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mdp2021

It's a miracle that the model of voluntary contribution from random agents and imperfect overview partially worked.

The science that could emerge by studying the phenomenon could constitute a milestone.

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https://web.archive.org/web/20080604020024/http://www.hereco...

> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

> And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus

I'm not sure one can compare an hour of watching TV to an hour of researching and writing, the former is essentially mindless idling that does not take any mental effort. I wonder if there's a measurable difference in brain energy consumption, but probably not.

The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

Clever. I had to read that repeatedly to get it.

Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."

I heard it as "in theory, theory and practice are the same"

I've heard that style too, with the addendum "in practice, not".

I have heard the same thing from Grid based electrical engineers. The grids fails in theory but works in practice.

"In theory, theory is ninety percent of practice; in practice, theory is ten percent of practice"

Uh.. <raises hand> I might be one of the few people who actually knows a bunch of the theory on why wikipedia works (properly). I had to do a bunch of research while working on wikipedia mediation and policies stuff, a long time ago.

I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.

I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.

Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/

and especially * http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (note I'm using lossely in empirical sense, where an online page might have a much lower actual limit than 150)

Same with Communism. It works in practice, in theory, it can never work. /s

To me the key highlight of the article is the finding that editors generally start fairly radical and neutralize over time. Only really passionate people are willing to put the effort into Wikipedia articles which correlates well with radical opinions. But over time working as Wikipedia editors tends to de-radicalize people's work.

Contrast that with the rest of the internet, which mostly rewards radicalization and nudges people towards it.

That's some of it, but certainly Wikipedia's editorial discussions differ from most forums in that its objective remains neutral, with worldwide access.

If the number of editors were limited, it could easily develop bias (see your own Facebook page for examples).

If the subject matters were limited, it could develop bias (WikiSolarEnergy wouldn't tend to attract anti-solar-energy types).

I think “random agents” was only at start. I don’t think you as a random person can edit much there anymore.

Which is good in ways. Though random phase is song of the past.

I routinely edit articles on Wikipedia without even logging in. The controversial articles, where you are likely to run into problems, are a small minority of what's there.

Wikipedia also tends to suffer from fiefdoms, where even seemingly low-controversy articles become impossible to edit, as someone has decided that article is now their personal pet and they'll spend an absurd amount of time undoing and preventing other people's edits.

The same applies on a larger scale with moderation. There are plenty of poorly-sourced database-like stub entries for STEM subjects, but try to make a page on a "softer" subject and there's a pretty good chance someone will try to nuke it with WP:PROOF, WP:NOTE, and/or WP:OBSCURE if it isn't perfectly fleshed out in the very first draft.

If you encounter that, you can possibly get help to get those articles unstuck. People are not supposed to keep fiefdoms, much of policy prevents it. (and someone with a bit of practice can call in help and clear it up)

But to do that you have to stop being random and start playing Wikipedia game.

Random people don’t have time for that.

Ergo “it is not a project for random editors anymore”.

I want do an edit or addition and be fairly evaluated without having to call higher instances or fight through bureaucracy.

Fair-ish. It really depends. The last few areas I did anything in (I'm not a regular anymore) basically nothing happened except what I wrote, so I guess the quiet parts are really really quiet and you don't get into much trouble at all.

All my random edits go through and stick around. Probably because they're relatively simple. A table with data up until 2020, and I update it with sources up until 2024? Never had it removed.

I seldomly add much beyond such things though.

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