You know that I here and most of you as well, use Wikipedia often, it’s fast, convenient, and always available. You’ve also noted, I’ll bet, that many of us don’t trust it for anything important. Here’s part of the answer. Roger Pearse has a site in England and has provided a lot of early church information in translation and online. It’s an outstanding site. His criticism of Wikipedians strikes me as spot on.
Who writes Wikipedia? … In a recentop-ed published in the Los Angeles Times, Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner proudly highlighted the fact that the Wikimedia community includes many very young contributors:
The youngest Wikipedian I’ve met was 7 … There’s a recurring motif inside Wikipedia of preteen editors who’ve spent their lives so far having their opinions and ideas discounted because of their age, but who have nonetheless worked their way into positions of real authority on Wikipedia. They love Wikipedia fiercely because it’s a meritocracy: the only place in their lives where their age doesn’t matter.
In fact, many Wikipedia administrators are school-going teenagers. The youngest I personally am aware of was 11 years old when he won administrator rights; at 12, he became a bureaucrat, which means he had the ability to close requests for adminship and appoint other editors as administrators.
[...]
Regular readers mayrecall the incidentwhere the academic authors of the Acta Pauli blog were harassed by an administrator whom they discovered was 14 years old.
Another interesting statistic is how many active editors there are in Wikipedia. The answer, curiously, isonly about 3,000 as of December 2012. This statistic defines “active” as making more than 100 edits a month, or 4 a day; not hard to exceed, as any Wikipedian will know.
Continue reading How old are the Wikipedia administrators? at Roger Pearse.
Related articles
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
