Information Society Watch

March 15, 2007, Bernardo A. Huberman & Dennis M. Wilkinson, First Monday

Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. It also demonstrates a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English–language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. The article shows that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits (Adapted from author).

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