Digesting the whole Wikipedia

Sat 10 Dec 2011 11:07 AM

In the most recent issue of First Monday, Royce Kimmons has an interesting analysis of community contributions in Wikipedia. His results suggest that most particular entries are the work of separate contributions by a small number of people, rather than the efforts of an ongoing community. The cool thing is that it is a systematic study of all Wikipedia entries and histories.

Abstract: Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. However, previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e., the number of revisions in an article’s revision history) and diversity (i.e., the number of authors that have contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro–structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.