Assessing the Value of Coooperation in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Wikipedia's collaborative editing process, revealing regularities in edit patterns and a positive correlation between article quality and number of edits, supporting Wikipedia's effectiveness as a collective knowledge platform.

Contribution

It models Wikipedia's edit accumulation as a stochastic process and establishes a link between edit volume and article quality, providing insights into collaborative knowledge creation.

Findings

Edit patterns follow a simple stochastic model.

A strong correlation exists between article quality and number of edits.

Wikipedia's collaborative process exhibits regularities despite uncoordinated contributions.

Abstract

Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English-language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. We show that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. We also demonstrate a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.