A few comments from an editing perspective, in case anything here is useful:
I think Levenshtein distance might be a useful concept here, given the
indication that I've read through and made some sort of decision around a
whole article or a significant part of an article – both for additions and
subtractions.
When it comes to article content, the most important signifier of effort
spent on an edit beyond text length that comes to mind is whether a new ref
tag is added. If I'm referencing something, there's a fair chance that I've
not only identified a shortage or deficiency, but potentially spent time
both finding a source and reading through it to be able to reference it,
even if it results in a short sentence.
In some languages, translations of other Wikipedia articles are common;
there might be a big difference between adding the same type of content
translated from another language version and writing it from scratch.
//Johan Jönsson
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Den tis 20 okt. 2020 kl 20:32 skrev Nate E TeBlunthuis <nathante(a)uw.edu>du>:
Greetings!
Quantifying effort is obviously a fraught prospect, but Geiger and
Halfaker [1] used edit sessions defined as consecutive edits by an editor
without a gap longer than an hour to quantify the total number of labor
hours spent on Wikipedia. I'm familiar with other papers that use this
approach to measure things like editor experience.
I'm curious about the amount of effort put into each particular article.
Edit sessions seem like a good approach, but there are some problems:
* How much time does an edit session of length 1 take?
* Should article edit sessions be consecutive in the same article?
* What if someone makes an edit to related article in the middle of
their session?
I wonder what folks here think about alternatives for quantifying effort
to an article like
1. Number of wikitext characters added/removed
2. Levenshtein (edit) distance (of characters or tokens)
3. Simply the number of edits
Thanks for your help!
[1] Geiger, R. S., & Halfaker, A. (2013). Using edit sessions to measure
participation in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer
Supported Cooperative Work, 861–870.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441873