On 5 Sep 2006, at 03:28, Matt Brown wrote:
On 9/4/06, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Answering "Who Writes Wikipedia?" in terms of number of surviving words is, no doubt, better than using edit counts.
If you rank Wikipedia editors by edit count, the bots win; in second place are the editors who function in a very bot-like manner, by constantly fixing small issues here and there, often with software assistance.
I also bet that if you ranked editors by surviving words in the encyclopedia (not project or talk) you might be quite surprised to see who ranks high. People get noticed on Wikipedia for participating in project-space, for one reason or another, not for their article contribs.
In [[Mathematics]] we actually discuss important changes and reach consensus. Who actually puts up the definitive version is fairly random and depends on who happens to be around at the time. So measures of changes to the article are not an accurate measure of contributions.