[e3bc54b2]

The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

[Kim_Bruning]

Uh.. <raises hand> I might be one of the few people who actually knows a bunch of the theory on why wikipedia works (properly). I had to do a bunch of research while working on wikipedia mediation and policies stuff, a long time ago.

I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.

I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.

Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/

and especially * http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (note I'm using lossely in empirical sense, where an online page might have a much lower actual limit than 150)

[IAmBroom]

Clever. I had to read that repeatedly to get it.

Cf: The difference between theory and practice is: "Practice works, in theory."

[alpaca128]

I heard it as "in theory, theory and practice are the same"

[SlowTao]

I have heard the same thing from Grid based electrical engineers. The grids fails in theory but works in practice.

[gnerd00]

"In theory, theory is ninety percent of practice; in practice, theory is ten percent of practice"

[knowitnone2]

Same with Communism. It works in practice, in theory, it can never work. /s