Academic studies about Wikipedia

Content

Production

A minority of editors produce the majority of persistent content

In a landmark peer-reviewed paper,Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen, John Riedl, "Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia", Proc. GROUP 2007, doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1316624.1316663] which was also mentioned in The Guardian, [Nicholson Baker (April 10, 2008) [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet How I fell in love with Wikipedia] The Guardian] a team of six researchers from the University of Minnesota measured the relationship between editors' edit count and the editors' ability to convey their writings to Wikipedia readers, measured in terms of persistent word views (PWV) — the number of times a word introduced by an edit is viewed. The accounting method is best described using the author's own words: "each time an article is viewed, each of its words is also viewed. When a word written by editor X is viewed, he or she is credited with one PWV." The number of times an article was viewed was estimated from the web server logs.

The researchers analyzed 25 trillion PWVs attributable to registered users in the interval September 1, 2002 − October 31, 2006. At the end of this period, the top 10% of editors (by edit count) were credited with 86% of PWVs, the top 1% about 70%, and the top 0.1% (4200 users) were attributed 44% of PWVs, i.e. nearly half of Wikipedia's "value" as measured in this study. The top 10 editors (by PWV) contributed only 2.6% of PWVs, and only three of them were in top 50 by edit count. From the data, the study authors derived the following relationship:cquote
Growth of PWV share increases super-exponentially by edit count rank; in other words, elite editors (those who edit the most times) account for "more" value than they would [be attributed] given a power-law relationship.

The study also analysed the impact of bots on content. By edit count, bots dominate Wikipedia; 9 of the top 10 and 20 of the top 50 are bots. In contrast, in the PWV ranking only two bots appear in the top 50, and none in the top 10.

Based on the steady growth of the influence on those top 0.1% editors by PWV, the study concluded unequivocally:

cquote
[...] Frequent editors dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia and [...] this domination is increasing.

Work distribution and social strata

A peer-reviewed paper noted the "social stratification in the Wikipedia society" due to the "admins class". The paper suggested that such stratification could be beneficial in some respects but recognized a "clear subsequent shift in power among levels of stratification" due to the "status and power differentials" between administrators and other editors. [cite web|url=http://www.viktoria.se/altchi/submissions/submission_edchi_1.pdf|title=Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie|author=Aniket Kittur, Ed Chi, Byron Pendleton, Bongwon Suh and Todd Mytkowicz|publisher=Proc. alt.chi 2007|accessdate=2007-10-27|format=PDF]

Analyzing an the entire edit history of Wikipedia up to July 2006, the same study determined that the influence of administrator edits on contents has steadily diminished since 2003, when administrators performed roughly 50% of total edits, to 2006 when only 10% of the edits were performed by administrators. This happened "despite" the fact the the average number of edits per administrator had increased more than fivefold during the same period. This phenomenon was labeled by the authors of the paper "rise of the crowd". An analysis that used as metric the number of words edited instead of the number of edit actions showed a similar pattern. Because the admin class is somewhat arbitrary with respect to the number of edits, the study also considered a breakdown of users in categories based on the number of edits performed. The results for "elite users", i.e. users with more than 10,000 edits, were somewhat in line with those obtained for administrators, except that "the number of words changed by elite users has kept up with the changes made by novice users, even though the number of edits made by novice users has grown proportionally faster". The elite users were attributed about 30% of the changes for 2006. The study concludes:

cquote
Thus though their influence may have waned in recent years, elite users appear to continue to contribute a sizeable portion of the work done in Wikipedia. Futhremore, [...] edits made by elite users appear to be substantial in nature. [...] An analysis removing revert edits does not substantially change the findings.

Reliability

Social aspects

Demographics

A 2007 study by Hitwise, reproduced in "Time" magazine, [cite web|url=http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1614751,00.html|title=Who's Really Participating in Web 2.0|author=Bill Tancer|publisher="Time Magazine"|date=2007-04-25|accessdate=2007-04-30] found that visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 male/female, but that 60% of edits are made by male editors.

