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