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Who (Really) Writes Wikipedia
Nico ? La ! writes "Aaron Swartz questions Jimbo Wales' (Wikimedia's founder) belief and evangelized truth that only around 500 people are the most important contributors to Wikipedia. Whereas the truth is that they probably are the people who do the most editing. From the post: 'For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around).'" Which ultimately means that Wikipedia in some ways much more closely mimics a real encyclopedia, with many contributors writing the bulk of the content, but a small group massaging that text to insure standards compliance with the overall work. Interesting thing there and worth your time, although the super-computer thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
As with anything that keeps stats or running totals, there are those that seek to achieve the highest count possible. Wikipedia is not immune to this. There are those that will make 50 small, distinct edits to an article (each comprising minor changes, like punctuation, formatting, spelling corrections, etc) to increase their edit count.
It is my personal experience that those with the highest edit counts peruse any and all articles applying Style Guidelines. This results in changes like like correcting capitalization of headers ("External Links" -> "External links"), placing bullets in front of external links, formatting dates, wikifying appropriate words, updating links that redirect, etc. Once a person becomes familiar with the guidelines they can easily nitpick pretty much any article and find something to correct (or at least change to their personal preference).
Also, don't forget those that run bots. That's a very easy method to rack up edit points.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
This is not a surprise. That is simply another example of nature's laws on the web. This is not much different from the now well known fact that most stories on Digg are submitted by a handful of people (see: Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg's HomePage Content).
Simpy
Wikipedia is trying hard for quality, hence the importance of copy editors - those quick edit users who do a lot of banging articles into shape.
Depends what you mean by quality - grammatically correct and logically ordered is one thing. Actual content - possibly in rough and ready form - is another.
What JW is (apparently) arguing is that what he considers the contributions to wikipedia is best measured by "edits", and that by this metric there is a hardcore of 500 users that do most of the work.
What the article argues is that the a better measure of of contribution to wiki is raw material, and that far from 500 people doing it, it is actually orders of magnitude more than this.
My opinion is that anyone treating all edits are equal and using that to derive a metric for measuring user contributions to the site is using a seriously flawed method. Selling the output of this method as "The Truth about who Created Wikipeida (or the Tale of the Noble 500") is just trying to invent history to fit their preconceived notions.