On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 11:20 AM, rarohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It may depend on your definition of "occasional
contributor" and
"power user", but the way I tend to think about such distinctions
would suggest your statement is false. I've never been able to do the
analysis directly for enwiki, because it is too large and lacks
appropriate dumps, but looking at other large Wikipedias suggests that
as a rule of thumb about 70% of article content (measured by character
count) comes from accounts with more than 1000 edits to articles.
Only ~15% of content originates from people with 100 article edits or
less.
Do these statistics take into account things like vandalism
reversions? Also, how do they handle anonymous users -- are they
summed up by edit count like anyone else? I distinctly remember
seeing a study conclude that most of the actual content comes from
users with few edits, but I can't recall where or how long ago
(possibly two or three years).
Regardless, the point remains that heavy contributors only exist
because they started out as new users. Just because you're a power
user type of person doesn't mean you'll be less daunted by wikimarkup
if you've never seen it before -- any barrier to entry is a problem.
(Otherwise, why not require registration too? That's probably
*easier* than understanding wikimarkup for most people.) And of
course, a lot of contributors that Wikipedia would really like to
encourage are people like academics in the humanities, say, who can't
be expected to be particularly comfortable with computers. How much
of the bias toward science and technology in Wikipedia is because of
wikimarkup?