The article's dismissal of an editor by complaining that "[his] edits were all deleting things and moving things around" is a perfect illustration of why "bytes added" is just as bad a contribution metric as "edit count". We're not in 2001 anymore. The Internet is not short of bytes about Alan Alda or Anacondas, and nor is Wikipedia short of people who add bytes about them.<p>Newly-added bytes may be true or false. They may be useful or not useful even if true --- readers do not want every byte about a given topic, they want a few tens of thousands of the most useful ones. (This is entirely orthogonal to the inclusionist-deletionist debate about what <i>topics</i> should be included. Some bytes may be useless in the context of a main topical article about Alan Alda himself, but they would be very relevant to a subtopical article about Alan Alda's dental health).<p>For a popular topic, you'll have dozens of people adding bytes of varying quality. Insiders subtract the false or useless bytes (an action easily captured in statistics and then maligned on the internet by pundits), but also look at the true and useful bytes, fact-check them, and then <i>leave them in place</i>. This contribution --- curation --- is not captured in any statistics, but it is an important part of the mechanism by which you can have 1 expert and two enthusiastic amateurs stop by every few weeks on their lunch break to expand an article with no centralised notice or approval, without having have the place turned into a mess by the 97 vandals and well-meaning incompetents who came by in the meantime.<p>The real problem Wikipedia faces is in the long tail of topics, where there is only one person adding the bytes, and that person is either grinding an axe, self-promoting, or afflicted with incurable "nerdview". The well-meaning, harried, underinformed Wikipedia insiders inevitably screw up when they try to distinguish useless vs. useful bytes on these topics, but I wouldn't call the outsiders who added the bytes in the first place "experts". Unfortunately both sides' conduct may be scaring away the people who <i>are</i> actual experts on those long-tail topics ...