Freedom or Copyright? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation(FSF)

[David Gerard]

On 09/02/2008, David Picón Álvarez <eleuteri at myrealbox.com> wrote:

> Actually the Wikipedia thing has been more or less thoroughly debunked.
> Whereas it is true that a very small minority (I think about 2000 people)
> are responsible for an overwhelming number of edits, it turns out their
> edits tend to be minor in character: fixing style, citations, that kind of
> thing. Most of the contentful edits are made by people who edit little.


Not "debunked" - both are true. Most of the actual text is written by
anonymous contributors, then the editing and shaping of that (which is
non-trivial work) is done by a smaller core group. Mind you, that
"core" is in the thousands in any given month - the last month we have
numbers for is Oct 2006, when it was 4300 editors on English Wikipedia
with >100 edits, and 43,006 with >5 edits.

Also: most articles are uncontroversial, and written by one or two
people; only a very few have any controversy over their content.

Greg Maxwell (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell) does
lots of statistical evaluations of the Wikimedia projects.


- d.