Review for Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie

Chi et al present a quantitatively observed shift in the editing dynamics of Wikipedia – from high edit individuals making the vast majority of edits to low edit count individuals making the majority of the edits. They consider a variety of hypotheses that might explain this change, concluding that the change in edits represents a shift in power from a small core of moderators to casual users. They also describe similar effects in del.icio.us, making it clear that this is not an anomalous occurrence.

This paper is quite methodical - in a good way. It moves quite logically through a series of hypotheses, clearly proving or disproving them before moving on. This is an important piece of work for understanding very large scale social systems and how they operate. Bringing in del.icio.us and showing a similar phenomenon is both appropriate and compelling, adding evidence to an area of study that has tended toward conjecture due to a lack of good data from at-scale deployments. So overall, I think this is a good paper and worth publishing. I'm not sure what makes it alt.chi though. It reminds me somewhat of the work done by Bob Kraut on online communities, which seems to find a home both at CHI and other venues oriented towards CSCW or CMC. I don't know if the existence of other venues for this sort of work makes it NOT good for alt.chi, but it is my only major reservation about this paper.

I would have liked to see a little more discussion of the lag effect that appears in most of the graphs. I believe their argument for what causes it, but the initial explanation was a little confusing. Repeating figure 2 for shorter time periods showing that the fall-off appears for other time periods would, I think, have really put that point to rest.

It's beyond the scope of this paper, but some qualitative work would also really strengthen this project. Aaron Swartz (cited in the paper) has a particularly interesting perspective as an insider to the Wikipedia community, and I think hearing more from people like him about the on-the-ground experience of experienced users interacting with the increasing number of novice users would help provide a much clearer story about how this process happens and what it means for the community.