[WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact dangerous to Wikipedia

[Stephen Streater]

On 5 Sep 2006, at 03:28, Matt Brown wrote:

> On 9/4/06, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Answering "Who Writes Wikipedia?" in terms of number of surviving  
>> words is,
>> no doubt, better than using edit counts.
>
> If you rank Wikipedia editors by edit count, the bots win; in second
> place are the editors who function in a very bot-like manner, by
> constantly fixing small issues here and there, often with software
> assistance.
>
> I also bet that if you ranked editors by surviving words in the
> encyclopedia (not project or talk) you might be quite surprised to see
> who ranks high.  People get noticed on Wikipedia for participating in
> project-space, for one reason or another, not for their article
> contribs.

In [[Mathematics]] we actually discuss important changes and
reach consensus. Who actually puts up the definitive version
is fairly random and depends on who happens to be around
at the time. So measures of changes to the article are not an
accurate measure of contributions.