On the Evolution of Wikipedia
Rodrigo Almeida, Barzan Mozafari and Junghoo Cho
A recent phenomenon on the Web is the emergence and proliferation of new social media systems allowing social interaction between people. One of the most popular of these
systems is Wikipedia that allows users to create content in a
collaborative way. Despite its current popularity, not much
is known about how users interact with Wikipedia and how
it has evolved over time.
In this paper we aim to provide a first, extensive study of
the user behavior on Wikipedia and its evolution. Compared
to prior studies, our work differs in several ways. First, previous studies on the analysis of the user workloads (for systems
such as peer-to-peer systems [10] and Web servers [2]) have
mainly focused on understanding the users who are accessing
information. In contrast, Wikipedia’s provides us with the
opportunity to understand how users create and maintain information since it provides the complete evolution history of
its content. Second, the main focus of prior studies is evaluating the implication of the user workloads on the system
performance, while our study is trying to understand the evolution of the data corpus and the user behavior themselves.
Our main findings include that (1) the evolution and updates of Wikipedia is governed by a self-similar process, not
by the Poisson process that has been observed for the general
Web [4, 6] and (2) the exponential growth of Wikipedia is
mainly driven by its rapidly increasing user base, indicating
the importance of its open editorial policy for its current success. We also find that (3) the number of updates made to
the Wikipedia articles exhibit a power-law distribution, but
the distribution is less skewed than those obtained from other
studies.
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