My question is simple: how can we get more people to edit postings so they look better? There are badges, but it doesn’t seem to work:
Awarded Badge Name Type
======= ================== =======
19 Copy Editor gold
0 Illuminator gold
14 Refiner silver
4 Research Assistant silver
Currently, most of the edits on ELU are done by a very, very few people. Watch how fast the number of edits per user drops by a full order of magnitude from that of our top editor:
So there are only 5 of us between Reg and Mari-Lou, by which point we’ve lost an entire order of magnitude.
We currently only have 19 users who have earned the gold Copy Editor badge, and only 14 who have earned the silver Refiner badge. No one has yet earned the gold Illuminator badge — in fact, nobody is even close to Illuminator!
The silver Research Assistant badge for editing 50 tag wikis is also extremely rare, having been so far awarded to only 4 members in all of ELU history.
The top 25 editors collectively account for more than three quarters of the edits (64043/83599). However, even within that group of the top 25, as you can see from the numbers above, it drops off precipitously after the first few rows. Here’s another way to look at that data, using a slightly different counting metric:
# 1. 22200 / 83599 26.6% of 26.6% RegDwigнt
# 2. 19556 / 83599 23.4% of 49.9% (Everybody Else Combined!)
# 3. 9459 / 83599 11.3% of 61.3% tchrist
# 4. 3773 / 83599 4.5% of 65.8% waiwai93
# 5. 2934 / 83599 3.5% of 69.3% kiamlaluno
# 6. 2872 / 83599 3.4% of 72.7% JSBձոգչ
# 7. 2304 / 83599 2.8% of 75.5% Daniel
# 8. 2173 / 83599 2.6% of 78.1% Matt E. Эллен
# 9. 1894 / 83599 2.3% of 80.3% Mari-Lou A
#10. 1646 / 83599 2.0% of 82.3% Andrew Leach
#11. 1372 / 83599 1.6% of 84.0% Kris
#12. 1249 / 83599 1.5% of 85.4% simchona
#13. 1176 / 83599 1.4% of 86.9% Kit Z. Fox
#14. 1087 / 83599 1.3% of 88.2% Hugo
#15. 1005 / 83599 1.2% of 89.4% jwpat7
#16. 978 / 83599 1.2% of 90.5% coleopterist
#17. 971 / 83599 1.2% of 91.7% MετάEd
#18. 943 / 83599 1.1% of 92.8% medica
#19. 902 / 83599 1.1% of 93.9% Uticensis
#20. 869 / 83599 1.0% of 94.9% Jimi Oke
#21. 823 / 83599 1.0% of 95.9% J.R.
#22. 748 / 83599 0.9% of 96.8% Thursagen
#23. 747 / 83599 0.9% of 97.7% Mahnax
#24. 713 / 83599 0.9% of 98.6% Robusto
#25. 620 / 83599 0.7% of 99.3% FumbleFingers
#26. 585 / 83599 0.7% of 100.0% Marthaª
Yes, that’s right: in the SEDE ranking above, just between Reg and me we two alone account for 3 out of every 8 edits overall, or about half of those done by the top 25 put together!
Is there anything that the ELU Community can do to get more folks to help out the few of us who are currently doing the bulk of the work (read: the top n people listed above) to put an attractive fresh coat of whitewash on our nice picket-fence so Aunt Polly doesn’t scold us?
It will make our site look better, and it really needs more hands at the task.
Please help.