Intellectual interchanges in the history of the massive online open-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia

Abstract

Wikipedia is a free Internet encyclopedia with an enormous amount of content. This encyclopedia is written by volunteers with various backgrounds in a collective fashion; anyone can access and edit most of the articles. This open-editing nature may give us prejudice that Wikipedia is an unstable and unreliable source; yet many studies suggest that Wikipedia is even more accurate and self-consistent than traditional encyclopedias. Scholars have attempted to understand such extraordinary credibility, but usually used the number of edits as the unit of time, without consideration of real-time. In this work, we probe the formation of such collective intelligence through a systematic analysis using the entire history of 34 534 110 English Wikipedia articles, between 2001 and 2014. From this massive data set, we observe the universality of both timewise and lengthwise editing scales, which suggests that it is essential to consider the real-time dynamics. By considering real time, we find the existence of distinct growth patterns that are unobserved by utilizing the number of edits as the unit of time. To account for these results, we present a mechanistic model that adopts the article editing dynamics based on both editor-editor and editor-article interactions. The model successfully generates the key properties of real Wikipedia articles such as distinct types of articles for the editing patterns characterized by the interrelationship between the numbers of edits and editors, and the article size. In addition, the model indicates that infrequently referred articles tend to grow faster than frequently referred ones, and articles attracting a high motivation to edit counterintuitively reduce the number of participants. We suggest that this decay of participants eventually brings inequality among the editors, which will become more severe with time.

Early onset of structural inequality in the formation of collaborative knowledge in all Wikimedia projects

“…In short, the rate of accumulation of the text remains almost constant regardless of the number of articles and the number of editors. One should note that our previous study on English Wikipedia suggests that i) the inter-event times between two consecutive edits in an individual article follows a universal distribution regardless of its age in real time and ii) the size difference between two consecutive edits also follows a universally right-skewed distribution regardless of the size [7]. Accompanied by the findings of our previous study, the result implies that the stagnation is caused by the decelerated appearance of new editors, and not the decreased productivity of the existing editors.…”

“…Previous studies, including our own, used a few language editions, commonly restricted to the English edition of Wikipedia, which is the largest [4,7,11,12,13]. In addition, Wikimedia projects other than Wikipedia are not usually analysed, even though several language editions of Wikipedia were considered [18,22].…”

“…On the other hand, studies have proved that the current state of accuracy of Wikipedia is remarkable; the accuracy of its contents surpasses that of traditional encyclopaedias [4,5]. Nevertheless, researchers found significant heterogeneities in the editing processes, based on the monopoly or oligopoly of a few supereditors' who govern the contents; thus, it is still far from being the Elysium of communal knowledge that we desire it to be [6,7,8,9,10].…”

Modeling Dynamics of Wikipedia: An Empirical Analysis Using a Vector Error Correction Model

“…However, most of these studies examine the relationships among factors from a static perspective without considering the dynamic evolution of Wikipedia. Although some scholars have already explored the statistical properties in many aspects of Wikipedia by statistical methods and revealed the dynamic relations among factors by visual analysis tools [4][5][6][7]. there are lack of rigorous empirical studies.…”

Categorization of Wikipedia Articles and Formation of Collective Knowledge via the Massive History of an Open-editing Encyclopedia

“…본 연구팀에서 분석 [1] 한 위키백과(Wikipedia) Each symbol corresponds to the range of ages to which articles belong. The time differences follow fat-tailed distribution, which is a sign of the burstiness, with a daily periodic pattern (1 day = 86400 s).…”