From Benz Wiki

[edit] "Wisdom of Chaperons"

"Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy" by Chris Wilson, Slate Magazine

"According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones."

"that doesn't explain the kind of territorialism—the authorial domination by 1 percent of contributors—on the site's pages. Is this a necessary artifact of operating an open-access site? Or is it possible to build a clearinghouse for high-quality, user-generated content without giving too much power to elite users and secret sauces?"

"The moderation system at the tech blog Slashdot is perhaps the best example on the Web of a middle way. Slashdot, which draws on links submitted by readers, ordains active contributors with limited power to regulate comments and contributions from other users. Compared with Wikipedia, which requires supreme devotion from its smaller core of administrators, Slashdot makes it easy to become a moderator. Giving large numbers of people small chunks of responsibility has proven effective in eliminating trolls and flame wars in the comment section. Still, the authority any one moderator commands is small, and the site's official poobahs maintain control over which stories are featured at the top of the site.
see Rob Malda's "CmrdTaco" site"

"Another compelling model comes from Helium.com, a Wikipedia-like repository of articles and editorials. Its founder, Silicon Valley veteran Mark Ranalli, compares his site to a capitalist version of Wikipedia. On Helium, contributors compete to have the top-ranked article on a given subject. As soon as you write an article, you're invited to pick your favorite of two articles on a similar subject. Requiring someone to write before he or she rates creates a more stable system: Rather than create a caste of creators and a caste of peons, Helium encourages everyone to do everything"

"Who Writes Wikipedia?" (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

"Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that's not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account."

"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."

Aaron went to to collect "Who Writes Wikipedia? -- Responses"

"As [Seth Anthony explained on Reddit]: "Only about 10% of all edits on Wikipedia actually add substantive content. Roughly a third of those edits are made by someone without an account, half of someone without a userpage (a minimal threshhold for considering whether someone is part of the "community"). The average content-adder has less than 200 edits: much less, in many cases."</p>

One of the more interesting things Anthony did was look at the work of admins in detail. In his sample, he noticed that none of the genuinely substantive edits were done by official site admins. He found that when admins originally joined the site, they contributed a lot less frequently and consistently but created a lot more substantive content. After they became admins, however, they turned into what Anthony calls "janitors".

This arose out of Seth Anthony's "Contribution Patterns among Active Wikipedians: Finding and Keeping Content Creators" presentation to Proceedings of Wikimania 2006; here, from his "Heavy Lifting", notes from that by Ross Mayfield:

Only 10% of edits are high content edits. 30% of those are anonymous, none are by admins, 52% are by someone with a userpage, none have a barnstar. The people who are creating content are relatively new, not versed in style guides and bureaucracy. Their use of Wikipedia speeds up a little bit through use, but not much.

Admins, on the other hand, are relatively efficient in their edits and have a consistent pace. They only edit within the article namespace 60% of the time. In other words, most edits are revisions of vandalism. But in the early days they edited less frequently, created more content (76% of the time) and edited less consistently.

Content creators seem to be occasional and less frequent editors that may be specialists (subject matter knowledge). Admins are former content creators, now janitors. One person in the audience volunteered that he just crossed over from subject expert to janitor to emphasize this point.

see also Scott Reynen's collection of comments in his post "Framing Wikipedia"

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see also: WikiTorial and CitizenJournalism