Dave Winer on Wikipedia:

In the web before Wikipedia, every point of view had a chance, but Wikipedia tends toward centralization, toward one or two views prevailing, those that are represented by people who are willing to maintain a presence on Wikipedia. This what I'm not comfortable with.

Well, that's pretty much community behavior in a nutshell. Pick any community, web-based or otherwise. There are always a small number of people who do a disproportionate amount of the work. I read a book about the creation of the OED awhile back, "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary". A huge number of volunteer submissions came from one man - a lunatic being held in an asylum after a murder.

The point isn't that W.C. Minor was a madman - it's that he was one of a handful of volunteers who made a contribution above and beyond anyone else. We see that at Digg, where the top 100 users file 56% of the front page stories. We see it in Wikis, where a small number of people end up doing all the maintenance. It shouldn't be a shock.

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