“The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia is that it’s some
emergent phenomenon–the wisdom of crowds, swarm intelligence, that sort
of thing… like we’re a lot of ants, working in an anthill,” Jimmy
Wales, the site’s co-founder, has said. “It’s kind of a neat analogy, but it turns out it’s actually not much true.”

Wales examined the numbers several years ago and was surprised to
learn that the most active 2 percent of users had performed nearly 75
percent of the edits on the site. “There’s this tight community that is
actually doing the bulk of all the editing,” he said. “I know all of them, and they all know each other.” —The Daily Beast