Policies and guidelines

A descriptive studyButtler et al., "Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia", Proc. CHI 2008, doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357227] that analyzed Wikipedia's policies and guidelines up to September 2007 identified a number of key statistics:

* 44 official policies
* 248 guidelines

Even a short policy like was found to have generated a lot of discussion and clarifications:

cquote
While the "Ignore all rules" policy itself is only sixteen words long, the page explaining what the policy means contains over 500 words, refers readers to seven other documents, has generated over 8,000 words of discussion, and has been changed over 100 times in less than a year.

The study sampled the expansion of some key policies since their inception:

* : 3600% (including the additional document explaining it)
* : 1557%
* : 938%
* : 929%
* : 580%
* : 124%

The number for Deletion was considered inconclusive however because the policy was split in several sub-policies.

Power plays

("Copyright notice: This section makes use of extensive quotations from a paper, but most of the quotations are excerpts from Wikipedia itself, with user accounts anonymized.")

A 2007 joint peer-reviewed study [Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh, David W. McDonald, Scott A. Golder, "Community, Consensus, Coercion, Control: CS*W or How Policy Mediates Mass Participation", Proc. GROUP 2007, doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1316624.1316648] conducted by researchers from the University of Washington and HP Labs examined how policies are employed and how contributors work towards consensus by quantitatively analyzing a sample of active talk pages. Using a November 2006 database dump, the study focused on 250 talk pages in the tail of the distribution: 0.3% of all talk pages, but containing 28.4% of all talk page revisions, and more significantly, containing 51.1% of all links to policies. From the sampled pages' histories, the study examined only the months with high activity, called critical sections — sets of consecutive months where both article and talk page revisions were significant in number.

The study defined and calculated a measure of policy prevalence. A critical section was considered "policy-laden" if its policy factor was at least twice the average. Articles were tagged with 3 indicator variables:

* controversial
* featured
* policy-laden

All possible levels of these three factors yielded 8 sampling categories. The study intended to analyze 9 critical sections from each sampling category, but only 69 critical sections could be selected because only 6 articles (histories) were simultaneously featured, controversial, and policy laden.

The study found that policies were by no means consistently applied. Illustrative of its broader findings, the report presented the following two extracts from in obvious contrast:

* a discussion where participants decided that calculating a mean from data provided by a government agency constituted :

cquote
quotation
is the mean...not considered original research? [U3]
It doesn't look like it to me, it looks like the original research was done by [Gov't agency] or am I missing something? [U4]
If the [Gov't agency] has not published the actual mean, us "calculating" it would be OR, no? I'm not sure. [U3]
No, why would it be? Extrapolating data from info already available is not OR. [U5]
From WP:NOR "articles may not contain any new analysis or synthesis of published arguments, concepts, data, ideas or statements that serves to advance a position." For what' worth... [U4]

* a discussion where logical deduction was used as counterargument for the original research policy:

cquote
quotation
Your notion is WP:OR. I can easily provide. . . a scholarly article that says that anti-authoritarianism is not central to Panism. You are synthesizing all kinds of ideas here, based on your POV. [U6]
Simple deductive reasoning is not original research. Panism is inherently anti-authoritarian; therefore, an authoritarian economic system cannot be Panist. Which do you disagree with: the premise or the conclusion? [U7]

Claiming that such ambiguities easily give rise to power plays, the study identified, using the methods of grounded theory (Strauss) , 7 types of power plays:

* aticle scope (what is off-topic in an article)
* prior consensus (past decisions presented as absolute and uncontested)
* power of interpretation (a sub-community claiming greater interpretive authority than another)
* legitimacy of contributor (his/her expertise)
* threat of sanction (blocking etc.)
* practice on other pages (other pages being considered models to follow)
* legitimacy of source (authority of references being disputed)

Due to lack of space, the study detailed only the first 4 types of power plays that were exercised by merely interpreting policy. A fifth power play category was analyzed; it consisted of blatant violations of policy that were forgiven it because the contributor was valued for his contributions despite his lack of respect for rules.

