The following quote from Here Comes Everybody is interesting in that it exposes dewy-eyed optimism surrounding equal participation (rather than equal access or equal ability) as untenable:

…imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer that two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. And among those contributors,  no effort is made to even out their contributions. The spontaneous division of effort driving Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality. On the contrary, most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it. Though the word “ecosystem” is overused as a way to make simple situations seem more complex, it is merited here, because large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behavior of some nonexistent “average” user.

This follows discussion of power-law distributions (in contrast to bell-curves) and the 80-20 rule.