Editing content in a collaborative environment: the case of the Spanish Wikipedia

Abstract

This work uses the database backup dumps that collect content and history reviews of the encyclopaedic articles of Spanish Wikipedia since its creation, in order to characterize and understand the underlying activity of the editors in content creation. Some quantitative characteristics of articles are analyzed: length, assigned categories and in-links and out-links to other articles. Some characteristics have similar patterns to the ones found in webometric studies. The categories system, even though is functionally well built, is not used properly by the editors, which undermines the access to knowledge. We have also obtained patterns of the editors’ activity related to article creation, content reviewing, activity days, reversions, vandalism, and authors’ countries of origin. We have found that an important part of Wikipedia lies on a few number of users who oversee the new content, aided by robots that facilitate the process. In general, content creation is performed by two different kinds of users: small individual contributions of a great legion of users and a large number of contributions made by a small group of extremely active users. For many users we have obtained the origin country, which has allowed us to know the contributions procedence.