Article scope

The study considers that Wikipedia's policies are ambiguous on scoping issues. The following vignette is used to illustrate the claim:

cquote
quotation
. . . consensus is bullshit because I have the facts on my side. I also have the exhortation of Wikipedia to be bold. . . deleting a discussion of the Catholic church’s. . . view of paleocentrism is not only inaccurate, but violates NPOV . . . .Deleting/emasculating it would violate several Wikipedia policies: NPOV, be bold. . . If you all want an article just on the scientific theory of paleocentrism, write one yourself. [U12]
We DID write an article just on the scientific theory of paleocentrism, before you showed up. . . You’re obviously new here, [U12] . . . arguing based on your reading of NPOV and Be bold is a bit ridiculous, like a kid just out of high school arguing points of constitutional law. These things are principles that have an established meaning. People who have been here for years understand them much better than you do. They won’t prove effective weapons for you to wield in this argument. . . [U13]
The social impact of “paleocentrism” is not “paleocentrism”. . . Wikipedia:wiki is not paper, we don’t need to cram every tertiary aspect of the topic into the article proper, and we don’t need to consider it incomplete when we don’t . . . [U14]
. . . the first thing the link Wikipedia:wiki is not paper says is:””Wikipedia ”is” an encyclopedia.”” A real encyclopedia like Encyclopedia Britannica has a fantastic section on paleocentrism, including all the social, political, and philosophical implications. [U12]
As discussed at Wikipedia:wiki is not paper, Wikipedia articles should give a brief overview of the centrally important aspects of asubject. To a biologist like yourself, the centrally aspect of paleocentrism certainly isn’t its social implications, but to the rest of society it is.. . . [U12]
. . . What you’re talking about isn’t ”paleocentrism”. Central issues to paleocentrism are periodic equilibrium, geomorphous undulation, airation. These are the issues that actually have to do with the process of paleocentrism itself. These “social aspects” you’re talking about are ”peripheral”, ”not central”. They are ”about” paleocentrism, they ”surround” paleocentrism, but they ”are not paleocentrism”. . . [U15]

The study gives the followin interpretation for the heated debated:

cquote
Such struggles over article scope take place even in a hyper-linked environment because the title of an article matters. The “paleocentrism” article is more prestigious and also more likely to be encountered by a reader than an article entitled “the social effect of paleocentrism.”

Prior consensus

The study remarks that in Wikipedia consensus is never final, and what constitutes consensus can change at any time. The study finds that this temporal ambiguity is fertile ground for power plays, and places the generational struggle over consensus in larger picture of the struggle for article ownership:cquote
In practice, [...] there are often "de facto" owners of pages or coalitions of contributors that determine article content. Prior consensus within this group can be presented as incontestable, masking the power plays that may have gone into establishing a consensus. [...] At issue is the legitimacy of prior consensus. Longtime contributors do not want to waste time having argumentsabout issues that they consider to be solved. Pointing to prior consensus, just like linking to policies, provides a methodfor dealing with trollish behavior. On the other hand, newcomers or fringe contributors often feel that their perspectiveswere not represented in prior arguments and want to raise the issue again.

The study uses the following discussion snippet to illustrate this continuous struggle:

cquote
quotation
Most all the stuff [U17] describes below has already been hashedout. . . It’s like that game of whack-a-mole: they try one angle,it gets refuted; they try a second angle, it gets refuted; they trya third angle, it gets refuted; and then they try the first angleagain. [U18]
It would be interesting to see how many different userstry to contribute to this article and to expand the alternateviews only to be bullied away by those who believe in [Cosmic Polarity] religiously... why don't you consider that perhaps they have a point and that [U19] , [U20] and the rest of you drive editors away from this article with your heavy-handed, admin-privileged POV push? [U21]

Power of interpretation

A vignette illustrated how administrators overrode consensus and deleted personal accounts of user/patients suffering from an anonimized illness (named Frupism in the study). The administrator's intervention happened as the article was being nominated to become as a featured article.

