"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 ________________________
A key number to make available is not just the number of edits, but the size of the deltas. This would filter different editing styles - some people are multiple edits in a session, others are one edit and then perhaps a proof. This will also give an indication of who does the bulk of the writing and who does the bulk of the editting and who does the bulk of the proofing - which are separate catagories of contribution. All of which are important - turning raw material into a formatted article is a crucial part of the process - but they are different activities.