Wikipedia: A Quantitative Analysis

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Wikipedia: A Quantitative Analysis is a 2009 doctoral thesis written in English by Felipe Ortega and published in Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain.

[edit] Abstract

In this doctoral thesis, we undertake a quantitative analysis of the top-ten language editions of Wikipedia, from different perspectives. Our main goal has been to trace the evolution in time of key descriptive and organizational parameters of Wikipedia and its community of authors. The analysis has focused on logged authors (those editors who created a personal account to participate in the project). Among the distinct metrics included, we can ?nd the monthly evolution of general metrics (number of revisions, active editors, active pages); the distribution of pages and its length, the evolution of participation in discussion pages. We also present a detailed analysis of the inner social structure and strati?cation of the Wikipedia community of logged authors, ?tting appropriate distributions to the most relevant metrics. We also examine the inequality level of contributions from logged authors, showing that there exists a core of very active authors who undertake most of the editorial work. Regarding articles, the inequality analysis also shows that there exists a reduced group of popular articles, though the distribution of revisions is not as skewed as in the previous case. The analysis continues with an in-depth demographic study of the community of authors, focusing on the evolution of the core of very active contributors (applying a statistical technique known as survival analysis). We also explore some basic metrics to analyze the quality of Wikipedia articles and the trustworthiness level of individual authors. This work concludes with an extended analysis of the evolution of the most in?uential parameters and metrics previously presented. Based on these metrics, we infer important conclusions about the future sustainability of Wikipedia. According to these results, the Wikipedia community of authors has ceased to grow, remaining stable since Summer 2006 until the end of 2007. As a result, the monthly number of revisions has remained stable over the same period, restricting the number of articles that can be reviewed by the community. On the other side, whilst the number of revisions in talk pages has stabilized over the same period, as well, the number of active talk pages follows a steady growing rate, for all versions. This suggests that the community of authors is shifting its focus to broaden the coverage of discussion pages, which has a direct impact in the ?nal quality of content, as previous research works has shown. Regarding the inner social structure of the Wikipedia community of logged authors, we ?nd Pareto-like distributions that ?t all relevant metrics pertaining authors (number of revisions per author, number of different articles edited per author), while measurements on articles (number of revisions per article, number of different authors per article) follow lognormal shapes. The analysis of the inequality level of revisions performed by authors, and revisions received by arti- cles shows highly unequal distributions. The results of our survival analysis on Wikipedia authors presents very high mortality percentages on young authors, revealing an endemic problem of Wikipedias to keep young editors on collaborating with the project for a long period of time. In the same way, from our survival analysis we obtain that the mean lifetime of Wikipedia authors in the core (until they abandon the group of top editors) is situated between 200 and 400 days, for all versions, while the median value is lower than 120 days in all cases. Moreover the analysis of the monthly number of births and deaths in the community of logged authors reveals that the cause of the shift in the monthly trend of active authors is produced by a higher number of deaths from Summer 2006 in all versions, surpassing the monthly number of births from then on. The analysis of the inequality level of contributions over time, and the evolution of additional key features identi?ed in this thesis, reveals a worrying trend towards progressive increase of the effort spent by core authors, as time elapses. This trend may eventually cause that these authors will reach their upper limit in the number of revisions they can perform each month, thus starting a decreasing trend in the number of monthly revisions, and an overall recession of the content creation and reviewing process in Wikipedia. To prevent this probable future scenario, the number of monthly new editors should be improved again, perhaps through the adoption of speci?c policies and campaigns for attracting new editors to Wikipedia, and recover older top- contributors again. Finally, another important contribution for the research community is {WikiXRay,} the soft- ware tool we have developed to perform the statistical analyses included in this thesis. This tool completely automates the process of retrieving the database dumps from the Wikimedia public repositories, process them to obtain key metrics and descriptive parameters, and load them in a local database, ready to be used in empirical analyses. As far as we know, this is the ?rst research work implementing a comparative analysis, from an quantitative point of view, of the top-ten language editions of Wikipedia, presenting results from many different scienti?c perspectives. Therefore, we expect that this contribution will help the scienti?c community to enhance their understanding of the rich, complex and fascinating work- ing mechanisms and behavioral patterns of the Wikipedia project and its community of authors. Likewise, we hope that {WikiXRay} will facilitate the hard task of developing empirical analyses on any language version of the encyclopedia, boosting in this way the number of comparative studies like this one in many other scienti?c disciplines.

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