On 5/4/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
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.
Well it's also the case that there are a great number of trivial edits (minor copyediting, vandalism reversion, simple wikification0 that get made by people with the right 'calling' (and in some cases, the right automation tools)...
The nature of these changes (each small and not time consuming, but as a whole tedious and unrewarding to many people) causes a small number of obsessive (in a good way) people to make a great number of edits.
I suspect that if you omit these edits you'd find the distribution of contributions to be somewhat less concentrated.