On 3/3/07, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/3/07, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/28/07, Sage Ross sage.ross@yale.edu wrote:
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?
There is also no real way to know whether those edits are "valuable"
edits.
One would hope that bad edits beget better edits, and that vandalism
begets
correction!
That's the important question from the responsible editor's perspective, though: to what degree do good edits beget more good edits? Anecdote and personal experience suggest "some", but it could be tested in a very rough way by taking (a large number of) paired articles of about equal standing and working on one but not the other.
More anecdotes backed up by gut feelings...
I think the "edits beget edits" experience is real. Of course, there's vandalism and reversion, and the fact that some articles attract a lot of vandalism for a little while, or a lot of vandalism episodically (I'm not talking about [[George W. Bush]] here). But then there are those articles that sit on your watchlist - things you came across, maybe made a few changes, and then watchlisted, meaning to come back later. If other people are like me in this regard (and looking at public "to do lists", I'm guessing they are), Wikipedia is full of low quality articles you meant to get back to once you had the time to look up that one reference...and never did. Or articles that desperately needed work, but you didn't have the time or didn't feel like dealing with it at the time.
Once someone starts working on one of these "dormant" articles, you come over and have a look. That's especially true if they make several edits. And you start to chime in - adding a reference, fixing a typo, correcting a fact. And this might attract another editor. Sometimes it's a bad edit, or vandalism that attracts you. Sometimes it's a biased insertion. More often that not, it's a one-off thing that's soon forgotten (or, worse yet, added to a "to do" list). But sometimes it attracts a swarm of editors.
I'd agree with the assertion that "edits beget edits", but (I think) primarily on articles that have already been edited by several people. Activity that only shows up on "Recent Changes" doesn't work the same way - the people watching that are looking for vandalism. So my hypothesis is that non-vandalism edits beget other edit on pages that have been edited by at least a few (5, to pick an arbitrary number) established editors.
Ian