Does it matter who contributes: a study on featured articles in the german wikipedia

The considerable high quality of Wikipedia articles is often accredited to the large number of users who contribute to Wikipedia's encyclopedia articles, who watch articles and correct errors immediately. In this paper, we are in particular interested in a certain type of Wikipedia articles, namely, the featured articles - articles marked by a community's vote as being of outstanding quality. The German Wikipedia has the nice property that it has two types of featured articles: excellent and worth reading. We explore on the German Wikipedia whether only the mere number of contributors makes the difference or whether the high quality of featured articles results from having experienced authors contributing with a reputation for high quality contributions. Our results indicate that it does matter who contributes.