On Monday 17 November 2008, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
- Most edits done by a small core
- But, most of the text created by the long tail
- However, most of the text that people actually read, was created by
the small core
Is that a good summary of what we know about this question?
Oh... that's pretty, I want to show that around! Care to, err, blog it?
With Felipe's help, I made an attempt that was not as "pretty" as the above [1].
[1]:http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/contribution-ortega
In fact, it's quite ugly! Here's my current citation heavy summary of the research, still non-too-pretty:
[[ Oddly, two seemingly contrary popular theories were being used to explain Wikipedia at the same time: is the crowd or the elite doing a majority of the work? Wales preferred the latter argument, concluding from his admittedly quick and ``amateurish" research in December of 2005 that ``half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users." \acite{Wales2005wew2} Yet this has been challenged and the question of contributors, the types of contribution, and even whether these have changed over stages of Wikipedia's development continues to be an active area of research and discussion. \acites[Wales conclusion has been confirmed by some, e.g. ][]{Voss2005mw}[but has since been complicated when one asks the question of what is meant by a contribution, such as][]{Swartz2006www,Priedhorskyetal.2007}[a further complication is the answer may have changed as Wikipedia matures, as seen in][]{Ball2007}[recently, some researchers concluded that ``elite" contributions are less powerful relative to the long tail of small contributors, see][]{Kitturetal.2007pfv}[though this conclusion is questioned and the discrepancy between high contributing and low contributing editors is argued to still be significant when one changes how the categories of ``elite" and ``bourgeoisie" are constituted for the analysis, such as in][]{OrtegaandGonzalez-Barahona2007,OrtegaandGonzalez-Barahona2008}. ]]