I'd imagine there's a pareto distribution of edits amongst users, and so it might not be so unreasonable to think that a handful of people have written a significant percentage of what's there.
Maybe, but my experience editing there is that the very vast majority of edits do not get reviewed at all, let alone by people with any background in the subject at hand.
Swartz's article mentioned at the end is interesting, and contradicts Wales' study, who measured by number of edits per contributor instead of number of contributed words per contributor.
"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."
What does it really matter what journalists actually write a piece when the publication's editors change it and have the final say for what gets published anyway?
A lot of people seem to forget how much editing by more than one person actually goes into a lot of professional writing. Editors probably have the most control over things that end up published, more so than the original writers of a piece usually do.
3 millions edits, however, is still an astonishing accomplishment, even taking this into account. Edits that don't require any human thinking are usually done by bot accounts, and few of them have that many edits.
The stat I found interesting is this one [citation needed]: while a majority of edits are done by few editors, most of the content is generated by either a) anonymous accounts or b) people who have contributed 2-3 times and haven't returned since. The editors, like the bots, represent maintenance edits.
Keep that in mind the next time Jimmy Wales gives beaucoup credit to editors, or some super-user gets power-happy.
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