The title of the article is a bit vague. "Nearly all" means 77%, which would potentially be a more accurate title for this submission. To use a common Wikipedia standard, "nearly all" seems like an example of a weasel word (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word</a>) or otherwise vague detensifier.<p>Not sure what the guidelines regarding deviation from linked article headlines are, though.
After doing some googling I found an article [1] that provides a somewhat more nuanced view. While it is true that around 70% of the edits each month are generated from the top 1% of users, this is only true for the top 1% <i>of that month</i>. When you look over a longer period the majority of edits come from users with less than 100 edits in total (which seems to be around 90% of the population).<p>[1]: <a href="http://asc-parc.blogspot.nl/2007/05/long-tail-and-power-law-graphs-of-user.html" rel="nofollow">http://asc-parc.blogspot.nl/2007/05/long-tail-and-power-law-...</a>
Isn't this true of almost all ecosystems and isn't it aptly explained by the Pareto principle?<p>1% of individuals hold 90% of the worlds wealth<p>1% of actors get lead roles in 90% of holywood movies<p>10% of sales people earn 90% of company's profits<p>0.1% of product designers influenced how 90% of todays products look<p>And so on...
Doesn't feel all that surprising. My contributions to Wikipedia are generally fixing typos, light grammar. If you count me as an editor, I wonder how many more like me there are that skew that number?
A similar participation ratio has been observed across many online social community and not just Wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)</a>