Most volunteer work on Wikipedia is spent fighting vandalism and edit disputes

Evidence

Although most Wikipedia activity is indeed volunteer work, the great bulk of that work is devoted to either (a) correcting ongoing vandalism, or (b) vicious infighting over the “correct” way to implement deletion policies. In other words, most Wiki-work is a huge Sisyphean waste of time, since the vandalism never stops, almost no entry converges to anything in particular (much less “truth”), and many “deleted” components have the vexing habit of recurring. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2101

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior work on the soundscape/information overload and on signal vs. noise — Wikipedia is a site where editorial ‘noise’ drowns signal.