Who the Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway? is a refutation of the idea that "[t]he bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site." That disparaging notion came about by looking at Wikipedia editing activity to see who made the most contributions to the project. Therein is the problem: What is "most"?
[Aaron] Swartz analyzed percentage-of-text instead of number of edits, and what he found was slightly different: The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site. The bulk of the changes to the original text, then, are made by a core group of heavy editors who make thousands of tiny edits (the 1400 freaks).
When you put it all together, the story becomes 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.
I find that reassuring; Wikipedia is useful and much better for finding the random information I look for than any other encyclopedia I've found. It's much like the news media: great for getting information if you don't trust it overmuch. In all the times I've actually known something from the inside about a news story, whether newspaper, magazine, or television report, it has been obvious that the story, as reported, was wrong. Sometimes egregiously so, sometimes in minor detail, but never reliably correct. So too with Wikipedia, as anyone who knows Old Saybrook, Connecticut, will attest upon reading the entry on Katharine Hepburn, which contains the following sentence:
Behold the cliffs....On September 21, 1938, Hepburn was staying in her Old Saybrook, Connecticut beach home when the 1938 New England Hurricane struck and destroyed her house. Hepburn narrowly escaped death before the home was washed away over the cliffs.
