Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users.
This indicates a concentration at the top, but is this concentration bigger or smaller than any alternative situation?
Book (and record) stores have always sold a bulk of "best sellers", with a "tail" of less common titles. In recent decades, supermarkets are selling books with a higher concentration of best sellers (a shorter tail), while Internet book sellers such as Amazon.com offer a far longer tail than any traditional book store can afford. This was featured in the October 2004 issue of Wired, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html and is the topic of the www.thelongtail.com blog.
I think that Wikipedia also has a very long tail, a large number of contributors who just write a few articles on highly specialized topics. Much more so than any mainstream (printed) encyclopedia. But we don't have their statistics to compare with.
If we just compare the bulk or mainstream part of Wikipedia, I think it is still smaller than Britannica, even though Wikipedia's long tail makes its total number of articles very large. I think it would be interesting if we could measure how far into the tail each article is. Is this the number of page views?