Revisions in Wikis

Someone made an interesting commented recently on a Kairosnews post about Wikpedia about revision:

"the big question of revision: how do we (people who write on wikis) get past the 80/20 rule of revision? Can you distribute the task of proofing for unity and coherence? Or will it always be that 80% of the people do 20% of the work while 20% of the people do 80% of the work? This is the same problem that Yochai Benkler calls 'low-cost integration' in Commons-Based Peer Production."

In my (few) experiments with wikis, I have found that this does tend to happen. Someone or a few people get to the wiki first and do most of the work. Then others often arrive and just tweak what the first people have written. This raises a few questions for me if I want to use or encourage others to use a wiki as a pedagogical too: Does the "80/20 rule" occur because peer editing is foreign and takes some time to warm up to? Is it something about the work being open and on the web that keeps people from making major revisions? How do you create an environment where everyone is contributing equally? Or is that even desirable? Maybe the 80/20 rule is how peer-editing and group projects work in real life too.