You have a very similar effect in larger Wikipedias. In those ones, there is no very active, "single bus"-like contributor, but a core of very active users concentrating about 85% of the total number of edits per month.
It seems that in these languages, though, there is a generational relay in which new active users jump into the core to substitute those who eventually give up, for any reason. So, the concentration becomes stable after a couple of years (aprox.) and the encyclopedia is able to continue growing.
Best.
F.
--- El jue, 23/10/08, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com escribió:
De: Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] "Regular contributor" Para: "Research into Wikimedia content and communities" wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Fecha: jueves, 23 octubre, 2008 10:27 Hoi, I missed that this was the research mailing list.. my fault. Consequently my answer was not appropriate. With this in mind, it is interesting to learn how the spread is in particularly the smaller projects. In my opinion there must be a certain amount of productive people in order to get to a community that does not have one person who is the "bus factor".
Having someone who drives the bus is really important. I wonder how you can point this person out. I think that someone who is just editing is important but it is not all that builds a community. Thanks, GerardM
On the Volapuk wikipedia Smeira was really important. When he left, I understand that activity collapsed.
2008/10/22 phoebe ayers phoebe.ayers@gmail.com
2008/10/21 Gerard Meijssen
Hoi, When you divide people up in groups, when you
single out the ones "most
valuable", you in effect divide the
community. Whatever you base your
metrics on, there will be sound arguments to deny
the point of view. When it
is about the number of edits, it is clear to the
pure encyclopedistas that
most of the policy wonks have not supported what
is the "real" aim of the
project.
When you label groups of people, you divide them
and it is exactly the
egalitarian aspect that makes the community
thrive.
But this isn't about labeling people for the rest
of time and saying that
this is how they are defined *on Wikipedia* --
it's about saying how do you
study people who regularly contribute to Wikipedia,
and as a part of that
how do you define the group that you are studying,
which is an important
question for any research study.
Given that it's impossible to study every
contributor to the project in
every study, and since many researchers are interested
in why people who
spend a lot of time or effort working on Wikipedia do
so (and what exactly
it is they do), this is a very relevant question for
this list.
--phoebe
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