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