contributed articles
Doi: 10.1145/1378704.1378720
Why Wikipedia’s remarkable growth
is sustainable.
By DiomiDis sPineLLis anD PanaGiotis LouRiDas
the
collaborative
organization
of Knowledge
WIKIPEDIA ( WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG) is a freely available
online encyclopedia anyone can edit, contributing
changes, as well as articles. 10 With more than a million
entries, hundreds of thousands of contributors, and
tens of millions of fully recorded article revisions,
Wikipedia’s freely available database has also made it
possible to study how human knowledge is recorded
and organized through an open collaborative process.
Although citation analysis6 can establish how new
research builds on existing publications, the fully
recorded evolutionary development of Wikipedia’s
structure has allowed us to examine how existing
articles foster development of new entries and links.
Motivation for our longitudinal study of Wikipedia
evolution followed from our observation that even
though Wikipedia’s scope is increasing, its coverage is
apparently not deteriorating. To study the process of
Wikipedia growth we downloaded the February 2006
snapshot of all recorded changes and
examined how entries are created and
linked. Inspecting the timestamps on
individual entry definitions and references, we found that links to nonexistent articles often precede creation of
new articles. Also, tracking the evolution of article links allowed us to empirically validate Barabási’s hypothesis
on the formation of scale-free graphs
through incremental growth and preferential attachment. 1 Our findings
paint a picture of sustainable growth,
suggesting that Wikipedia’s development process delivers coverage of more
and more subjects.
The phenomenal growth of Wikipedia is attributable to a mixture of technologies and a process of open participation. The key technology behind
Wikipedia is that of a Wiki—online
lightweight Web-based collaboration. 4
Wikipedia content appears online as
static HTML pages, though each such
page includes an edit button anyone
can use to modify its content; editing
most articles requires no prior authorization or arrangement. The system
maintains the complete edit history of
each page and supports a “watchlist”
mechanism that alerts registered users when a page they are interested in
changes.
The page history and watchlist facilities promote low-overhead collaboration and identification of and response
to instances of article vandalism. We
found that 4% of article revisions were
tagged in their descriptive comment as
“reverts”—the typical response to vandalism. They occurred an average of
13 hours after their preceding change.
Looking for articles with at least one
revert comment, we found that 11% of
Wikipedia’s articles had been vandalized at least once. (The entry for George
W. Bush had the most revisions and reverts: of its 28,000 revisions one-third
were reverts and, conceivably, another
third vandalism.) Articles prone to vandalism can be administratively locked
against revisions, a step rarely taken;
in our study only 0.13% of the articles
( 2,441 entries) were locked.
S TUDYING COOPERATION AND CONFLICT BE TWEEN AUTHORS WI TH HISTORY FLOW VISUALIZATIONS. FERNANDA B. VIÉGAS, MARTIN WAT TENBERG, AND KUSHAL DAVE. PROCEEDINGS OF SIGCHI 2004. H TTP:// ALUMNI.MEDIA.MIT.EDU/~FVIEGAS/PAPERS/HIS TORY_FLOW.PDF
