[WikiEN-l] An interesting study on bad edits and their impact

[Sage Ross]

> Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article
> views, we show that an overwhelming majority of the viewed words were
> written by frequent editors and that this majority is increasing.

This depends on your definition of "frequent editors".  The paper
doesn't make this terribly clear, but as I read it these are the key
numbers:

* 25 trillion out of 34 trillion (73%) "page word views" (PWVs) are
from content contributed by registered users.  27% is from anons.
*The top 10% of editors (by edit count) account for 86% of the 25
trillion PWVs.  But that's only 63% of total PWVs, when anon
contributions are included.  Also, that 10% is ca. 420,000 editors.
We definitely don't have that many "frequent editors", for most values
of frequent.
*Top 1% of editors account of about 70% of the 25 trillion PWVs, or
51% of the total.  So the top 42,000 editors account for about half.
According to Erik Zachte's statistics, that's also about the number of
users making more than 5 edits in a give month (as of October 2006,
the end date of the study)
*The top .1% (4,200) editors account for 44% of the 25 trillion, or
32% of the total.  That's the approximate number of editors making
>100 edits per month.
*The PWV share of the top 10% and top 1% groups were decreasing, not
increasing.  Only the top .1% group was increasing, and they don't
account for a majority of content.

As David Gerard points out, this doesn't fully solve the question of
"who writes Wikipedia", but it's certainly relevant (and I would say
it points to a middle ground between the positions of Jimbo and Aaron
Swartz).  Unfortunately, it's terribly out of date; Wikipedia, and its
readership, has changed a lot in the past year.

Yours in discouse,
Sage (User:Ragesoss)