"There is one woman who mostly edits about hamsters, and always on her phone. She has never interacted with anyone else. Who is she? She's not part of any community that we can tell," says Annie Rauwerda in an interview with Asterisk Magazine.
As a Boing Boing contributor and creator of the popular Depths of Wikipedia, Rauwerda has learned a lot about how the sausage is made at Wikipedia. While Wikipedia appears democratic on the surface, major decisions typically involve just a core group. "When people talk about Wikipedia as a decision-making entity, usually they're talking about 300 people — the people that weigh in to the very serious and (in my opinion) rather arcane, boring, arduous discussions," Rauwerda says.
Who's in the core group? "A lot of people work blue-collar jobs. Wikipedia is like their intellectual outlet," Rauwerda says. Successful long-term editors share one key trait: "they have very little hesitation to work hard, and they put a low value on their own time."
Some debates among editors can stretch on for years. "The yogurt versus yoghurt debate lasted seven years and totaled over 140,000 words," Rauwerda reveals, adding "That's multiple Shakespeare plays — which I would rather read."
The site's various communities each have their own distinct character. "There's the military history WikiProject… they are very hierarchical. They have a lot of rules. They're very efficient in reviewing articles," she notes. "The tropical cyclones community… tend to skew very young. It's a lot of teenage boys in tropical cyclones." While military history and tropical storms receive meticulous attention, other areas lag behind. "The one that I always notice is influencers," Rauwerda says. "Influencers often have horrendous articles… you can tell that somebody that didn't really get the norms of Wikipedia went in there."
