Wikipedians are a diverse group. Poke around their user pages and you’ll see arrays of multi-colored “user boxes” proudly announcing that the contributor is nearsighted, or an atheist, or Catholic, or gay, or Swedish, or a teenager, or a backgammon player, or a golden retriever lover, or a pilot, or a Zen Buddhist, or a Jedi, or a Red Sox fan, or an advanced C++ programmer, or an Islay malt drinker, or a Tolkien reader, or a Lovecraft fan, or a guitarist, or a snowboarder, or a pagan, or someone who “advocates the use of more cowbell.”
For his part, GlassCobra (username: GlassCobra), 20, a Northeastern third-year, is a Gryffindor, likes to watch Adult Swim, and prefers New York–style pizza. He’s also a tireless reverter of vandalism and corrector of misinformation on thousands of Wikipedia’s pages.
Although he’d been using the site since high school, GlassCobra confesses that the “stigma of being a nerd” prevented him from getting too involved, at first. Finally, this April, he registered an account and started editing. In just eight months, he’s already logged more than 7000 edits across a wide spectrum of articles, from Cam’ron to César Chávez to Insane Clown Posse.
GlassCobra’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 GlassCobra. “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 GlassCobra 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.
Broad and narrow
You don’t need to be an administrator like GlassCobra to contribute to Wikipedia, nor do you have to be a diehard like SJ Klein, 29, a Cantabrigian who works for the One Laptop per Child program. (Klein’s username “Sj” should not be confused with “Essjay,” a high-profile Wikipedia admin who, to the chagrin of many, was found earlier this year to have concocted an elaborate online identity as a tenured religion professor.)
“On the English Wikipedia, I’ve probably contributed to a few thousand articles,” says Klein. “I have about 15,000 edits across different spaces. I’ve made almost that many contributions to the metaWiki, which is the organizational wiki, and maybe five or six thousand edits across all the other projects, like WikiBooks and Wiktionary.” Lately, Klein has been spending as many as 100 hours a week at his day job. But when he had more free time, he says he “used to spend 20 to 30 hours a week editing Wikipedia.”
