monika’s w e b l o g

While I’m busy reading about research methods, the article “Who Writes Wikipedia” by Aaron Swartz is catching my interest in two points:
- measuring methods crucially influence the research result with possibly far reaching consequences
- the concepts of community and crowd are discussed as opposing ideas

In short, Aaron Swartz measures (in a sample) the amount of letters added to articles in each edit by individual users, while Jimbo Wales in his so far concluded studies has counted the amount of edits individual users did.
“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. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.”

[via Martin Roell]

Thoughts on measuring methods:
Both start with the objective to get insight into how many editors add how much content to Wikipedia.
And, while counting the number of edits gives just insight into the amount of activity of editors, counting the added letters (which could be extended to counting subtracted and corrected letters, etc.) is purely referring to the content itself.

Thoughts on communities and crowds:
Thinking over the article of Swartz, writing Wikipedia would possibly follow a swarm behaviour, after Jimmy Wales turned away from this idea – starting initally from the same thought – towards his conclusion that a rather small community is writing most of the content.
What is the difference between a community and a crowd/swarm?
Is it – as the article with citations of Wales implies – the number of members, and them knowing each other or not?
Or is the amount of power the difference, as Martin Röll suggests in a chart “ants vs community”?
Most important for me at the moment: Does a community follow different laws than a swarm (Pareto distribution, or other), and what are those?
The concept of Lave and Wenger on communities of practice shows analogies to Wikipedia: joint enterprise, mutual engagement, shared repertoire (http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm). Is Wikipedia a community project in the first place, or can a swarm engage in a joint enterprise-mutual engagement-shared repertoire thing?

I am sure this has been discussed extensively elsewhere; hoping to find some clues.

September 12th, 2006. von Administrator.
Kategorie: research methodology, social software. .