Exploring the dynamic contribution behavior of editors in wikis based on time series analysis

Abstract

Purpose – Wiki is a new form of information production and organization, which has become one of the most important knowledge resources. In recent years, with the increase of users in wikis, “free rider problem” has been serious. In order to motivate editors to contribute more to a wiki system, it is important to fully understand their contribution behavior. The purpose of this paper is to explore the law of dynamic contribution behavior of editors in wikis. Design/methodology/approach – After developing a dynamic model of contribution behavior, the authors employed both the metrological and clustering methods to process the time series data. The experimental data were collected from Baidu Baike, a renowned Chinese wiki system similar to Wikipedia. Findings – There are four categories of editors: “testers,” “dropouts,” “delayers” and “stickers.” Testers, who contribute the least content and stop contributing rapidly after editing a few articles. After editing a large amount of content, dropouts stop contributing completely. Delayers are the editors who do not stop contributing during the observation time, but they may stop contributing in the near future. Stickers, who keep contributing and edit the most content, are the core editors. In addition, there are significant time-of-day and holiday effects on the number of editors’ contributions. Originality/value – By using the method of time series analysis, some new characteristics of editors and editor types were found. Compared with the former studies, this research also had a larger sample. Therefore, the results are more scientific and representative and can help managers to better optimize the wiki systems and formulate incentive strategies for editors.

Community’s knowledge need and knowledge sharing in Wikipedia

“…Free riders in Wikipedia are also difficult to identify. The prevalence of free riding in Wikipedia has been observed in empirical studies (Huang et al, 2015).…”

Influencia potencial de artículos de empresas latinoamericanas en Wikipedia

“…Aunque existen distintos desarrollos, el más usado en el mundo es MediaWiki, aplicación de código abierto que soporta todos los proyectos de la Fundación Wikimedia, entre ellos la enciclopedia en línea Wikipedia (Koren, 2017). Los wikis son construidos por editores que realizan una labor dinámica y recurrente de edición de contenidos (Huang et al, 2016) en los que se potencian tanto las motivaciones individuales a compartir (Arazy et al, 2016) como la inuencia social entre los participantes (Iglesias-Pradas et al, 2015). De este modo, a diferencia de otros medios, los wikis son creaciones colectivas en constante transformación.…”

Users roles identification on online crowdsourced Q&A platforms and encyclopedias: a survey

“…While on Wikipedia, even anonymous users may contribute to articles, on Baidu Baike only registered users can edit articles. In order to analyze the behavior of editors in terms of their contributions, Huang et al [49] used a time series model, with data points being the editor contribution measured in terms of the number of articles created and edited in a certain period of time. Using k-means clustering, they obtained four classes of users on Baidu Baike, (1) Dropouts, who stop editing after contributing heavily in the second month, (2) Delayers, who highly contribute in the initial two months and then their contribution dwindles, (3) Testers, who constitute 85.4% of the users and stop contributing after making a few edits initially, and (4) Stickers, who maintain a certain level of contributions even after a five month period and thus are important because of their continued contributions.…”