On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:42 AM, nsk nsk@karastathis.org wrote: [snip]
I regard the use of the red links for identifying articles most needed to be written as an example of communication through stigmergy in Wikipedia. I am, however, somewhat concerned about whether most Wikipedians prefer to get this information from the articles themselves or from the MostWanted MediaWiki/Wikipedia features, and whether this could affect the stigmergic nature of the communication. I
[snip]
I would expect, but do not have data to support:
That at any time there is small subset of highly active users who actively use the "MostWanted" features and are personally responsible for a highly disproportionate number of new articles. I also expect that there is a much larger group of editors who learn of needed pages by discovering red-links during their own quasi-random exploration and do not use the MostWanted feature at all. Finally, I expect that while members of this latter group make far fewer articles individually the large size of this group results in the contribution being very large.
To study this further you could explore the page hit counts for the mostwantedpage features and compare that to article creation. You could also explore how "wanted" a page becomes before it is created: I would expect (but again, do not have data to support) that many pages are created long before they have enough accumulated want to earn a visible position on any of the mostwanted pages lists. (i.e. mostwanted is not going to have much effect on pages until they have a rather large amount of want).