Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

That’s the question Seth Anthony asked Wikipedia’s data. From my notes of his Wikimania talk…Seth first looked at a sample of 250 recent edits:

• Outside article namespace 28% (various administrative frou fra?)
• Article talk namespace 10%
• Vandalism 5%
• 45% tweaking minor small changes, stylistic.
• Substantive changes, additions 10%
• Creating new articles 2%

Looking just at “high-content” edits, that last 12%:

• Not one by a Wkipedia admin. (They’re too busy elsewhere, Seth guesses.)
• Not one by someone with a barnstar.
• 69% by someone with a username–so, almost a third were made by an anon!
• Only 53% by someone with a userpage.
• Median date of first edit (for a registered user), April 2006 (only 3-4 months ago)

My research also (my talk’s at 2 today, aaaaaargggh!) showed that even in a “vandal wave” almost all the anonymous editors were, in fact, trying to add value to the project. It’s pretty inspiring when you think about it.

And so are the people at this conference–though I’m amazed to be one of so few women. The proportion of women speaking here is much higher than the proportion of women in the audience.