The Efficiency of Wikipedia’s Evolution

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Wikipedia, the world’s most popular encyclopedia, is a unique enterprise characterized by its purely decentralized production. Thus, it is important to understand whether editors produce the pages in an ecient manner. I examine how eciently Wikipedia has developed from three perspectives. First, I evaluate whether the editors produce the pages with the highest eventual views first. I find that at a given point in time, editors create roughly 80% of the maximum possible views that could have been created up through that time. Second, I examine whether pages are created in order of how well-connected they are to other pages in the link structure, so how easy they are to find. I find that a page’s probability of being created at any point in time is significantly and substantially increasing in its relative number of views and connections. However, this e↵ect diminishes with time and page creation was much less sensitive to these measures in 2008 than in 2001. Third, I compare which pages frequent versus infrequent editors create. I find that frequent editors tend to produce highly-viewed pages while infrequent editors tend to produce better connected pages.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 2013

Author	Jackson, Emilie
Primary advisor	Levin, Jonathan
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Economics

Subject	Stanford Department of Economics
Subject	Wikipedia
Subject	Eciency
Subject	Knowledge Production
Subject	Decentralized Platforms
Subject	Internet
Subject	Public Goo
Genre	Thesis

Related item	Title 2013 John G. Sobieski Award for Creative Thinking
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/ps022vh0955

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Preferred Citation: Jackson, Emilie. (2013). The Efficiency of Wikipedia’s Evolution. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/ps022vh0955

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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