Slate Discovers The Power Law

from the 1-percent-of-a-big-number dept

Wed, Feb 27th 2008 10:31am — Timothy Lee

Last week Slate ran a story that breathlessly reported that Wikipedia isn't as democratic as its boosters claim because most of the edits are made by the most active editors. We learn that "a small segment of highly active users author the majority of the site's content." But as Mathew Ingram points out, the real question is why anyone found this surprising. It's true that a small fraction of Wikipedia users author a big chunk of the content. But it's quite a leap to go from that rather obvious point to deriding "fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0." In fact, Wikipedia is fundamentally different from older reference works like Britannica, and not just because it has an order of magnitude more content. In the first place, as Ingram points out, even if 1 percent of Wikipedia user base have an outsized influence on the encyclopedia's direction, that still amounts to tens of thousands of people. No commercial encyclopedia could possibly afford to have that many employees.

The distribution of edits on Wikipedia is what's known as a power law, and power law distributions are ubiquitous in human societies. You can find power laws in the distribution of income, website traffic, book and CD sales, city populations, and dozens of other phenomena. Indeed, democracy itself is subject to power laws; the most politically active voters contribute the vast majority of volunteers and campaign contributions. The fact that Wikipedians' contributions follow a power law distribution doesn't mean that Wikipedians are telling "fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0." What makes Wikipedia different from traditional encyclopedias isn't a more "democratic" distribution of contributions, but the vastly increased number of people who are able to contribute when the encyclopedia is organized in an open fashion. This has produced an encyclopedia that is far more comprehensive than any commercial company could hope to produce.

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Filed Under: power law, slate, wikipedia

7 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 27 Feb 2008 @ 10:56am

Soon slate will discover that 1% of forum users makes 50% of the posts. And 1% of bloggers get 50% of the traffic. It's a conspiracy!
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DittoBox, 27 Feb 2008 @ 11:13am

Still "democratic"
Even if you have a small number of people creating and editing the wiki, anyone can still edit content!

People who don't know what they're voting for shouldn't and most of the time don't vote. Why should voting be compulsory? Likewise, if you have 100,000 editors but only 1000 of which make 90% of the edits the problem isn't the top 1% of editors. Nor is there even an inherent problem. You simply have a user base who isn't as active.

That may lead to abuse. But its not quite as bad as a few individuals running absolutely everything.
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- Henry Clay, 27 Feb 2008 @ 11:38am
  
  Re: Still "democratic"
  @DittoBox
  
  Agreed, the concept is that anyone has the OPTION to participate. Not that everyone will, or has to.
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4-80-sicks, 27 Feb 2008 @ 11:21am

I guess they also didn't notice that anybody who wants to start writing a whole lot of content is basically free to do so at any time? The premise isn't only obvious, its context and connotation hold a fundamentally flawed implication.

Would they also think I hold some kind of balance of power on Techdirt because I'm a frequent poster here?
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Ethan Bauley, 27 Feb 2008 @ 11:25am

Benkler.org
Thanks for setting that Christoper E. Wilson bozo straight.

I emailed him suggesting he peep The Wealth of Networks...
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The Mighty Buzzard, 27 Feb 2008 @ 11:55am

It's patently unfair that a tiny portion of wikipedia users make the vast majority of the contributions. I demand that some of their contributions be taken away and attributed to those of us who don't contribute as much. Hey, it works for tax systems...
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aeolus, 27 Feb 2008 @ 12:03pm

and what about?
Tell this to Mike Magee and the poor everywhere girl!!
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