W6: Who writes Wikipedia? Wikipedians

1) Characteristics of Wikipedians

This week, I literally got a general picture of the population participating in Wikipedia editing. In fact, Wikipedia is everyone's encyclopedia, so it's no exaggeration to say that participants, called Wikipedians, are all about Wikipedia. I could know about something very important.

First of all, very general information. I could know about age, region, gender, etc., And I was not very surprised or that because it was almost in line with what I expected. For instance, I thought the participation rate would be high in the U.S. and Europe, and I thought It would participate a lot at an age familiar with the Internet and had some knowledge about internet, not too young and too old. And, in the case of gender, it was a little impressive because the male participation was overwhelmingly high. I want to know about this reason. It's quite interesting.

 

2) Topics that extend thanks to a big number of small contributions: the long-tailed law

It was an opportunity to learn analytically about the characteristics of Wikipedia contributors. Most impressive was that aspects of Wikipedia's participants appeared as long-tailed graphs. A small number of users, about 20 percent, are responsible for most of Wikipedia's editing, but the sum and proportion of many very small contributions are eventually similar. This phenomenon is called the Pareto law, or the Long-tail law. It is said that the Pareto law, which focuses on a few tremendous contributions, and the long-tail law, which focuses on the sum of many small contributions.

Wiki, many of these small contributions expand and enrich the subject. Because it is simply a popular everyone’s encyclopedia. So, even if our very small contribution seems to have little influence, those small contributions come together and eventually have a big impact on Wikipedia's expansion. It can be seen that Wikipedia is a fully open encyclopedia, which also shows the aspects that we commonly observe in society.

 

3) The power of public in Wikipedia

As mentioned in paragraph 2 above, Wikipedia participation is explained by the Pareto law, or long-tailed law. What you want to say depends on the large amount of participation by a few, or what the majority contributes little by little, whichever of the two is focused on. I want to ask about this. How can we solve these characteristics in a good way to become a good Wikipedia? Wikipedia, of course, is operating successfully enough because of its aforementioned characteristics and easier editing than vandalism, but what I want to talk about is whether there is a structural way to make better use of this.

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