Info/Law

Computer science researchers here at the University of Minnesota recently published this paper using some new metrics to analyze Wikipedia. From the abstract:

Wikipedia’s brilliance and curse is that any user can edit any of the encyclopedia entries. We introduce the notion of the impact of an edit, measured by the number of times the edited version is viewed. Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article views, we show that frequent editors dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia, and that this domination is increasing. Similarly, using the same impact measure, we show that the probability of a typical article view being damaged is small but increasing, and we present empirically grounded classes of damage. Finally, we make policy recommendations for Wikipedia and other wikis in light of these findings.

Essentially, they counted “persistent word views” (PWVs) — the number of times visitors view a particular word introduced by an edit. Among the coolest findings is their determination that the most active of the 4.2 million editors they studied make a wildly disproportionate contribution to what we see when we visit the site. I am sure many people shared my intuition that the graph of Wikipedia editors has a very tall head of the more fanatical devotees and a long, long tail of more casual contributors. But I’ve never seen it quantified quite so precisely:

Editors who edit many times dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia. The top 10% of editors by number of edits contributed 86% of the PWVs, and top 0.1% contributed 44% – nearly half! The domination of these very top contributors is increasing over time.

The other interesting findings show that vandalism of Wikipedia entries is cleaned up very quickly, largely because they deploy bots effectively to repair such damage. Worth checking out for all of you who believe in the Wealth of Networks.

Filed under: Digital Media, Internet & Society, Minnesota, Peer Production, Scholarship