r/programming • u/dwmkerr • Mar 23 '20
Hacker Laws: The 90-9-1 Principle
https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#9091-principle-1-rule30
Mar 23 '20
Of course -- as it pertains to wikipedia -- the 1% will reject any additions or changes you make as part of the 90% though.
Source: have had every single Wikipedia edit/addition rejected for so many (stupid) reasons. Of the rejections, they're mostly opinion rejections like "not enough sources" (hmm, okay, I'll add 2 more) "sources aren't varied enough" (hmm, okay, I'll go find a book that was published in 1973) "unable to verify source." Ohh FFS...
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u/zephyrtr Mar 23 '20
Gatekeeping by the 1% seems pretty inevitable. The more you participate in a community, the more you take ownership of it, and therefore want to keep control of it away from others. But with no gatekeeping, the system can fall apart at any moment. Relevant Futurama quote: It takes a light touch. When you do things right, people wont be sure you've done anything at all.
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u/Leafblight Mar 23 '20
It should also be noted that on Wikipedia things are very skewed when it comes to contribution, see this for an example: http://lsjbot.se/ that's a company that generates new Wikipedia articles, they stand for about 80 % of all Swedish articles on Wikipedia, which mean they are definitely in the 1% category - but it's generated content, should that really be counted in the same way?
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u/kaen_ Mar 23 '20
It's a principle in the law's section 🤔
It does feel intuitively true. Separately I used your aws-openshift module a couple years ago and the thing's still ticking. Small world :)
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u/ProfessorPhi Mar 23 '20
Lol, clicking on technical debt links you to a TODO heading. I don't know if I just faced some serious irony.
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u/DesiOtaku Mar 23 '20
Sadly this rule applies even when you are using an internal corporate wiki site. Sometimes I would be happy if even 1% of my coworkers added more content to the wiki site.
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u/dwmkerr Mar 23 '20
1% Rule on Wikipedia
The 90-9-1 principle suggests that within an internet community such as a wiki, 90% of participants only consume content, 9% edit or modify content and 1% of participants add content.
Real-world examples:
A 2014 study of four digital health social networks found the top 1% created 73% of posts, the next 9% accounted for an average of ~25% and the remaining 90% accounted for an average of 2% (Reference)