De: Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu>
Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
CC:
Enviado: Jueves 3 de Mayo de 2012 10:24
Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: what outdated looks like
I've been looking over a lot of history articles and the tupical pattern in
terms of edits is a bell-shaped curve with the peak around 2007.
For a good example see Shakespeare
http://toolserver.org/~tparis/articleinfo/index.php?article=William_Shakesp…
look at the bar chart under "year counts..
By Nov 2007 the surge of editing virtually ended. The article was then 83kb in
length...it had a small burst of growth in late 2009 reaching 100k in June 2009;
it is now 106k long. Basically the article was mostly finished in 2007, and has
had little change in the last 3 years. With a couple minor exceptions the
youngest source cited in the footnotes is 2006. The newest item in the
bibliography is one book from 2007, I saw n=1 article in a scholarly journal
(from 1969). Maybe it's ok for a college freshman but an English major so
unaware of the recent scholarship would not get a good grade.
Hi Richard.
I think the example is quite interesting. There is a surprising pike of 1,250 edits in
June 2007, and about 3,000 edits were added between May and October 2007.
This made me think that there could be some possible causes behind this peculiar pattern.
Indeed, I have found some organizational factors that we must consider to understand this
case:
1. The effect of Wikiproject Shakespeare: It looks like it was founded in April 2007 [1]
[2].
"After we got ourselves organized, our first big project was bringing William
Shakespeare to FA status" (from interview published on Signpost).
Thus, this is a good explanation for the febrile editing activity in subsequent months.
2. Apparently, it got FA status in August 2007 [3], and it showed up on the main page in
October 2007 [4]. This can also explain the activity drop since then.
3. Yet another question is whether the fact that the article is currently semi-protected
(and it is probably quite prone to vandalism, according to the high number of watchers)
has some discouraging effect for new contributors.
Please, note that there are still new editors joining WikiProject Shakespeare in 2012.
Best,
Felipe.
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Shakespeare/Archive…
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Shakespeare
[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/William_…
[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:William_Shakespeare
The look at the contributors
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=en&wi…
of the 9 editors with over 100 edits, only two have been active on this article
in 2012
Shakespeare received 648,000 views in April 2012, compared to 585,000 in April
2010 and 575,000 in April 2008. As for the often heard fear that anyone can
edit it, note that 1100 editors are watching over that article and are alerted
to any changes. However none of them has added anything from the ton of
scholarship that has appeared since 2006. ~~~~
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