On 2/27/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Excellent find. Thank you for posting that, Keith.
The full paper's preprint is up at:
http://xxx.arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0702/0702140.pdf
(I think this can be answered based on the preprint's data and
equations, but I'm not volunteering to figure out the answer.)
One of the central conclusions is "edits beget edits", though this is
in terms of correlation, not causation. But assuming causation, how
many edits does an edit beget? That is, as a function of total edits,
time since creation, and number of new edits in a recent time slice,
how many extra edits are edits are expected in the next time slice and
beyond? If I make 50 edits in one day to a 1000-edit article of age
50 weeks, how many extra edits will others contribute the next day,
and how many extra over the next year?
If someone comes up with the equation for that based on the paper's
data, then we could do some measurements on the mechanisms by which
edits beget edit. The important question is, do edits really beget
edits, or is the correlation between number of new edits and number of
total edits simply an artifact of Wikipedia's overall exponential
growth coupled with the relationship between article age and article
popularity (i.e., more important articles are created earlier).
I assume the answer is some of both. But it could be tested by
individual editors choosing appropriate pairs of articles (of similar
quality, time-since-creation, and total edits), and editing one
heavily while leaving the other alone. For each pair, measure how
many extra edits beyond that editor's work accrue to the edited one
compared to the control.
-Sage