Sj wrote:
The swarm does the bulk of the writing, especially finding and providing current facts, starting new articles, and adding neglected POVs. The roving groups are sensitive to dozens of policy pages, and implement them as they rove... they also take on large projects, one at a time, and try to implement certain changes across thousands of pages at once.
"The swarm does the bukl of the writing..." hints at a testable hypothesis.
My own research indicates the opposite, but let me be perfectly NPOV about my own research: it is completely amateurish and driven by my need to make interesting public talks that get the world excited and thinking about wikipedia. :-) I can hardly be considered an unbiased scientific researcher.
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
A deeper understanding of all these issues can have some interesting implications for us in terms of understanding certain policy issues.
--Jimbo