Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia

Wikipedia's brilliance and curse is that any user can edit any of the encyclopedia entries. We introduce the notion of the impact of an edit, measured by the number of times the edited version is viewed. Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article views, we show that frequent editors dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia, and that this domination is increasing. Similarly, using the same impact measure, we show that the probability of a typical article view being damaged is small but increasing, and we present empirically grounded classes of damage. Finally, we make policy recommendations for Wikipedia and other wikis in light of these findings. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Group and Organization Interfaces]: Computersupported cooperative work, web-based interaction General Terms Human factors Keywords Wiki, Wikipedia, collaboration, vandalism, damage

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: GROUP
• Authors: Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong K. Lam, Katherine A. Panciera, Loren G. Terveen, John Riedl
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Article View, GROUP 2007, Typical Article View, Wikipedia's Brilliance