That's only 65,000 people!

I demand that Slate publish the names of this tiny cabal of Illuminati!

Mujokan:

If you go to Wikipedia and view their stats, you will find they lay claim to over 75,000 active global writers. Unfortunately, this is old data and no one has updated the stats from 2006. Wilson is implying the writers, and not necessarily the users of Wikipedia, are responsible for edits.

Taking 1% of the outdated 75,000 would imply 750 editors of entries to Wikipedia and still a sizeable number. I think you already know this and are poking at the author. They also lay claim to 75,000 editors and perhaps they mean editors of Wikipedia through submissions.

What makes my casual observation of 750 editors of Wikipedia rather interestesting (just from looking at Wiki's numbers and also the blog from which Wilson pulled his article) is that Wikipedia does publish a list of power writers numbering ~300 in total. These are writers who have submitted 200 times or more. One writer has submitted over 17,000 times. Since it is for public consumption, I have no problem posting the link here: Power Posters

run75441:

That list of "Power posters" is people who have posted to Wikimedia's various mailing lists, not to Wikipedia itself.

Whether an editor participates much in the mailing lists - writing, reading, or just ignoring them, is purely up to the editor. I've been an administrator on the English and Welsh language Wikipedia for nearly 5 years (about 18,000 edits on the English version, quite a few thousand more edits on other language versions), but have only very occasionally posted to any of the mailing lists (and seldom even read them) -- there's a lot of unproductive bickering that goes on on some of the lists, and I believe most Wikipedia administration should be done using the wiki itself.

arwel:

I was thinking the power posters might have been similar to the "star posters" on The Fray and taken one step further incorporating editing powers also. I believe there are 1000 administrators? or perhaps you can englighten myself and other curious posters?

Thank you for the reply and the info.

I didn't look so far into it. I just assumed the article was saying that around 50% of edits are made by 1% of registered users.

But speaking of power, this kind of thing tends to follow a power law distribution. There's not much you can do about it. There's no way to eliminate the "long tail" on something used by so many people. I think criticism of Wikipedia as not being democratic needs to stay within the realm of specific improvements that might actually be feasible.