On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 11:20 AM, rarohde <raro...@gmail.com> wrote: > It may depend on your definition of "occasional contributor" and > "power user", but the way I tend to think about such distinctions > would suggest your statement is false. I've never been able to do the > analysis directly for enwiki, because it is too large and lacks > appropriate dumps, but looking at other large Wikipedias suggests that > as a rule of thumb about 70% of article content (measured by character > count) comes from accounts with more than 1000 edits to articles. > Only ~15% of content originates from people with 100 article edits or > less.
Do these statistics take into account things like vandalism reversions? Also, how do they handle anonymous users -- are they summed up by edit count like anyone else? I distinctly remember seeing a study conclude that most of the actual content comes from users with few edits, but I can't recall where or how long ago (possibly two or three years). Regardless, the point remains that heavy contributors only exist because they started out as new users. Just because you're a power user type of person doesn't mean you'll be less daunted by wikimarkup if you've never seen it before -- any barrier to entry is a problem. (Otherwise, why not require registration too? That's probably *easier* than understanding wikimarkup for most people.) And of course, a lot of contributors that Wikipedia would really like to encourage are people like academics in the humanities, say, who can't be expected to be particularly comfortable with computers. How much of the bias toward science and technology in Wikipedia is because of wikimarkup? _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
