Lazy Wikipedia

2009/11/27 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Internet

The best-known encyclopedia on the Internet is due to the success of volunteers. It has not yet reached nine years and already has 11 million articles in 265 languages. All thanks to 150,000 volunteers. Most students are between 20 and 35 years old and single, but there are also university professors and researchers.

But they seem to be getting tired. This follows from the study carried out by the GSyC/LibreSoft chair in Madrid. In fact, the number of people who work voluntarily has not grown since 2007 and have less time associated with Wikipedia.

The research group has analyzed the ten most important versions of the wikipedia: English, German, French, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish (more than 500,000 articles published in their respective languages, the Basque language occupies the 45 place of the list). So far, a type of analysis has been used that has never been used to analyze Internet communities, called survival analysis, common in medicine and industrial processes.

After this analysis, it is observed that since its creation the number of volunteers has been growing in all versions until 2007. That year, for the first time, more left than those who entered Wikipedia: in the English version they left an average of 20,000 people a month and entered approximately 15,000. According to the researchers, the issue is serious, since since then the trend has not changed, which threatens the future of Wikipedia.

In addition, compared to other large internet communities like Debian, participants get tired quite quickly. Specifically, in the year of becoming an editor of the encyclopedia, they abandon him. In addition, half of them contribute in less than 150 days, with the exception of the German and French versions (201 and 188 days respectively).

Serving time and highlights

Logically, these are average, and there is a lot of difference between editors. Thus, the researchers have shown that almost all contributions are made by a small group of volunteers, specifically 10% of the volunteers make 90% of their contents. And these are the ones that last the most in Wikipedia.

The researchers have also verified the number of outstanding articles. This is called to volunteers who, according to them, are of good quality, so to speak in some way have quality assurance. In the English version, for example, one out of every 1,100 articles stands out, which have obtained this designation three years after publication. Well, according to the researchers, they are very few, and that also indicates, to some extent, that the production of Wikipedia has slowed down. What's more, researchers believe that the number of outstanding articles will hardly increase if a volunteer recruitment strategy has not been devised.

All these data, as well as the rest of the data collected in the research, are found in the Spanish research network, in RedIRIS. In fact, the researchers invented a software that allows to automate empirical analysis, the WikiXRay. This has allowed the data to be introduced into the research network and thus can be used by researchers from around the world to complement or compare their research. In addition, the GSyC/LibreSoft chair has expressed its intention to continue the study of Wikipedia. Will Wikipedia make known the next research?

Published in Gara