I’m a fan of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory–recent controversey notwithstanding. Still, I was surprised by the following chart from Wikipedia’s statistics page:
The chart shows that 416,139 “wikipedians” have made 29,580,205 edits to various articles (there are currently 1,306,883 articles in total). That’s a lot of edits, but what’s more interesting is how an extremely small number of people account for the overwhelming majority of edit activity: just 5 individuals were responsible for more than 850,000 edits, and only 5.7% of all active users provided 88.5% of all completed edits.
Clearly, there are interesting implications for so-called user-generated content sites. In particular, capturing and retaining the interest of the most-hyperactive editors/contributers is key (at least it is for Wikipedia).
Update: Christopher points out that some of the most active “wikipedians” are, in fact, bots (automated or semi-automated accounts for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually). Important clarification…
Well, the #1 user according to that same page is Bluebot with over 200k edits in the past 246 days. Which doesn’t seem very reasonable. And the name seems a bit suspicious. Further clicking reveals:
User:Bluebot, This user account is a bot operated by Bluemoose. It is not a sock puppet, but rather an automated or semi-automated account for making repetitive edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually.
Left by Christopher St. John on August 9th, 2006