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Wikipedians are born, not made: a study of power editors on Wikipedia

Published: 10 May 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Open content web sites depend on users to produce information of value. Wikipedia is the largest and most well-known such site. Previous work has shown that a small fraction of editors --Wikipedians -- do most of the work and produce most of the value. Other work has offered conjectures about how Wikipedians differ from other editors and how Wikipedians change over time. We quantify and test these conjectures. Our key findings include: Wikipedians' edits last longer; Wikipedians invoke community norms more often to justify their edits; on many dimensions of activity, Wikipedians start intensely, tail off a little, then maintain a relatively high level of activity over the course of their career. Finally, we show that the amount of work done by Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians differs significantly from their very first day. Our results suggest a design opportunity: customizing the initial user experience to improve retention and channel new users' intense energy.

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cover image ACM Conferences
GROUP '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
May 2009
412 pages
ISBN:9781605585000
DOI:10.1145/1531674
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 May 2009

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Author Tags

  1. Wikipedia
  2. collaboration
  3. contribution
  4. power editors
  5. wiki

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GROUP09
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GROUP09: ACM 2009 International Conference on Supporting Group Work
May 10 - 13, 2009
Florida, Sanibel Island, USA

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GROUP '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 40 of 110 submissions, 36%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 125 of 405 submissions, 31%

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