Grokking Wikipedia

For a project that is beginning to assume an ever-greater importance in the intellectual landscape (to say nothing of the online landscape), relatively little is known about how Wikipedia actually works. There's lots of polemic flying around about how it should work, but precious little research into the facts.

This makes Aaron Swartz's piece "Who Writes Wikipedia?" valuable - and long overdue. The results are not what we have been led to suspect:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they've come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

And you've got to love a story that includes the line

To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives.

As one does. (via BoingBoing.)