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"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."

"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."