On the Evolution of Wikipedia

Abstract

A recent phenomenon on the Web is the emergence and pro-liferation of new social media systems allowing social inter-action 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, previ-ous 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 in-formation since it provides the complete evolution history of its content. Second, the main focus of prior studies is eval-uating the implication of the user workloads on the system performance, while our study is trying to understand the evo-lution of the data corpus and the user behavior themselves. Our main findings include that (1) the evolution and up-dates 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 suc-cess. 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.