On 04/09/06, 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. But it is also may not be the best approach for the future, if we are really switching to a "quality over quantity" mentality. At the least, there should be careful choices about what kinds of articles to analyze, before we put too much weight on results like these. My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a significantly larger portion of established editors as the main contributors, even by the word count metric.
That's because it's bloody impossible to get through them without being fabulous at the politics, even for experienced editors. FAC in particular is a great example of gratuitous requests for shrubberies BY POLICY!!!
- d.