[lsb]

I approached that question from a purity standpoint: if you only limited Wikipedia to people who did things "right", where would you be? And the answer turned out to be that you wouldn't be very far.

I think urban planners have found that neighborhood cohesion and community watches are far better than gated communities and lawless knifefights outside, and the online textual equivalent of community dynamics agrees with that.

[philthy]

Agreed, wonderful analogy. Also in response to the source article, what defines a post as a "bad contribution" does this mean it was totally inappropriate or just needed slight tweaking. Has the author ever tried to make a legit new wiki post? I've never successfully posted anything without having even the slightest peer review. Who cares if the posts are almost entirely contributed by bots, just about everything is becoming automated these days (stocks, banking, traffic, etc.) and with the peer review base Wikipedia has I doubt the doomsday of robots are going to smarten up and misinform us...

[tokenadult]

if you only limited Wikipedia to people who did things "right", where would you be?

Although it's notionally possible that a first editor who got something "right" (factually correct based on reliable sources) was later reverted by someone edit-warring to score a point. Sometimes a particular edit makes Wikipedia worse rather than better. If NONE of my edits had ever been reverted (several have been), I would think that I wasn't trying hard enough to check sources and correct commonplace errors. However, it's not clear at the moment whether the editors with the lowest percentages of reverted edits are those who do the best edits, or just those whose prejudices (and topic choices) avoid scrutiny by the mob of other Wikipedia amateur editors. I am conscious of this issue because I was a professional editor and researcher to make my living long before most members of the general public had ever heard of the Internet, and because most wikipedians are so young and so devoid of editing experience that they readily mistake good edits for bad.

I think urban planners have found that neighborhood cohesion and community watches are far better than gated communities

It would be interesting to see citations to research on this issue, as well as the latest citations to research on forming online communities in which fact-checking and encouragement of careful scholarship become the group ethos. I live in a crime-free neighborhood with an annual block party and NO crime in a typical year, not gated, with good community cohesion, but also isolated from a lot of passers-by simply because it isn't a shortcut to anywhere else. Wikipedia is so exposed to the outside world, including spamming advertisers and propaganda agents of warring governments, that it may take more vigilance to protect than just an informal consensus among volunteer amateur editors.

[lsb]

A guy I knew at the Media Lab said that Marvin Minsky tried to correct his Wikipedia article, but someone reverted it. The IP address came from inside the Media Lab, so it might have very well been him.

The small-community-far-from-everything is quite similar to Wikipedia in its early years. Look at 2002-2005 and you'll see lots of anonymous Good Samaritans contributing helpful content. (Look for R6 and R7 on http://slightlynew.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-writes-wikipedia... to see a time series of anonymous contributions from 2003 to 2010.)