It’s not a very well-known fact, but 73.4 percent of the entries in Wikipedia are made by roughly 1400 people. You may have thought it was an open, global, knowledge base. In fact, it is a tightly controlled monopoly of view points.
A study done by Yair Amichai-Hamburger of the Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Herzliya, Israel found them to be very disagreeable to new ideas. In an article entitled Psychologist finds Wikipedians Grumpy and Closed-Minded, Amichai-Hamburger postulates that wikipedians contribute because “It is their way to have a voice in this world.” …and that their motive is egocentric and not altruistic.
The thought of a shared central knowledge base for all of humanity is an altruistic one, that just simply not what Wikipedia is.
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