[apologies for the cross-post]
Some have repeated on this list, the notion that most of the content on Wikipedia is contributed/generated by a very small dedicated core. I have always found this contention very difficult to believe -- the level of detail, in some of the areas in which I have some knowledge myself, hinted that the text was written not by a member of a small all-purpose group but by a person with quite a bit of deep knowledge in the field.
BoingBoing has a post about Aaron Swartz's finding that this idea (all content generated by small core) is wrong, indeed:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/04/how_wikipedia_entrie.html
> Aaron Swartz, who is running for the WIkipedia executive, has done
> some data-crunching using a rented supercomputing cluster, against
> many Wikipedia entries to determine how Wikipedia entries get
> written. It turns out that while the majority of edits come from a
> small group of 500 core editors, the majority of new content is
> inserted by drive-by, unregistered users whose contributions are then
> massaged into encolopediahood by the core 500.
--ravi
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