Firstly, thanks for the paper. I enjoyed reading it (although I am not a statistician so some of it went over my head).

In 4.1.3 Edits Origin, there is the sentence “Surprisingly, it turned out that English WP is almost equally edited by North Americans and editors from the rest of the world [110]”. That sentence comes across as implying that North American has some special relationship to the English language relative to the rest of the world (a claim that seems somewhat at odds with the language originating outside of North America). I presume the surprise was in relation to the proportion of English speakers in North America and I think the sentence would be better if this was made clear, e.g. Given that X% of English speakers reside in North America, surprisingly ….”

However, my ball park estimate would be that about half the world’s English speakers are in North America (which would make it a very unsurprising observation that English WP is “equally edited”). According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Countries_in_order_of_total_speakers North America (USA+Canada) constitutes about 62% of English speakers, but that’s probably an over-estimate given that it is based on the “major English-speaking nations” but at least it’s a citable statistic that make the finding a bit more surprising. Of course, maybe it’s simpler just to not be surprised and just say “English WP is almost equally edited …”.

Aside, I really don’t know whether it’s possible to get the numbers to truly know how many people speak a language well enough to be likely to be willing to edit WP in that language in order to compare it to the location where the edits originate. There’s probably an interesting research topic in relation to level of skills in a language and comfort zone in terms of editing WP in that language. I speculate that many people might be confident to do simple edits in a language in which they have a lower level of fluency but that larger edits might only be done by the more fluent. And I suspect the language(s) in which you read WP probably limit the languages in which you edit it (since reading an article is often a trigger to edit it).

Kerry

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Taha Yasseri
Sent: Thursday, 6 September 2012 7:06 PM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] [pre-print] Value production in a collaborativeenvironment

Hello Everybody,
Few days ago, we have submitted a manuscript, reviewing some of our recent work + comparisons to others + some new results.
A pre-print is at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5130

The aim of the paper is to provide a mini review especially for those ones who are not very familiar with the field. However, the paper is clearly biased in coverage in favour of our topics of interest and also mentioning only those papers that I come across! Since the first characteristic, being limited in topical coverage, is fine, the second one, potential missing of related papers should be cured as much as possible.

That would be highly appreciated if you could give me feedbacks of any kind, especially on the missing literatures.

Cheers,
.Taha Yasseri