Wikipedia Stats

Some interesting questions were posed by Jimmy Wales on the Wikipedia mailing list recently. Wales said on June 5:

I would be fascinated if we could figure out such statistics as

“For any given edit, what is the average length of service of the editor?” “For any given edit, what is the median length of service of the editor?” These could be measured by either time since first edit, or total number of edits or (perhaps best) some weighted average of the edit history.

It would be nice to track that number over time… are we becoming “younger” as a community, “older” as a community? Staying about the same? Are old-timers sticking around longer than they used to, or jumping ship faster?

Tim Starling and Jakob Voss followed up on this in just two days. The basic conclusion - contributions to Wikipedia follow a power law distribution, meaning that there is a core set of folks that wind up doing most of the work. It’s not a “cabal” but rather an elite that forms out of a commitment to the project. But there still are significant contributions by newbies.

Because there still seem to be people that are not aware of the steep distribution of activity per contributor: It’s confirms [[Lotka’s Law]] - at least for the majority of contributors - a power law in the form “contributors * edits^1.5 = constant”

Jakob adds:

I was really suprised to see that around a quarter of all edits are by “newbies” that have done their first edit less than 100 days ago. I’ll write something about models here.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at 5:29 am and is filed under Technology, Wikipedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.