On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:42 AM, nsk <nsk(a)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).