[Wikipedia-l] FIRST MONDAY: Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia

[Frederick Noronha]

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.

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