73.4 Percent of All Wikipedia Edits Are Made By Roughly 1,400 People

This is complete FUD.

I wrote a simple script to parse the numbers on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_o...

Turns out, the top 1,400 account for 17% of the edits. Even the top 4,000 listed on that page together account for only 28%.

I've been on Wikipedia since mid 2002. That statement by Jimbo sounds like exactly the sort of thing he would have said back in 2003 or 2004, because it was true back then. He did know a whole lot of editors personally. But in 2009, those numbers are way off the mark.

Furthermore, as someone else said, these top editors are mostly admins doing janitorial duties such as rolling back vandalism semi-automatically. If you remove this component, the distribution would be even more equitable.

Finally, this is just the English Wikipedia, which is only about one-fourth of the total, by article count. And different languages have mostly disjoint authorship. So I'd say the true impact of the top thousand globally is around 2-5%.

Seriously, this is pure trolling.

Wow, this piece is actually just a quote from my article, which goes on to disprove the statement.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Why are people voting this up?

"get used to going to the—gasp—library and reading—cringe—books."

Which are edited by what? 3 people? 10 people?

All sources of information have varying degrees of unreliability. Personally, I trust well-cited Wikipedia articles more than I do most books, journals, and other more academically accepted sources.

This "don't trust Wikipedia" story pops up in various places a few times a year. It just reeks of a bunch of academics trying to justify their existence and shouting at kids to get off their lawns.

Of course, most edits are editing, not new content, and these 1400 people are mostly editors, not authors:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

There are millions of people who browse Wikipedia in any given month, but only 2 percent of them (roughly 1,400) ...

Wait, what? 2% of "millions" cannot be 1400. Ah, I think the quote by Jimmy Wales implies that this is 2% of registered users.

Aaron Swartz had a great blog post about how this is just not true at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia. The core of people who incessantly edits do make a lot of edits, but they're cleaning up vandalism or bringing articles into the proper Wikipedia style, not actually writing articles and contributing new facts. If you think about it, it makes complete sense. The combined knowledge of 1,400 people just don't isn't enough to write all the articles about Magical Trevor AND Godel's Incompletenesss Theorem. A mathematician might come once to put in the bulk of the theorem, and then leave because he has better things to do, while obsessive Wikipedia janitors will edit it over and over again.

Nearly all products online, with user generate content and participatory actions, all that comes from usually less than 1% of the user base. Everyone else is just reading, consuming, watching, etc. This is FUD as you can see the same breakdown on almost any product with free user generated content.

HN gets a mention in this article:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikip...

"The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site, says a post racing up the Hacker News charts."

There is other interesting commentary on the facts reported in originally linked blog post in the Silicon Alley Insider article.

Even if these numbers are supposed to sound surprisingly low, I'm guessing its far better than how the input was managed for the set of "Britannica's" we had sitting on a shelf when I was a kid. And that's not a bash against the old way, which had good content for its day.

Some things really are getting better. You will always need to filter information. No news here.

I predict that this phenomenon will be connected with the fact that most people buy the same few bestsellers from Amazon and rent the same few big hits from Netflix, will be dubbed "The Fat Body", and will become the big meme of 2009.

randomwalker said it best, but I'll remind you that WP admins and devotees use scripts to mass-edit for all sorts of things; there's typos and misspellings, but there's also all manner of WP:MoS changes, standardized subheds, and recategorization pages.

Racking up an edit count is the #1 thing people do to become admins.

Edit-count gaming has to be a major component of this. Status on Wikipedia (whether you're given sysop/admin privileges, which include blocking users who annoy you, etc.) is roughly proportional to one's edit count, so people who are trying to raise their <s>avatars</s> user accounts to <s>level 60</s> higher social status and privileges tend to generate large numbers of low-content edits.

Duh.

rather than criticize this, you should on your ass and start contributing to wikipedia more.