Empirical Analysis of User Participation in Online Communities: the Case of Wikipedia

Abstract

We study the distribution of the activity period of users in five of the largest localized versions of the free, on- line encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find it to be consis- tent with a mixture of two truncated log-normal distri- butions. Using this model, the temporal evolution of these systems can be analyzed, showing that the statis- tical description is consistent over time.