On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Pierre-Carl Langlais <langlais.qobuz@gmail.com> wrote:

Therefore, does occasional editors matter ? I should say yes. For instance, on the French wikipedia some new editor did a brilliant job on [[Napoléon III]]. Once the article became an FA, he stopped being active : to him, its main, ponctual, work was over.

The different types of editing should be understood. I might have an interest in [[Lauren Jackson]] and actively maintain the article about her during her competitive career. That's all I might do on Wikipedia is work on that one article, where I've substantially improved that one article.

On the other hand, I might be a big fan of the [[Canberra Capitals]], [[Seattle Storm]] or [[Australia women's national basketball team]] and work on editing inside the main article and all articles that relate to it, but not to articles about the Bullen Boomers, Chicago Sky or women's basketball.

At the same time, I could be an editor that likes women's sport so I edit everything in and around that topic. This would include Lauren Jackson, women's basketball, the Chicago Sky in addition to Mia Hamm, [[Florence Griffith-Joyner]], [[Cambodia women's national football team]].

At each level, there are potential issues for how to approach it for content improvements: How much you do, when you do it, etc. It gets interesting when you start looking at editing nodes (not for the whole Wikipedia necessarily) but for specific topic areas. You can begin to see this pattern more clearly. I can tell you based on my own observations that the broad group tends to not do substantial content additions but article maintenance, category additions, etc. They appear everywhere, may even have high edit counts but if you look at the content added, it isn't much.

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