Understanding the wikipedia phenomenon

Abstract

Wikipedia, the user led and monitored "open" encyclopedia has been an undoubted popular success. Of particular interest are the diffusion process of the innovation throughout the "contributor" community, and the question as to why unpaid, often well qualified, volunteers contribute content and time. Explanations for 'altruistic' contributor behavior based on the positivistic paradigm, and with roots in organizational psychology, while heavily researched and documented, have not been readily transferable to quantitative models of sufficient predictive value, in relation to Wikipedia's metrics. For despite the wide range of types, ages, locations and motivations of its contributors and seekers, investigators on Wikipedia have identified certain definite and often surprisingly universal trends ('laws') in its overall growth curve, organization structure, community and article formation.Models based on aggregated top-level relationships between entities on and around wikipedia suffer from assuming relationships between these entities as inputs to the wikipedia process, rather than emergent phenomena that evolve and change with the output. We argue for an Agent Based Model of Wikipedia, with the end objective of our work being a tool with diagnostic and/or prescriptive value for decision makers in organizations using or planning to use Knowledge Management Systems.