Sj wrote:
The swarm does the bulk of the writing, especially finding and providing current facts, starting new articles, and adding neglected POVs.
I think this is an interesting aspect, and definitely something I notice in my monitoring of "New Pages". Often there will be a new and fairly low-quality article created by an anon user on a topic I had never heard of. Sometimes I'll do some research on the topic, find out it's really somewhat interesting, and basically scrap the original crappy contribution and completely rewrite the article from scratch into at least a reasonably good stub. So in a sense, I've written 100% of the article as it then exists, but without the original drive-by user, I wouldn't have done so. Meaning that even users who are not much help in actually writing encyclopedia articles are at least occasionally useful in pointing out things that should be written about.
-Mark