Learning to trust the crowd: Some lessons from Wikipedia
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inspired by the open source software (OSS) movement, Wikipedia has gone further than any OSS project in decentralizing its quality control task. This is seen by many as a fatal flaw. In this short paper, I will try to show that it is rather a shrewd and fertile design choice. First I will describe the precise way in which Wikipedia is more decentralized than OSS projects. Then, I will explain why Wikipedia’s quality control can be and must be decentralized. Next, I will show why it is wise for Wikipedia to welcome anonymous amateurs. Finally, I will argue that concerns about Wikipedia’ quality and sustainable success have to be tempered by the fact that, as disruptive innovations tend to do, Wikipedia is in the process of redefining the pertinent dimensions of quality and value for general encyclopedias.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it