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Measuring author contributions to the Wikipedia

Published: 08 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We consider the problem of measuring user contributions to versioned, collaborative bodies of information, such as wikis. Measuring the contributions of individual authors can be used to divide revenue, to recognize merit, to award status promotions, and to choose the order of authors when citing the content. In the context of the Wikipedia, previous works on author contribution estimation have focused on two criteria: the total text created, and the total number of edits performed. We show that neither of these criteria work well: both techniques are vulnerable to manipulation, and the total-text criterion fails to reward people who polish or re-arrange the content.
We consider and compare various alternative criteria that take into account the quality of a contribution, in addition to the quantity, and we analyze how the criteria differ in the way they rank authors according to their contributions. As an outcome of this study, we propose to adopt total edit longevity as a measure of author contribution. Edit longevity is resistant to simple attacks, since edits are counted towards an author's contribution only if other authors accept the contribution. Edit longevity equally rewards people who create content, and people who rearrange or polish the content. Finally, edit longevity distinguishes the people who contribute little (who have contribution close to zero) from spammers or vandals, whose contribution quickly grows negative.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WikiSym '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis
September 2008
219 pages
ISBN:9781605581286
DOI:10.1145/1822258
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: 08 September 2008

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WikiSym08: 2008 International Symposium on Wikis
September 8 - 10, 2008
Porto, Portugal

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  • (2024)Chapter 6. Exploring the evolution of Wikipedia articles through ContropediaInvestigating Wikipedia10.1075/scl.121.06lan(156-177)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2024
  • (2023)How Did They Build the Free Encyclopedia? A Literature Review of Collaboration and Coordination among Wikipedia EditorsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/361736931:1(1-48)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Edit-History Vis: An Interactive Visual Exploration and Analysis on Wikipedia Edit History2023 IEEE 16th Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis)10.1109/PacificVis56936.2023.00025(157-166)Online publication date: Apr-2023
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