Patterns of creation and usage of Wikipedia content

2021

Wikipedia, a paradigmatic example of online knowledge space is organized in a collaborative, bottom-up way with voluntary contributions, yet it maintains a level of reliability comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias. The lack of selected professional writers and editors makes the judgement about quality and trustworthiness of the articles a real challenge. Here we show that a self-consistent metrics for the network defined by the edit records captures well the character of editors' activity and the articles' level of complexity. Using our metrics, one can better identify the human-labeled high-quality articles, e.g., "featured" ones, and differentiate them from the popular and controversial articles. Furthermore, the dynamics of the editor-article system is also well captured by the metrics, revealing the evolutionary pathways of articles and diverse roles of editors. We demonstrate that the collective effort of the editors indeed drives to the direction o...

Proceedings of the 5th …, 2009

Prior research on Wikipedia has characterized the growth in content and editors as being fundamentally exponential in nature, extrapolating current trends into the future. We show that recent editing activity suggests that Wikipedia growth has slowed, and perhaps plateaued, indicating that it may have come against its limits to growth. We measure growth, population shifts, and patterns of editor and administrator activities, contrasting these against past results where possible. Both the rate of page growth and editor growth has declined. As growth has declined, there are indicators of increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits. We discuss some possible explanations for these new developments in Wikipedia including decreased opportunities for sharing existing knowledge and increased bureaucratic stress on the socio-technical system itself.

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2014

Wikipedia might possibly be the best-developed attempt thus far of the enduring quest to gather all human knowledge in one place. Its accomplishments in this regard have made it an irresistible point of inquiry for researchers from various fields of knowledge. A decade of research has thrown light on many aspects of the Wikipedia community, its processes, and content. However, due to the variety of the fields inquiring about Wikipedia and the limited synthesis of the extensive research, there is little consensus on many aspects of Wikipedia's content as an encyclopedic collection of human knowledge. This study addresses the issue by systematically reviewing 110 peer-reviewed publications on Wikipedia content, summarizing the current findings, and highlighting the major research trends. Two major streams of research are identified: the quality of Wikipedia content (including comprehensiveness, currency, readability and reliability) and the size of Wikipedia. Moreover, we present the key research trends in terms of the domains of inquiry, research design, data source, and data gathering methods. This review synthesizes scholarly understanding of Wikipedia content and paves the way for future studies.

Digithum, 2012

This issue looks in depth at the multiplicity of the social and cultural impacts of Wikipedia. The articles analyse issues including its development and the consequences for the commercial sector and the public image of large corporations (in the article by Marcia W. DiStaso and Marcus Messner) or its role in the diffusion of culture and architectural heritage (in the article by Emilio José Rodriguez et al.). The article by Antoni Oliver and Salvador Climent details the use of Wikipedia as a structured knowledge corpus, in the framework of the state of the art in natural language processing research. In turn, the article by David Gómez proposes the concept of wikimediasphere and shows how Wikipedia actually forms part of a very dense ecosystem of projects that, though they share common elements, act with a high level of autonomy as nodes on a wider network. Lastly, the article by Nathaniel Tkacz analyses the practical and epistemological implications of one of the basic pillars of Wikipedia's core content policy - the Neutral Point of View - and its relation to a specific concept of truth.

2012

Abstract: Since its inception, Wikipedia has grown to a solid and stable project and turned into a mass collaboration tool that allows the sharing and distribution of knowledge. The wiki approach that basis this initiative promotes the participation and collaboration of users. In addition to visits for browsing its contents, Wikipedia also receives the contributions of users to improve them. In the past, researchers paid attention to different aspects concerning authoring and quality of contents.

Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration

In any collaborative system, people do not contribute equally. This is particularly observed to be true for systems seeking to gather contributions from a large, diverse group of people. In such settings, it is seen that a sizable amount of contribution comes from a small group of highly-active users. While it is well-understood that such users are instrumental in the system's progress, the contribution made by a large group of less-active users is not sufficiently understood. Popularly called masses, these users comprise of the majority of the system's user base. It is, therefore, important to examine their worth in the system. The literature in this direction points towards two contradicting points of view with one acknowledging masses' contribution (Ortega Hypothesis) while the other deeming them unnecessary in the system (Newton Hypothesis). Given the large-scale collaboration facilitated by Wikipedia where a large crowd with a diverse skill-set and hence unequal contribution participates, a detailed investigation of the worth of masses becomes necessary for informed policy-making. In this work, we examine whether masses help or hamper the knowledge-building in Wikipedia. We specifically consider their contribution across different contribution types pertaining to the insertion of new content as well as the administrative activities. We observe that although the individual contribution by masses is small, yet they contribute important pieces of knowledge to Wikipedia articles. The results indicate that the overall contribution of masses across several parameters even exceeds the contribution by elites. We also find that as compared to masses, highly-active users dominate the edits where no new content is inserted and only activities involving the up-keeping of the existing content such as restructuring or formatting take place. The results of the study may help in devising appropriate incentivization policies for Wikipedia and the collaborative systems in general. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Collaborative and social computing design and evaluation methods.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Wikipedia has become one of the ten most visited sites on the Web, and the world's leading source of Web reference information. Its rapid success has inspired hundreds of scholars from various disciplines to study its content, communication and community dynamics from various perspectives. This article presents a systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. We describe our detailed, rigorous methodology for identifying over 450 scholarly studies of Wikipedia. We present the WikiLit website (http://wikilit.referata.com), where most of the papers reviewed here are described in detail. In the major section of this article, we then categorize and summarize the studies. An appendix features an extensive list of resources useful for Wikipedia researchers.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

This article proposes a review of the literature analyzing Wikipedia as a collective system for producing knowledge.

Proceedings of The Asist Annual Meeting, 2008

This panel will provide a global perspective on Wikipedia research. The literature on Wikipedia is mostly anecdotal, and most of the research has focused attention primarily on the English Wikipedia examining the accuracy of entries compared to established online encyclopedias (Emigh & Herring, 2005; Giles, 2005; Rosenzweig, 2006) and analyzing the evolution of articles over time (Viégas, Wattenberg, & Dave, 2004; Viégas, Wattenberg, Kriss, & van Ham, 2007). Others have examined the quality of contribution (Stvilia et al., 2005). However, only a few studies have conducted comparative analyses across languages or analyzed Wikipedia in languages other than English (e.g., Pfeil, Zaphiris, & Ang, 2006). There is a need for international, cross-cultural understanding of Wikipedia. In an effort to address this gap, this panel will present a range of international and cross-cultural research of Wikipedia.The presenters will contribute different perspectives of Wikipedia as an international sociocultural institution and will describe similarities and differences across various national/language versions of Wikipedia. Shachaf and Hara will present variation of norms and behaviors on talk pages in various languages of Wikipedia. Herring and Callahan will share results from a cross-language comparison of biographical entries that exhibit variations in content of entries in the English and Polish versions of Wikipedia and will explain how they are influenced by the culture and history of the US and Poland. Stvilia will discuss some of the commonalities and variability of quality models used by different Wikipedias, and the problems of cross-language quality measurement aggregation and reasoning. Matei will describe the social structuration and distribution of roles and efforts in wiki teaching environments. Solomon's comments, as a discussant, will focus on how these comparative insights provide evidence of the ways in which an evolving institution, such as Wikipedia, may be a force for supporting cultural identity (or not).

Digital Society, 2009. ICDS'09. Third International …, 2009