Reverse Lake Wobegon Effect
Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is why it is often very hard for people to conceptualize how these user generated sites work- there is no “average user” to imagine yourself as.
(Basically paraphrasing from Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody)
Aaron Swartz disproved this for Wikipedia:
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
Most of the content is written by an “expert” on the topic and then it is cleaned up and made to look the way you expect a Wiki entry to look by a small army of Wikipedia insiders. In that sense, it’s easier to imagine yourself as an average user. There’s something you know well and could share with the Wiki world. Then one of the Bill Gates types (who distort the number-of-edits average) can go in and clean it up.
