This piece examines who contributes to Wikipedia.
One the surface, it appears that most of the work is done by a few users:
“I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”
But when you examine the content users are adding, the profile changes:If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales’s methods, you get Wales’s results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.
But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes:
few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit — this one! With the more reasonable metric — indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study — the result completely reverses.
. . .
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
If this conclusion is correct, the lesson is that to keep Wikipedia growing, it’s pool of contributors must continue to broaden. Casual users must feel comfortable jumping in and posting content.
Recently I created a Wikipedia account and started an article, so I can make an observation on this. It’s really easy to register and start an article. What is a bit more difficult is learning the formatting so the article looks decent. There are ample tutorials available, but I had hunt through several pages to find what I was looking for. Once you figure a tool out, it’s easy to change the article. And the preview screen is nice. The trick is in getting there.
To broaden the contributor base, Wikipedia might work on making the editing/formating instructions easier to find and understand.