While several companies have made offers for Digg, Rose has refused to sell the site, which has already profited from an ad deal with Microsoft. Since Rose is practically the mascot of his own site, he'll want an owner who knows what they're buying, which probably rules out Old Man Murdoch for good. But he'll also want the site to grow, which IAC can't promise. So what will Rose think after meeting with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page?

[Julia Allison]

"According to researchers in Palo Alto," Wilson says, "1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales believes the same; he told the Times, "the vast majority of work is done by this small core community." So Slate buys the party line. But these are fake statistics: The Palo Alto study counted the number of edits. If I add five hundred words to an article about fortune cookies, that counts the same as if I rename a category. All this proves is that a small set of wonks are organizing Wikipedia.

The masses are still writing it. Aaron Swartz compared the number of letters added to several articles and found that most articles are written by people with little other Wikipedia experience. That is, most of Wikipedia comes from people who dropped in and added a chunk of text. All the edits? Those are just Wikipedia diehards rearranging the other users' contributions. (A more thorough study confirms Swartz's conclusion.)

It's obvious, really. Why does Jimmy Wales believe that only 500 people wrote everything of import on Wikipedia? With 2 million articles on the site's English version, that would mean each core user wrote nearly 20,000 articles in the seven years since the site launched. That's eight articles a day per user, and clearly physically impossible. Is Wales unaware of this math, or is he so bent on maintaining Wikipedia's respectability that he can't admit how innovative it is?

So much for Wikipedia being in the hands of the few. But Wilson also aims at Digg, saying the site "is largely run by 100 people." The top hundred Digg users submitted almost half of the stories that went to the front page, he points out. Of course, Digg recently adjusted its algorithm to lower the influence of those Diggers.

Wilson tries to spin this: "The super Diggers published an open letter of grievances and threatened to boycott the site," he says, implying that the hundred top users were in united revolt. But the actual threat only came from four users. That's hardly enough to threaten the site.

As Wilson notes, founder Kevin Rose talked to these four Digg users and reached what Wilson calls a "shaky truce." What exactly is shaky? Rose and CEO Jay Adelson merely explained what they had just done and how it would encourage new users to contribute. They didn't actually concede anything to the four users.

Isn't Slate supposed to be the reasoned, second-guessing news source? Then why does Wilson assume Rose has any fear of his top users? Talking to these users wasn't Rose's way of saving his site. It was a cunning move to make these users feel important, and get his message out to the entire Digg community. Rose came away doing just what he wanted and making everyone thank him for it.

Wilson even reaches for unsubstantiated arguments against Digg; he points to rumors that the site hires secret moderators to delete stories. Rose has denied this publicly several times; it's hard to believe he'd lie about this one aspect of the site when he's been so open about all others.

It'd be easy to blame this story on Slate's need to be contrarian, but the message here was so conservative and mainstream, it seems it's just a plain old bad story, bad enough to be retracted. If only we could vote on that.

The point behind social news is, as I said, to empower users. This assumes that users can produce good news. Obviously Digg's user base, which grew from Rose's fanbase from his days as a host on TechTV, hasn't reproduced the New York Times. Instead, they've curated a site focused on servicey news, workday entertainment, and big scoops: lists of funny old cartoons, studies about pot's effect on the body, and updates on new technology. The content reflects the user base. Theoretically, as the site grows more mainstream so will the news, until Digg is as useful as Drudge for a snapshot of what's important today.

But to keep the site interesting to all users, Digg must balance the influence of top users with that of casual or one-time users. Because core Digg users can find each other and often promote each other's stories, they may dominate the site unless Digg actively balances their role. That's what the company did, unannounced, on Tuesday. And the top users were unhappy.

Every major site has a core user base (on Gawker, it's the commenters), which sees the site quite differently than the casual visitors. They feel an ownership, to such a point that they will directly insult those running the site for not catering to their whims. Thing is, those core users are often as important to (and spend as much time on) the site as its official employees, so they can't be ignored.

A typical newspaper or TV station can only do so much to interact with its mass audience. Even then, audience members don't have much influence over each other; the medium is one-to-many. If the New York Times screws up, it only has to face bad press, not a reader revolt. Rose has to put out every fire whenever he decides to change his business. And surprisingly, he's done a great job at it. He's learned from mistakes and changed site policy; the next major algorithm change will surely be better announced.

Digg may not be as big as Facebook or MySpace, but I get the feeling that if it were, users would still feel closer to Kevin Rose than they do to Mark Zuckerberg or Rupert Murdoch. Sorry for having a banal opinion, but I like how Digg works.

[Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]