Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/Special report

Special report

The few who write Wikipedia

The views expressed in this special report are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section.
Edit distribution of all Wikipedians, as of 8 January 2014

On 15 January, the English Wikipedia turned thirteen years old. In that time, this site has grown from a small site that was known to only a select few to one of the most popular websites on the internet. At the same time, recent data suggests that there is a power law among users, where the comparative few who are writing most of Wikipedia have most of the edits. The result of this is that there is going to be bias in what is created, and how we deal with it as Wikipedians is indicative of the future of the site. Furthermore, this brings up what we have to do in order to combat this bias, as there are many ideas, but the question is whether they will work or not.