This month: April 2007 Current First Monday cooperation Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English–language Wikipedia follow certain patterns. This paper demonstrates the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. There is a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

Also this month! wikipedia globe Visualizing the Overlap between the 100 Most Visited Pages on Wikipedia for September 2006 to January 2007 This paper compares the monthly lists of the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages for the period of September 2006 to January 2007. searchCrystal is used to visualize the overlap between the five monthly Top 100 lists to show which pages are highly visited in all five months; which pages in four of the five months and so on. It is shown that almost 40 percent of a month's top 100 pages are visited in all five months, whereas 25 percent are highly visited only in a single month.