Jimmy Wales told blogger Aaron Swartz this past year, “is that it’s some emergent phenomenon — the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing — thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content, and out of this emerges a coherent body of work.”

Instead, Wales contended, Wikipedia was actually written by “a community . . . a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers.” Initially, he figured about 80 percent of the work was done by 20 percent of users. But he crunched the numbers and discovered something even more striking: nearly 75 percent of edits were done by just two percent of users.

Swartz, however, launched a study of his own, which found a marked difference between edit-intensive users, who contribute small fixes to existing entries, and those who actually wrote the bulk of articles. “Almost every time I saw a substantive edit,” he writes, “I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.”

In other words: it’s generally the core crew of several thousand dedicated Wikipedians who combine to keep the site refined and readable, correcting mistakes and counteracting vandalism. But it’s usually regular folks with special expertise (the self-proclaimed Dylanologist, the amateur horticulturalist, the military buff), writing one or two or five articles apiece, who’ve contributed the bulk of the content. Both groups are equally important to Wikipedia’s success.

Broad and narrow
You don’t need to be an administrator like GlassCobra to contribute to Wikipedia, nor do you have to be a diehard like SJ Klein, 29, a Cantabrigian who works for the One Laptop per Child program. (Klein’s username “Sj” should not be confused with “Essjay,” a high-profile Wikipedia admin who, to the chagrin of many, was found earlier this year to have concocted an elaborate online identity as a tenured religion professor.)

“On the English Wikipedia, I’ve probably contributed to a few thousand articles,” says Klein. “I have about 15,000 edits across different spaces. I’ve made almost that many contributions to the metaWiki, which is the organizational wiki, and maybe five or six thousand edits across all the other projects, like WikiBooks and Wiktionary.” Lately, Klein has been spending as many as 100 hours a week at his day job. But when he had more free time, he says he “used to spend 20 to 30 hours a week editing Wikipedia.”

< prev  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |   next >
Related:
  Topics: Lifestyle Features , SJ Klein , Crime , Vandalism ,  More more >
  • Share:
  • RSS feed Rss
  • Email this article to a friend Email
  • Print this article Print
Comments
Wikipedia rules
GlassCobra ROCKS! An excellent person. What a cool article!
By Archangel on 12/12/2007 at 8:10:25
Wikipedia rules
Yes! Thank you! Finally, a well-informed article on Wikipedia! This is a rare gem - most articles on Wikipedia seem to be either snide critics using sensational language or uninvolved advocates spewing trivial apologies of Wikipedia alongside meaningless statistics, and I'm glad to see that *someone* can write about the topic well for the public.
By Nihiltres on 12/13/2007 at 1:42:25
Wikipedia rules
This was a PR "puff piece" as Jimmy Wales is fond of saying. I would say the article spent about 6% of its words on criticism and 94% on flattery. Read the article about "History of western Eurasia" (the whole thing), and tell me that this is a good resource for anyone beyond a 6th-grade education. Read the article about "electric knife" and tell me if it seems "balanced" to devote about 20% of the article to how electric knives are used to trim foam for transvestites to pad their asses. No kidding, I tried to modify that article for the better, but instead of being thanked, I was blocked. Read about what happened to Taner Akcam at the airport, then tell me that all of the "good" that Wikipedia has done actually outweighs the deprivation of a man's civil liberties. Yes, I agree, this article is a rare gem. It is indeed RARE these days to still find a journalist who so blindly follows a cult. Did I mention the former COO of the Wikimedia Foundation is a convicted felon? Did I mention that the former Treasurer was found to be in contempt of court surrounding a hearing about how he was hiding $800,000 from a rightful plaintiff? Did I mention that the Foundation is budgeting more than $500,000 for the new Executive Director's salary and staff for 2008, not to mention $180,000 for the lawyer who denies having known anything about the COO's felony background. Wikipedia has become a hyperbolic parody of what all its critics have claimed it was. We can't even make fun of it any more, because it's so laughable at face value.
By Gregory Kohs on 12/13/2007 at 11:14:33
Wikipedia rules
Gregory Kohs: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electric_knife&action=history doesn't back up your claims - none of these users was banned for removing something. Anybody who wants to learn about the real reason why Gregory Kohs was banned from Wikipedia by Jimmy Wales can read about it <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-09/MyWikiBiz">here</a>. In short, Kohs is a marketer whose company "MyWikiBiz" offered to create Wikipedia articles for companies, at prices ranging from $49 to $99. - Abuse of Wikipedia for commercial and personal promotion (COI, "conflict of interest" edits) is a big problem for Wikipedia, which could have received a bit more attention in the article. But the site is not entirely without defence, as the blocking of Kohs proved.
By HaeB on 12/15/2007 at 5:35:23
Wikipedia rules
The Bathrobe Cabal strikes again!
By LaraLove on 12/17/2007 at 11:47:12
Wikipedia rules
This is a great article. I just want to provide one correction. There is no arbitrary sales figure that a book must reach to achieve "notability" status on Wikipedia; no 5,000 benchmark. We use the word notable in a sense peculiar to Wikipedia and in keeping with what Wikipedia is--an encyclopedia and therefore a tertiary source. The general notability standard we use is not some arbitrary and subjective test, nor a judgment call such as whether we've heard of it as a vernacular interpratation of that word might lead some to believe. What we have devised is a standard that asks whether the World has taken note of the subject by publishing information about it in reliable sources. It is usually formulated as "being the subject of significant treatment in reliable sources". We have subject specific standards of notability which sometimes define other bases, give guidance on applicability of the general standard, and even provide resources for locating the necessary reliable sources. We have a book notability standard set forth at a page titled "Wikipedia:Notability (books)", of which which I was a primary contributor and the creator. See //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_%28books%29
By Fuhghettaboutit on 01/08/2008 at 9:16:43
Wikipedia rules
In response to HaeB -- I was blocked from Electric knife editing: //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User:ZD_Netman Also, the COI policy arose AFTER the foundation of MyWikiBiz, so it's kind of funny to blame my company for violating a Wikipedia "rule" that didn't exist at the time! Another Wikipediot!
By Gregory Kohs on 02/21/2008 at 6:42:52

Today's Event Picks
ARTICLES BY MIKE MILIARD
Share this entry with Delicious

 See all articles by: MIKE MILIARD

MOST POPULAR
RSS Feed of for the most popular articles



Featured Articles in Media -- Dont Quote Me:
Monday, December 01, 2008  |  Sign In  |  Register
 
thePhoenix.com:
Phoenix Media/Communications Group:
TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
Copyright © 2008 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group