Who actually writes Wikipedia?

Recent findings of Wikipedia’s growth have been quite interesting, as the bulk of the changes to the original text,  are made by a core group of 1400 editors who make thousands of tiny edits.

Prior to that, there are tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site.

In other words, an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it, as businessinsider.com mentions.

However, as Jimbo Wales pointed out, Wikipedia was actually written by “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” where “I know all of them and they all know each other”. Really, “it’s much like any traditional organization.”

He added: “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.”