Is Editing More Rewarding Than Discussion? a Statistical Framework to Estimate Causes of Dropout from Wikipedia

Is Editing More Rewarding Than Discussion? a Statistical Framework to Estimate Causes of Dropout from Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2009, written by Ulrik Brandes, Patrick Kenis and Denise van Raaij.

Overview

In this paper authors address the question: what causes formerly active Wikipedians to stop contributing? Seen from a different angle, authors estimate characteristics of users, pages, or the whole system that increase or decrease the probability of dropout. Authors propose a general statistical method with which hypothetical causes of dropout can be tested. With this method it can be analyzed whether the emerging structures in Wikipedia function as incentives preventing Wikipedians to stop contributing. Applying this method to a selection of active users reveals, among others, that participation in discussion pages, as well as editing controversial pages, increases the dropout hazard, whereas editing general content pages has an attenuating eect on dropout. Although method is solely illustrated on Wikipedia, it can be easily applied to other Web 2.0 applications.