It’s not actually a gang of 500 anymore. Now it’s between one and three thousand.

A lot of people trot out Aaron Swartz (likely since he’s one of the first serious hits in a Google search on the topic), but two serious problems are neglected when he is brought up:

1. A little slice of the pie does not show an accurate picture of editing behaviors, because those behaviors vary wildly based on the exact slice you take. Based on subject matter, size of the article, how and/or whether it has ever been peer assessed, or any number of other factors show radically different editing patterns. A Featured Article candidate gets edited in an entirely different way that say, Zittrain’s bio. To draw a really broad conclusion about who does the editing, you must look at the whole project and average it out.

2. Aaron’s numbers are from 2006. Considering that the community has shown exponential growth and grew by the thousands in just 06-07 alone, his numbers are no longer accurate.

3. Swartz is just one guy. PARC’s stats on who does editing are not only based on much more recent data, but they were compiled by a pretty brilliant team of scientists.

If I understand your comment correctly, you are stating that the “Gang of 500″ (actually 524 users, from Jim Wales’s lecture at Stanford) provide the majority of Wikipedia content, while the global community acts as a supplement to that.

Aaron Swartz (www.aaronsw.com) recently conducted research that came to the conclusion that while the core users provided a majority of the edits to Wikipedia, the ad-hoc community provided an overwhelming majority of the content.

Granted, his survey set wasn’t the entirety of Wikipedia, but I believe it was large enough to infer a larger pattern of behavior.

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If I misunderstood your intent, and we are arguing the same point, then /salute

What would have been the developpers best option? To avoid any buzz: remove the App silently and have no communication around what happened until they can safely offer a better and trustable product. It would be in Google’s interest to explain things clearly, but they might have decided to favor the developper’s reputation.

> the point of open-source is to outsource [testing apps for security breaches] to users

Wich explains why the only users of Linux are marginal geeks. ;^)

Seriously, no — and it’s a crucial point: the point of Open source it not to let anyone do the dirty work, because most aren’t able. The point is to let anyone decide he can certify software, based on his expertise, so that the (id10t) user can have choices about who he trusts. Not having certification around Open source is ineffective, and those certification can be dictatorial if it is the choice of their initiator.

I’m also fairly heavily involved with Android. While I agree with much of your post, I wanted to clarify some things:

“If Google is silently pulling disputed apps while the developers protest … they’ve replicated the iPhone’s App Store”

There’s still the fundamental difference that the iPhone App Store is a focused monopoly: it is the *only* way to get apps on an iPhone. You mention “alternative distribution methods” parenthetically later in the paragraph, but it’s really central to Android’s openness. What happens in the Android Market has some impact on a publisher, but it is not the death-knell that being kicked out of the App Store is.

“But Android users ought to know who pulled the app, and why.”

I wouldn’t quibble if this information were made available, but it’s unclear why you feel it’s a consumer right. If your local grocer switches suppliers of eggs, or discontinues selling some breakfast cereal, there is usually no notice to you that such a lineup change has been made and why. If your local shoe store stops carrying Timberland shoes, they probably won’t put up a poster explaining why. If your local computer store stops shelving TaxACT, they do not owe you a justification for this move. It is unclear why the Android Market would be any different.

Again, it is different with the iPhone App Store due to the monopoly status the App Store holds vis a vis iPhone apps. Apple pulling a product from the App Store removes 100% of distribution (akin to forcing a product off all stores’ shelves, not just a single store).

Now, had you phrased this as more of a “here’s what Google gets by opening up this information”, as you allude to in the second-to-last paragraph, that would have been excellent. As it stands, though, the current phrasing is couched more in terms of a right than “merely” a really good idea, and at least I’m not ready to make that leap just yet.

BTW, a typo: in the second-to-last paragraph, you have “MemberUp” instead of “MemoryUp”.

It isn’t that a core community of Wikipedians “supplements” the work of a larger ad-hoc group. Ad-hoc, anonymous contributions supplement the work of the core community of dedicated editors. This is verified by both internal statistical studies and third party work by organizations such as PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition research group.