Legitimacy of contributor

This type of power play is illustrated by a contributor (U24) that draws on his past contributions to argue against another contributor who is accusing U24 of being unproductive and disruptive:

cquote
quotation
Oh, you mean "I" hang around to make a point about the lack of quality on Wikipedia? Please take another look at my edit count!! LOL. I have over 7,000 edits... As you know, I can take credit for almost entirely writing from scratch 2 of the 6 or 7 FAs in philosophy... [U24]

Explicit vie for ownership

The study finds that there are contributors who consistently and successfully violate policy without sanction:

cquote
U24 makes several blatant "us or them" vies for power: if U25's actions persist, he will leave. [...] Such actions clearly violate policies against article ownership, civility toward other contributors, and treatment of newcomers. As a newcomer, U25 may not know of these policies, but U26 certainly does. The willing blindness [of U26] stems from the fact that U24 is a valued contributor to philosophy articles and is not bashful about pointing this out. There is a scarcity of contributors with the commitment to consistently produce high-quality content; the Wikipedian community is willing to tolerate abuse and policy violations if valued work is being done. [...] quotation
With all due respect, that didn’t answer the question. . . I wanted to know what it was in U25’s proposal which was unacceptable. . . His lack of reference etc. is all a fault, sure, but that’s why I provided one (Enquiry, section 8). [U26]
. . . this point is already addressed in the article. . . It may need to be expanded a bit. I can easily do that myself when I have time. . . Is there anythin else? Do you also support U25’s vie that the article is “poor”, that is needs to overhauled from top to bottom, the meanignlsess nonsens that he actually did try to insert above or the other OR that he has stated on this page? Basically, there are two sides on this matter, this article can be taken over by cranks like what’s his name, or not? If it does, I go. You can either support me or not. Where do you stand?. . . [U24]
I do not by any stretch of the imagination support the view that the article is poor. In fact, I disagree with many of the things U25 has said elsewhere on this page. . . I’m genuinely sorry if this upset you. [U26]

Obtaining administratorship

Researchers from CMU devised [Moira Burke and Robert Kraut, "Taking up the mop: identifying future Wikipedia administrators", Pages 3441-3446, doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1358628.1358871] a probit model of editors who have successfully passed the peer review process to become admins. Using only Wikipedia metadata, including the text of edit summaries, their model is 74.8% accurate in predicting successful candidates.

The paper observed that despite protestations to the contrary, "in many ways election to admin is a promotion, distinguishing an elite core group from the large mass of editors." Consequently, the paper used policy capture [Stumpf, S. A., & London, M. (1981). Capturing rater policies in evaluating candidates for promotion. The Academy of Management Journal, 24(4), 752-766.] ndash a method that compares nominally important attributes to those that actually lead to promotion in a work environment.

The overall success rate for promotion was 53%, dropping from 75% in 2005 to 42% in 2006 and 2007. This sudden increase in failure rate was attributed to a higher standard that recently promoted administrators had to meet, and supported by anecdotal evidence from another recent study [Forte, A., and Bruckman, A. Scaling consensus: Increasing decentralization in Wikipedia governance. Proc. HICSS 2008.] quoting some early admins who have expressed doubt that they would pass muster if their election () were held recently. In light of these developments the study argued that:

cquote
The process once called "" by the founder of Wikipedia has become a fairly big deal.

Significant factors affecting RfA outcome, numbers in parentheses are not statistically significant at p<.05:

Contrary to expectations perhaps, "running" for administrator multiple times is detrimental to the candidate's chance of success. Each subsequent attempt at has a 14.8% lower chance of success than the previous one. Length of participation in the project has only a small contribution to success to RfA chance of success.

