Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with Chromograms

Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with Chromograms - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2007, written by Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda B. Viégas and Katherine J. Hollenbach.

Overview

To investigate how participants in peer production systems allocate their time, authors examine editing activity on Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia. To analyze the huge edit histories of the site's administrators authors introduce a visualization technique, the chromogram, that can display very long textual sequences through a simple color coding scheme. Using chromograms authors describe a set of characteristic editing patterns. In addition to confirming known patterns, such reacting to vandalism events, authors identify a distinct class of organized systematic activities. Authors discuss how both reactive and systematic strategies shed light on self-allocation of effort in Wikipedia, and how they may pertain to other peer-production systems.