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

Wikipedia has been a resounding success story as a
collaborative system with a low cost of online participation.
However, it is an open question whether the success of
Wikipedia results from a “wisdom of crowds” type of effect
in which a large number of people each make a small
number of edits, or whether it is driven by a core group of
“elite” users who do the lion’s share of the work. In this
study we examined how the influence of “elite” vs.
“common” users changed over time in Wikipedia. The
results suggest that although Wikipedia was driven by the
influence of “elite” users early on, more recently there has
been a dramatic shift in workload to the “common” user.
We also show the same shift in del.icio.us, a very different
type of social collaborative knowledge system. We discuss
how these results mirror the dynamics found in more
traditional social collectives, and how they can influence
the design of new collaborative knowledge systems.