Hacker News Reader

Research has also proven that a relatively very small group of contributors actually make most of the changes on Wikipedia, believe it's in the order of about 100 people (can't find the link at the moment). It's well possible that it's a conspiracy, or there's a secret style guide we don't know about.

View on HN

A small group of contributors make the most edits by count. A diverse group of contributors write the most prose content, usually on a topic that they're expert in. So the core wikipedians are organizing/wikifying/categorizing and that's the bulk of the edits, but the bulk of the content is a different story.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Ok, so I got the details wrong. However, still think this effect could partially be explained by the tightly knit community of editors.

The style guide isn't secret.[1] Also, the research saying that most changes were done by a small group (~1500 way back in the day [2]) was challenged. While the core group of wikipedians are responsible for most of the copyediting, categorizing, etc, the bulk of material additions came from outsiders.[2]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style

[2]http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Reply on news.ycombinator.com