Intellectual interchanges in the history of the massive online open-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia
Jinhyuk Yun, Sang Hoon Lee, Hawoong Jeong

TL;DR
This study analyzes the entire history of Wikipedia to understand how collective editing dynamics develop over real time, revealing universal scaling laws and proposing a mechanistic model that explains editing patterns and editor participation behaviors.
Contribution
It introduces a comprehensive real-time analysis of Wikipedia's editing history and develops a mechanistic model capturing key editing dynamics and editor participation trends.
Findings
Universal scaling laws in editing activity over real time
Distinct growth patterns for different article types
Infrequently referred articles grow faster and high motivation reduces participation
Abstract
Wikipedia is a free Internet encyclopedia with an enormous amount of content. This encyclopedia is written by volunteers with various backgrounds in a collective fashion; anyone can access and edit most of the articles. This open-editing nature may give us prejudice that Wikipedia is an unstable and unreliable source; yet many studies suggest that Wikipedia is even more accurate and self-consistent than traditional encyclopedias. Scholars have attempted to understand such extraordinary credibility, but usually used the number of edits as the unit of time, without consideration of real time. In this work, we probe the formation of such collective intelligence through a systematic analysis using the entire history of 34,534,110 English Wikipedia articles, between 2001 and 2014. From this massive data set, we observe the universality of both timewise and lengthwise editing scales, which…
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