Something along the lines of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail thesis, this page confirms Jimmy Wales‘ contention that Wikipedia, far from being reliant on a nebulous and far-flung posting userbase, is actually much more like a conventional organisation than the revolutionary rhetoric associated with some elements within the Wikipedia community would suggest. New content often comes from the anonymous writers or one-time posters, but the majority of edits come from regulars. And it’s even more skewed than you might expect:
How Wikipedia entries get written:
Cory Doctorow: Aaron Swartz, who is running for the WIkipedia executive, has done some data-crunching using a rented supercomputing cluster, against many Wikipedia entries to determine how Wikipedia entries get written. It turns out that while the majority of edits come from a small group of 500 core editors, the majority of new content is inserted by drive-by, unregistered users whose contributions are then massaged into encolopediahood by the core 500.
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
(Via BoingBoing).
