While both the success of Wikipedia and the deep meaning it expresses as an outstanding example of the participatory dynamics of the new web become globally known, the initial surprise is leaving space to professional analysis and studies about the inner processes and motivations that fuel this extraordinary social experiment.

Starting from the “Enterprise 2.0″ article deletion process, Hardvard Business professors Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee have recently and freely published a case on Wikipedia under the GFDL.

While providing a lot of history and background, I believe this case’s biggest merit is arising new questions:

• Why Wikipedia gathered so much success while Nupedia was a complete failure?
• How can an egalitarian and freeform editing process produce good quality content
• Which is the best control structure in order to avoid the chaos while stimulating mass participation
• Can Wikipedia ever surpass Britannica for quality and authority (we are not so far from it)?
• What is the relation between the importance of a topic and its accuracy? Do more users mean more quality, convergence and precision?

Being Wikipedia a really incredible proof of the wisdom of crowds, an infinite number of questions could be asked. Some of the answers could be find inside a new study released by Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman (Hp Labs).

The paper is entitled “Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia” and it poses two simple but fundamental questions:

• Does unscheduled and virtually uncontrolled editing by a large number of unvetted editors contribute to or detract from article quality?
• Is the Wikipedia framework conducive to the creation of quality articles?

To give an answer the authors analyzed all 50.0 million edits made by the 4.79 million non-robot contributors to the 1.48 million articles of the English-language Wikipedia. A large scale effort to examine the relationship between quality and visibility in Wikipedia.

Results are promising:

In summary, our findings suggest the larger the collaboration among editors in Wikipedia, the higher quality of its articles. Thus, topics of high interest or relevance are naturally brought to the forefront of visibility and quality.

So a bigger number of edits and unique editors means a loop of increased precision and reliability. Unsurprisingly the distribution follows a long tail where a limited group of topics are dominant attracting a disproportionated amount of contributors while the vast majority of articles go unnoticed and receive negligible editing.

Probably, while the number of contributors grows even the quality of more obscure articles will be gradually improved reaching the standard of the Britannica.

Not a bad scenario for a crazy experiment.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.