

Wikipedia User Makes 1 Million Edits - kurtable
http://mashable.com/2012/04/20/wikipedia-1-million-edits/

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gwern
As the article opines, there's something slightly sad about this milestone. I
have roughly 100-120k edits on the English Wikipedia (
<http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume> ), so I think I can speak from
first-hand experience here.

The problem with devoting this much effort to Wikipedia is not that your time
is wasted. If you get this far, you've absorbed enough that you know how to
make edits that will last and how to defend your material, and this guy in
particular is making edits in areas particularly academic and safe from
deletionists; and your articles will receives hundreds or thousands of visits
a month (see stats.grok.se, I was a little shocked at how many page hits my
articles collectively represent a month).

The problem is that the benefits are going entirely to all your readers. It's
practically a case-study in positive externalities. You don't even get
intangibles like reputation. When you make 10,000 edits to your personal wiki,
you will probably have written some pretty decent stuff, you will have
established a personal brand, etc. Maybe it'll turn out great, maybe it'll
turn out to be worth nothing. But when you make 10,000 edits to Wikipedia, you
are guaranteed to get nothing.

(Yes, I realize his user page lists a bunch of media coverage. That's great,
but it's only because he's the _first_ to pass 1m edits. What happens with the
next editor to pass 1m, or heck, all the other editors on
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_b...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits)
?)

To again turn to myself; when I was pouring much of my free energy and
research interest into improving Wikipedia, I got nothing back except
satisfaction and being able to point people at better articles during
discussions. I began writing things that didn't fit on Wikipedia and got a
personal website because I didn't want to use some flaky free service, and the
world didn't end. I now have an actual reputation among some people; on
occasion, people even email me with job offers to write things (discussing a
little ebook with O'Reilly, for example). I owe my current (very modest) job
to my writings being clearly _mine_ , and not 'stuff on Wikipedia'. I'm not
saying any of this is very impressive, but I am saying that these are benefits
I would _not_ have received had I continued my editing on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is wonderful, but it's sad to see people sacrificing so much of
themselves for it.

~~~
Alex3917
For better or worse the exact same thing is true for comments on blogs, social
news sites, and elsewhere. The people writing the articles on their personal
sites get all the credit, whereas the people analyzing and fact checking what
others are saying are often providing just as much if not more value.

Don't get me wrong, the vast majority of comments are completely crap, but so
are the vast majority of blog posts. And because the average blog post gets
way more attention than the average comment, trying to keep things from
becoming completely insane is a completely thankless job. And unfortunately
highly necessary, or else bloggers and journalists would basically have free
range to completely make shit up and be wrong about basic facts, both
purposely and accidentally, and generally spread all sorts of propaganda and
misinformation.

And what's more, leaving good comments is really an art form, one that's quite
different from writing longer stuff but really on par with it in many ways.
And yet there really aren't more than a handful of blog commenters who have
achieved any measurable amount of reputation or success because of their
comments.

Commenters are generally seen at best as critics, people who complain instead
of do. But really the role they play in the ecosystem is not just important
but in fact essential.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Reminds me of [1], AKA why it's good to allow a _moderate_ amount of trolling.

[1] -
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beliefs/)

~~~
Grognor
Citation does not support claim - article is about how only die-hard fanatics
remain in a group when something diminishes its leader's reputation, not how
trolling benefits communities.

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gchucky
Not to really detract from this, but it should be pointed out that the
majority of this editor's edits were made using AutoWikiBrowser
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser>), a tool that
automates editing. It's used mostly for repetitive tasks such as article
cleanup and vandalism reverting. So this was not one million handwritten
edits, just one million edits in general.

~~~
aes256
Looking through the guy's recent contributions, as far as I could see for the
past 24 hours or so was just hundreds of AWB edits on article talk pages;
things like adding a widget saying an article is part of a particular
wikiproject to a few dozen talk pages at once.

I don't think we should be comparing wikipedia contributors on the number of
edits they've made...

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citricsquid
The cool part of this is the top comment on the article. It's from the
executive editor at Encyclopædia Britannica, presumably wanting to offer him a
job(?)

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ehutch79
*marked not notable

