Quantitative analysis of the top ten wikipedias

Abstract

In a few years, Wikipedia has become one of the information systems with more public of the Internet. Based on a relatively simple architecture it has proven to be capable of supporting the largest and more diverse community of collaborative authorship worldwide. Using a quantitative methodology, (analyzing public Wikipedia databases), we describe the main characteristics of the 10 largest language editions, and the authors that work in them. The methodology is generic enough to be used on the rest of the editions, providing a convenient framework to develop a complete quantitative analysis of the Wikipedia. Among other parameters, we study the evolution of the number of contributions and articles, their size, and the differences in contributions by different authors, inferring some relationships between contribution patterns and content. These relationships reflect (and in part, explain) the evolution of the different language editions so far, as well as their future trends. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.