On 10/8/07, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article views, we show that an overwhelming majority of the viewed words were written by frequent editors and that this majority is increasing.
This depends on your definition of "frequent editors". The paper doesn't make this terribly clear, but as I read it these are the key numbers:
- 25 trillion out of 34 trillion (73%) "page word views" (PWVs) are
from content contributed by registered users. 27% is from anons. *The top 10% of editors (by edit count) account for 86% of the 25 trillion PWVs. But that's only 63% of total PWVs, when anon contributions are included. Also, that 10% is ca. 420,000 editors. We definitely don't have that many "frequent editors", for most values of frequent. *Top 1% of editors account of about 70% of the 25 trillion PWVs, or 51% of the total. So the top 42,000 editors account for about half. According to Erik Zachte's statistics, that's also about the number of users making more than 5 edits in a give month (as of October 2006, the end date of the study) *The top .1% (4,200) editors account for 44% of the 25 trillion, or 32% of the total. That's the approximate number of editors making
100 edits per month.
*The PWV share of the top 10% and top 1% groups were decreasing, not increasing. Only the top .1% group was increasing, and they don't account for a majority of content.
As David Gerard points out, this doesn't fully solve the question of "who writes Wikipedia", but it's certainly relevant (and I would say it points to a middle ground between the positions of Jimbo and Aaron Swartz). Unfortunately, it's terribly out of date; Wikipedia, and its readership, has changed a lot in the past year.
I think I misinterpreted the paper; I think the percentiles are based on both registered and anonymous editors. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-10-08/Va... for more.
-Sage