Barry Wellman asked:
Having had several experiences with Wikipedia entries and edits this week, I am curious if anyone is doing research on:
the social structure and reward structure of Wikipedists -- item enterers, editing others, administrators, etc. (I don't know the structure well enough to know the nomenclature).
I had a "let's edit and at least slightly improve some of these awful wikipedia entries" phase a few weeks back, and did some reading about the wikipedia in general as well. I haven't found "real research" but did find some very interesting popular articles about how the Wikipedia works. Here are a few links: Aaron Swatz: Who Writes Wikipedia? Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought. 2006-09-04 "Wales has repeatedly stated that 1-2% of wikipedia users have contributed 50-75%. However analyzing articles by letter count (not edits) shows most top contributors unregistered with under 25 edits. Wikipedia is written by outsiders, policed by insiders." http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The amorality of Web 2.0 Criticism of the Wikipedia - offers articles on Bill Gates and Jane Fonda as examples of how the "collaborative editing" can generate a articles that are simply lists of trivia rather than coherently flowing descriptions of a topic. Interesting. http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The law of the wiki ""Output quality declines as the number of contributors increases. Making matters worse, the best contributors will tend to become more and more alienated as they watch their work get mucked up by the knuckleheads, and they'll eventually stop contributing" http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_law_of_the.php The Atlantic Online | September 2006 | The Hive | Marshall Poe Detailed article about the history of the Wikipedia by Marshall Poe. "Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched off history’s biggest experiment in collaborative knowledge" http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200609/wikipedia Oh, and here's one of my own blog posts that starts talking about Alan Liu's suggested student guidelines for use of the Wikipedia but ends up pointing out some of the problems with entries that I've been working on recently - related to some of the problems pointed out in the articles above. http://jilltxt.net/?p=1746 I'd love to know of more research on these issues. Jill ---- Jill Walker Associate Professor, Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway http://jilltxt.net