[WikiEN-l] New York Times article

Thu Jun 22 10:15:17 UTC 2006

On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > These are reasonable questions. Jimbo implies that if P(t) is the
> > number of protected articles at time t, and S(t) is the proportion of
> > semi-protected articles, then:
> > P(now) << P(a year ago)
> > That is, that full protection on the whole has greatly decreased. But also that:
> >  P(now) + S(now) <= P(a year ago)
> > That is, that the total amount of articles off-limits to newbies has
> > not increased.
>
> I think that the first is true, and if not we should seriously look at
> why not.  I think that there is no reason for the second to be true.

First: Anyone notice the NYT correction?

Anyway, the more I consider the facts, the less convinced I am. The
problem is in the interpretation of "anyone can edit". Does it mean
"anyone who wants to edit, can", or does it mean "anyone at all can
edit". Normally this wouldn't matter, but it's critical if we're
attempting to measure "anyone-can-edit-ness" (ACEN).

By the first interpretation, we should take into account the fact that
most edits are made by confirmed users (I think?) If there is a shift
from total protection to semi-protection, then ACEN has gone up. The
measure P(now) < P (then) is the critical one, but P(now) + S(now) <=
P (then) should probably not totally be forgotten.

By the second interpretation, the vast hordes of potential visitors to
the site massively overwhelm the small number who actually carry out
the edits.Shifting towards semi-protection makes no difference at best
(either way they're blocked), so the critical comparison is P(now) +
S(now) <= P (then). The problem is that semi-protection lasts longer
than full protection, as a rule, so that in general this comparison is
far from true.

Semi-protection may indeed have been intended to improve openness and
ACEN, but based on my quick perusal of the protected articles list,
ACEN has gone down. Semi-protection is not the only cause of that (if
a cause at all) - but I think we should be honest about where we stand
now, compared to some arbitrary time in the past. I'm far from
convinced that NYT "got it exactly backwards" - it's a fairly subtle
question of interpretation of what ACE and "open" mean.

> I also think that a serious analysis should not look at the raw number
> of articles (the site is a lot bigger than a year ago, so there should
> be a lot more of everything) but both percentages of articles, and also
> percentages of articles weighted by pageviews and/or edit frequency.

Pageview figures would indeed be nice, for all kinds of statistics. No
one seems to have given a reason why pageview stats could not be
turned on for a day, just to give us some data to play with.

Steve