They produce a whole lot of edits. They don't actually contribute an especially large amount of content, which is the thing with real value.
The content is mostly written by subject matter experts that contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few articles each.
That sounds like the ideal scenario. Any evidence that it is or isn’t this way? I would guess it’s skewed more towards a handful of folks simply writing many articles about things they’re moderately knowledgeable about.
The vast majority of content was created by a long tail of users, with a very small minority of users being the last to "touch" a particular piece of text (copy edits, moving things around, etc).
Probably should have published that.
As with most human efforts, the emergence of a political layer is inevitable. But overall they seem to be doing a pretty good job keeping their shit together. Even though I have no way of knowing whether the information on Wikipedia is correct as a whole, at least it presents as self-consistent.
I'm not too sure about that, actually. Wikipedia has a lot of special interest groups to handle niche topics, so I don't think that there's much room for experts outside of the group.