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
-- Nathan TeBlunthuis PhD Candidate University of Washington Department of Communication