Yes it does.
Quality contributions include asking, answering, editing and recategorizing questions. Community (message board) contributions do NOT count.
Making contributions of all kinds will improve your contributor status. Answering (and asking) questions, recategorizing, and splitting off alternates all count towards increasing your contributor level.
Technically, it is called recategorizing, and does not count as editing. Although you are 'editing' categories, it doesn't count as editing.
Yes
No, questions that you edited before joining The Initiates Program do not count towards your total for the editing questions mission. Similarly, any questions that you edited whilst on a previous mission do not count towards your total either. It is only the questions you edit from the start date of your mission that count towards the mission. You can check how many questions you have edited by clicking on "My contributions" on the blue menu and filtering to "Questions (edited)".
No, questions that you answered before joining The Initiates Program do not count towards your total for the answering questions mission. Only answers from the date you begin the mission count towards your total. You can check your total number of answers by clicking on "My contributions" on the blue menu and filtering to "Answers (new)".
By asking and answering questions mainly, but other things also count, like categorizing questions, cleaning things up (editing to make things better), and participating in the community.You can see the leaderboard where we track contributions here:wiki.answers.com/Q/Special:Tops
Yes
That's a hard one. If you count all of our users, it would come out to less than one, since the vast majority of people on this site come and look, and don't make any contributions at all. And then there are other people who are on the site every day during a lot of their spare time answering questions, editing questions, recategorizing, merging, fixing spelling, etc., and they have really high numbers some days. I would say that the leaderboards reflect pretty well what the busiest people are doing... but if you want an average of everyone, it would be less than one.
No, neither giving nor receiving trust points count as contributions.
yes
The Only Three Questions That Count was created in 2006.