Sawczynec’s written some from scratch, as well — such as the entry on the Philippines’ Manila Hotel. He’s also gotten heavily involved in Wikipedia policy discussions. And, this past month, his diligence and tenacity helped him ascend to the rank of a site administrator, which allows him to block harmful users, delete pages, and send some of the more contentious entries into temporary lock-down. Administrator is an elite title: there are only 1427 administrators on the English-language site.
But “we try not to act like it’s a status symbol,” says Sawczynec. “We see ourselves as janitors, mainly. The symbol of the administrator is a mop. We are humble servants, just doing our best to clean up.” (So it’s not something he uses to impress the ladies at Northeastern keggers? “Oh, dear God, no.”)
While Sawczynec confesses that his dogged monitoring and editing of others’ contributions may stem from “being a bit of a control freak,” he’s adamant that, on Wikipedia, “no one person should have control of anything. Wikipedia is run and governed entirely by community consensus just so that control freaks don’t let their heads get too big, and so that any one person can’t screw something up too much.”
Many and few
Looking at the Wikipedia “community,” it can sometimes seem that the site is actually written and edited by a small cadre of diehards. In fact, even one of its co-founder believed that to be true.
“The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia,” Jimmy Wales told blogger Aaron Swartz this past year, “is that it’s some emergent phenomenon — the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing — thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content, and out of this emerges a coherent body of work.”
Instead, Wales contended, Wikipedia was actually written by “a community . . . a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers.” Initially, he figured about 80 percent of the work was done by 20 percent of users. But he crunched the numbers and discovered something even more striking: nearly 75 percent of edits were done by just two percent of users.
Swartz, however, launched a study of his own, which found a marked difference between edit-intensive users, who contribute small fixes to existing entries, and those who actually wrote the bulk of articles. “Almost every time I saw a substantive edit,” he writes, “I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.”
In other words: it’s generally the core crew of several thousand dedicated Wikipedians who combine to keep the site refined and readable, correcting mistakes and counteracting vandalism. But it’s usually regular folks with special expertise (the self-proclaimed Dylanologist, the amateur horticulturalist, the military buff), writing one or two or five articles apiece, who’ve contributed the bulk of the content. Both groups are equally important to Wikipedia’s success.
