Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia

Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2013, written by R. Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker.

Overview

Many quantitative, log-based studies of participation and contribution in CSCW and CMC systems measure the activity of users in terms of output, based on metrics like posts to forums, edits to Wikipedia articles, or commits to code repositories. In this paper, authors instead seek to estimate the amount of time users have spent contributing. Through an analysis of Wikipedia log data, authors identify a pattern of punctuated bursts in editors' activity that authors refer to as edit sessions . Based on these edit sessions, authors build a metric that approximates the labor hours of editors in the encyclopedia. Using this metric, authors first compare labor-based analyses with output-based analyses, finding that the activity of many editors can appear quite differently based on the kind of metric used. Second, authors use edit session data to examine phenomena that cannot be adequately studied with purely output-based metrics, such as the total number of labor hours for the entire project.