The Writers of Wikipedia
Who actually writes the vast sea of knowledge that is Wikipedia?
One question that many people either make assumptions about or neglect to think about is, who writes the articles we read everyday on Wikipedia? The usual assumption I tend to hear, is that it is not safe to use in general because literally everyone can edit it. There is definitely some truth to that because if a person feels like editing a Wikipedia page, they can. There’s nothing stopping them from doing so. My assumption in high school was that there was a group of super geniuses working tirelessly to create articles on everything you can think of. It always boggled my mind how a non-profit website the size of Wikipedia could function so brilliantly without any source of income besides from donations. Wikipedia has been ad-free for it’s fourteen year existence and it plans to stay that way.
After sifting through some articles regarding the writers of Wikipedia, I found surprisingly different information from what many people like to assume. One article, by Henry Blodget from Business Insider, discusses the research of Aaron Swartz on Wikipedia from his blog. He cites how at first, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, believed that there were a core 1400 die-hard Wikipedia contributors who created nearly 75% of the content. He went on to state that the last 25% of contributors are random people who make small edits such as minor fixes of spelling or facts, or they are people who enjoy vandalizing the pages (Blodget, 2009). Swartz, however, conducted his own research that revealed that those 1400 contributors were mainly just racking up high numbers of edits from making small minor changes to every article. Swartz says that his evidence supports a quite different conclusion that Wales’ does.
Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that’s not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. Source
The method which Swartz enlisted to find this information out regards picking random Wikipedia articles and figuring out who edited them and what did they do in those edits. Swartz also realized that the bulk of many of those pages were created by people who didn’t even bother to create an account (Swartz, 2006).
Of course, many of this information is rather outdated. That blog post by Swartz is almost ten years old and the one on Business Insider is over six years old, but after reading further, it seems like the same is still true today. There are still die-hard contributors that make thousands of edits during their free time. There are now over 85,000 regular contributors across the globe making Wikipedia a resource anyone in the world can use according to the BBC News. For the most part, like Swartz’s research suggests, these regular contributors are doing more of the minor edits that are necessary for the formatting and organization of the 22 million articles that people submit in 282 different languages (BBC, 2012). Over the years, Wikipedia has become a much more organized and well-run organization, but the core ideas of how contributions are made still remains the same. People just enjoy sharing what they know about a subject with the world, so they go to Wikipedia, and do their best to share their knowledge.