Another significant finding of the paper is that one Wikipedia policy edit or WikiProject edit is worth ten article edits. A related observation is that candidates with experience in multiple areas of the site stood better chance of election. This was measured by the diversity score, a simple count of the number of areas that the editor has participated in. The paper divided Wikipedia in 16 areas: article, article talk, articles/categories/templates for deletion (XfD), (un)deletion review, etc. (see paper for full list). For instance, a user who has edited articles, her own user page, and posted once at (un)deletion review would have a diversity score of 3. Making a single edit in any additional region of Wikipedia correlated with a 2.8% increased likelihood of success in gaining administratorship.

Making minor edits also helped, although the study authors consider that this may be so because minor edits correlate with with experience. In contrast, each edit to an Arbitration or Mediation committee page, or a Wikiquette notice, all of which are venues for dispute resolution, decreases the likelihood of success by 0.1%. Posting messages to administrator noticeboards () had a similarly deleterious effect. The study interpreted this as evidence that editors involved in escalating or protracted conflicts lower their chances of becoming administrators.

Saying "thanks" or variations thereof in edit summaries, and pointing out point of view () issues (also only in edit summaries because the study only analyzed metadata) were of minor benefit, contributing to 0.3% and 0.1% to candidate's chances in 2006–2007, but did not reach statistical significance before.

A few factors that were found to be irrelevant or marginal at best:
* Editing user pages (including one's own) does not help. Somewhat surprisingly, user talk page edits also do not affect the likelihood of administratorship.
* Welcoming newcomers or saying "please" in edit summaries had no effect.
* Participating in consensus-building, such as RfA votes or , does not increase the likelihood of becoming admin. The study admits however that participation in consensus was measured quantitatively but not qualitatively.
* Vandal-fighting as measured by the number of edits to the had no effect. Every thousand edits containing variations of "revert" was positively correlated (7%) with adminiship for 2006–2007, but did not attain statistical significance unless one is willing to lower the threshold to p<.1). More confusingly, before 2006 the number of reverts was negatively correlated (-6.8%) with adminship success, againt without attaining statistical significance even at p<.1. "(Editor's note: the authors seem unaware of the introduction of policy in 2006, which is meant to dampen non-vandalism reverts.)"

The study suggests that some of the 25% unexplained variability in outcomes may be due to factors that were not measured, such as quality of edits or participation if off-site coordination, such as the (explicitly cited) secret mailing list reported in The Register. [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing] The paper concludes:

cquote
Merely performing a lot of production work is insufficient for “promotion” in Wikipedia. Candidates’ article edits wereweak predictors of success. They also have to demonstrate more managerial behavior. Diverse experience and contributions to the development of policies and WikiProjects were stronger predictors of success. This is consistent with the findings that Wikipedia is a bureaucracy and that coordination work has increased substantially. [Kittur, A., Suh, B., Pendleton, B. A., Chi., E. "He says, she says: Conflict and coordination in Wikipedia". Proc CHI 2007, ACM Press (2007), 453-462.] [Viegas, F., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., and van Ham, F. "Talk before your type: Coordination in Wikipedia". Proc HICSS 2007, 575-582.] [...] Participation in Wikipedia policy and WikiProjects was not predictive of adminship prior to 2006, suggesting the community as a whole is beginning to prioritize policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination.

References

"(Consider this a to do list as well)"

* Kittur et al., "He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240698
* Bryant et al., "Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1099203.1099205
* Voung et al., "On ranking controversies in wikipedia: models and evaluation", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1341531.1341556
* Hu et al., "Measuring article quality in wikipedia: models and evaluation", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1321440.1321476
* Adler & Alfaro, "A content-driven reputation system for the wikipedia", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1242572.1242608
* Stein & Hess, "Does it matter who contributes: a study on featured articles in the german wikipedia", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1286240.1286290
* Blumenstock, "Size matters: word count as a measure of quality on wikipedia", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1367497.1367673
* Suh et al., "Lifting the veil: improving accountability and social transparency in Wikipedia with wikidashboard", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357214
* Luyt et al., "Improving Wikipedia's accuracy: Is edit age a solution?", http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.v59:2
* Kuznetsov, "Motivations of contributors to Wikipedia", http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1215942.1215943
* Viegas et al., "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia", http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2007.511