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So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “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.”

via http://www.cnetnews.com.cn/news/net/story/0,3800050307,39539845,00.htm

Since my own essay critical of Wikipedia’s “anti-elitism”, and intensifying after Jaron Lanier’s more recent essay touting Wikipedia as the prime example of “online collectivism,” the amazingly huge, wide-open encyclopedia project has becom...

How good is Wikipedia's content? How good is Wikipedia's community? What does Wikipedia's future look like?