Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written by Just 1 Percent of Its Editors

The title of the article is a bit vague. &quot;Nearly all&quot; means 77%, which would potentially be a more accurate title for this submission. To use a common Wikipedia standard, &quot;nearly all&quot; seems like an example of a weasel word (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Weasel_word" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;asc-parc.blogspot.nl&#x2F;2007&#x2F;05&#x2F;long-tail-and-power-law-graphs-of-user.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;asc-parc.blogspot.nl&#x2F;2007&#x2F;05&#x2F;long-tail-and-power-law-...</a>

Isn&#x27;t this true of almost all ecosystems and isn&#x27;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&#x27;s profits<p>0.1% of product designers influenced how 90% of todays products look<p>And so on...

Doesn&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)</a>

Even if the stat held for longer than a month, it&#x27;s not surprising that for each subject matter expert there are 99-ish casual contributors.

100% of the world&#x27;s science was discovered&#x2F;formalized by 0.00001% of humanity. Implies nothing on the science&#x27;s accuracy

So the same as every other forum.