Measuring Author Contributions to the Wikipedia

From WikiSym 2008

B. Thomas Adler, UC Santa Cruz; Luca de Alfaro, UC Santa Cruz; Ian Pye, UC Santa Cruz; Vishwanath Raman, UC Santa Cruz;

Tuesday, September 9, 15:30-17:00 @ Papers Auditorium (B001)

Research Paper

Abstract

Steven and Stephen agree to write a book together,
but both are very busy and would like to
divide the resulting profits based on the
contributions of each author...

We consider the problem of measuring user contributions.
This has many applications,
such as dividing revenue (as in the case of Steven and Stephen),
recognizing merit (e.g., barnstar awards),
choosing the order of authors (ahem),
or as the basis for promotions in status.
In the context of the Wikipedia, previous works have
focused on two possible criteria:
the total text created, or the total number of edits performed.
We show that these don't work well;
both techniques are vulnerable to manipulation,
and total text additionally fails to reward people
who prefer to polish existing text by editing.

We propose two new measures, both incorporating a notion
of quality in the evaluation of a contribution.
We show that both are appropriate;
among them, we favor the criterion based on edit distance,
due to its ability to reward deletions and polishing
as beneficial contributions.

Keywords: wiki, measuring contributions, edit quality, edit longevity

Discussion

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