Doctoral Thesis Summary. Wikipedia: a Quantitative Analysis

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Doctoral Thesis Summary. Wikipedia: a Quantitative Analysis
Authors
Felipe Ortega
Publication date
2009
Links
Original Preprint

Doctoral Thesis Summary. Wikipedia: a Quantitative Analysis - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2009, written by Felipe Ortega.

Overview

In this doctoral thesis, authors undertake a quantitative analysis of the top-ten language editions of Wikipedia, from different perspectives. Authors main goal has been to trace the evolution in time of key descriptive and organizational parameters of Wikipedia and its community of authors. The analysis has focused on logged authors (those editors who created a personal account to participate in the project). Among the distinct metrics included, authors can find the monthly evolution of general metrics (number of revisions, active editors, active pages); the distribution of pages and its length, the evolution of participation in discussion pages. Authors also present a detailed analysis of the inner social structure and stratification of the Wikipedia community of logged authors, fitting appropriate distributions to the most relevant metrics. Authors also examine the inequality level of contributions from logged authors, showing that there exists a core of very active authors who undertake most of the editorial work. Regarding articles, the inequality analysis also shows that there exists a reduced group of popular articles, though the distribution of revisions is not as skewed as in the previous case. The analysis continues with an in-depth demographic study of the community of authors, focusing on the evolution of the core of very active contributors (applying a statistical technique known as survival analysis). Authors also explore some basic metrics to analyze the quality of Wikipedia articles and the trustworthiness level of individual authors. This work concludes with an extended analysis of the evolution of the most influential parameters and metrics previously presented. Based on these metrics, authors infer important conclusions about the future sustainability of Wikipedia. According to these results, the Wikipedia community of authors has ceased to grow, remaining stable since Summer 2006 until the end of 2007. As a result, the monthly number of revisions has remained stable over the same period, restricting the number of articles that can be reviewed by the community. On the other side, whilst the number of revisions in talk pages has stabilized over the same period, as well, the number of active talk pages follows a steady growing rate, for all versions. This suggests that the community of authors is shifting its focus to broaden the coverage of discussion pages, which has a direct impact in the final quality of content, as previous research works has shown. Regarding the inner social structure of the Wikipedia community of logged authors, authors find Pareto-like distributions that fit all relevant metrics pertaining authors (number of revisions per author, number of different articles edited per author), while measurements on articles (number of revisions per article, number of different authors per article) follow lognormal shapes. The analysis of the inequality level of revisions performed by authors, and revisions received by articles shows highly unequal distributions. The results of survival analysis on Wikipedia authors presents very high mortality percentages on young authors, revealing an endemic problem of Wikipedias to keep young editors on collaborating with the project for a long period of time. In the same way, from survival analysis authors obtain that the mean lifetime of Wikipedia authors in the core (until they abandon the group of top editors) is situated between 200 and 400 days, for

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Wikipedia Quality

Ortega, Felipe. (2009). "[[Doctoral Thesis Summary. Wikipedia: a Quantitative Analysis]]".

English Wikipedia

{{cite journal |last1=Ortega |first1=Felipe |title=Doctoral Thesis Summary. Wikipedia: a Quantitative Analysis |date=2009 |url=https://wikipediaquality.com/wiki/Doctoral_Thesis_Summary._Wikipedia:_a_Quantitative_Analysis}}

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Ortega, Felipe. (2009). &quot;<a href="https://wikipediaquality.com/wiki/Doctoral_Thesis_Summary._Wikipedia:_a_Quantitative_Analysis">Doctoral Thesis Summary. Wikipedia: a Quantitative Analysis</a>&quot;.