Photo: Flickr user lifeontheedge

Friday, August 03, 2007

Who adds real content to Wikipedia, not just correcting typos and wikification?

Answer:

Only 12% of edits create fresh content. Of these 12%...
  • 0% were made by admins

  • 69% were registered users.

  • 31% were created by anon users, or non-logged in users.

...and only 52% were by people who had a user page.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since becoming an admin, I've created over a hundred fresh articles.

Ben Yates said...

That's fairly amazing, and way more than I've done in the past couple years (I'm not an admin). Hopefully this research will be repeated with a larger sample size.

Diplopotamus said...

Given the history of many people involved with Wikimedia, including former board members, to have no clue about the concept of sample size, and having an acceptable, random, representative population, I would put about 0 faith in this statistic.

Ben Yates said...

Well, it was 250 randomly selected edits. That seems fairly robust to me. It doesn't mean that admins don't create content, just that the amount of content they create is dwarfed by the amount created by new users (which makes sense, because there are about a million times more new users than admins).

Diplopotamus said...

250 edits is a terrible representation given that a person may make multiple edits, AWB edits, vandal reversions etc.

Does the sample size reflect 1000 admins to several million users?