A possible caveat: We could be over-counting heads because we don't know who all the anonymous users are, and how many people they represent. Someone might be particularly interested in staying incognito (for whatever reason) and to remain anonymous. Or one person might make multiple edits here and there as they stumble across them over several years but never bother to create an account:
e.g., (power)User: Faithlesswonderboy
"I edited for years under various IPs, never bothering to register an account until July 2007, as I was frustrated at my inability to edit Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Unfortunately, I don't know what my IP addresses were; there were many, as I edited at school, various coffeehouses and I borrowed several different wireless signals at my old apartment."
5 comments:
After our discussion and recent assignment about Wikipedia today, I found this site reasonably relevant and quite funny:
http://www.dickipedia.org/
Don't be alarmed, I can see how the name may turn people away but I encourage you to check it out and read some of the articles. Unfortunately, I found it more difficult on this site than Wikipedia, to edit or add a new page. I'm sure we can all think of people who deserve their own special article on this site =)
I was surprised to learn that such a small percentage of people using wikipedia are editing it. The quote and information you posted really seem to suggest that the percentage of editors is even smaller! I still don't think users realize how easy it can be to make an edit.
Wikipedia really defies a lot of social dilemmas, because people are unselfishly willing to devote time to fix articles.
I was actually talking about this today with a couple friends as I was showing them the edits I made. They all said that they use Wikipedia quite frequently but they never have bothered to take the time to edit or add a page. I guess most people just view it as a resource rather than something that they can contribute their own knowledge to.
As for other wiki's I found a pretty cool one (at least for me, being an environmental geek) it's http://www.greenlivingpedia.org/Greenlivingpedia
Anyway, I enjoyed the assignment and will probably find myself editing wikipedia much more often now (though I don't know if I'll always be signed in!)
I'm curious as to how such a small group of editors can maintain editing all the articles on wikipedia. I mean, we talked in class about how many people's articles got flagged within about an hour, and I don't understand how a small group of editors can be so efficient. I feel as thought either the editors are really dedicated to editing, or there is an underestimation of the number of editors.
This article really reminds me of something that was brought up in another one of my classes.
Just last month, Bing Gordan, the president of Electronic Arts visited my video games class and he stated that in 1995, the majority of people predicted that the internet would fail miserably. Most agreed that the internet had huge potential as a place of information. However, critics stated that no one was willing to pay for the information that was going to be posted. (imagine Encarta Online) Never in a million years did anyone predict that millions of people would be willing to post things at their leisure for no monetary gain. (Thereby not requiring users to pay for things) In Gordon's opinion, the internet succeeded because of amateur content and Wikipedia is a perfect example of that. This holds especially true if the idea of "multitudes" holds up and it is in fact the masses who browse these amateur sites and edits information. I personal feel that there is a huge number of people doing the editing. We saw how big the list of recently submitted articles was and from our experience as a class, all of our pages were flagged very quickly. I just don't see how its possible to keep such a mass of information up to date without a huge number of editors.
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