Who Writes Wikipedia?

Fascinating analysis, using a different metric and coming to a completely different conclusion than Wales did. If he's right, it'll be interesting to go back and reread what various people have written about Wikipedia. Four years later, has anybody run the larger-scale analysis he suggests here?

As a moderator of a wiki-project, I can confirm Aaron Swartz's results. After we had gained enough popularity, most of the articles were written by outsiders and core community was there only to maintain -- categorize, wikify, create interlinks here and there, delete garbage and, last but not least, have flamewars in the discussion pages.

So, in the article it's claimed that Wales wanted to do a study using this method, and (implied) if appropriate, revise his conclusion.

This is four years ago, anyone knows if that happened?

Edited to add: One thing that has been annoying me a little, is when articles, regardless of their quality, are deleted because they lack notoriety. If these deletes adhere to the conclusions in this article (written by an outsider, then deleted by an insider, rather than both written and deleted by insiders), this strikes me as an example of a policy that should be changed in face of this evidence, since capturing the knowledge of these drive-by contributors seems more important than "saving space".

One of the primary reasons that Wikipedia is written by such a tiny percentage of its users is that the process of writing and editing is arcane and shrouded in one of the most insular online cultures in existence.

I don't know if greater access to its priestly class would mean a better or worse site, honestly. I'm sure there are thousands of people who are experts in their fields and could improve the content of the site greatly - but I can imagine that opening the floodgates and working to democratize authorship and editorship could also drag it further into the gutter.

The article that we are discussing is actually saying quite the opposite: that the bulk of Wikipedia is written by many, many users. The bulk of the edits on the other hand, are written by the few.