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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Amor, J.J., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Robles, G., Herraiz, I.: Measuring libre software using debian 3.1 (sarge) as a case study: preliminary results. Upgrade Magazine (2005a)
Amor, J.J., Robles, G., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M.: Measuring woody: The size of debian 3.0. Technical Report. Grupo de Sistemas y Comunicaciones, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Madrid, Spain. Grupo de Sistemas y Comunicaciones, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Madrid, Spain (2005b)
Buriol, L.S., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Millozzi, S.: Temporal evolution of the wikigraph. In: Proceedings of the Web Intelligence Conference, Hong Kong. IEEE CS Press, Los Alamitos (2006)
Ghosh, R.A., Prakash, V.V.: The orbiten free software survey. First Monday (2000)
Gigles, J.: Internet encyclopedias go head to head. Nature Magazine (2005)
Gini, C.: On the measure of concentration with especial reference to income and wealth. Cowless Comission (1936)
Godfrey, M., Tu, Q.: Evolution in open source software: A case study. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, San Jos, California, pp. 131–142 (2000)
Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Ortuno-Perez, M., de-las Heras-Quiros, P., Gonzalez, J.C., Olivera, V.M.: Counting potatoes: the size of debian 2.2. Upgrade Magazine II(6), 60–66 (2001)
Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Robles, G., Ortuno-Perez, M., Rodero-Merino, L., Centeno-Gonzalez, J., Matellan-Olivera, V., Castro-Barbero, E., de-las Heras-Quiros, P.: Analyzing the anatomy of GNU/Linux distributions: methodology and case studies (Red Hat and Debian). In: Koch, S. (ed.) Free/Open Software Development, pp. 27–58. Idea Group Publishing, Hershey (2004)
Koch, S., Schneider, G.: Effort, cooperation and coordination in an open source software project: Gnome. Information Systems Journal 12(1), 27–42 (2002)
Lehman, M.M., Ramil, J.F., Sandler, U.: Metrics and laws of software evolution the nineties view. In: METRICS 1997: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Software Metrics, p. 20 (1997)
Mockus, A., Fielding, R.T., Herbsleb, J.D.: Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and mozilla. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology 11(3), 309–346 (2002)
Raymond, E.S.: The cathedral and the bazaar. First Monday 3(3) (1998)
Robles, G.: Empirical software engineering research on libre software: Data sources, methodologies and results. Doctoral Thesis. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Mostoles, Spain (2006)
Viegas, F.B., Wattengberg, M., Dave, K.: Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Viena, Austria, pp. 575–582 (2004)
Voss, J.: Measuring wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics 2005, Stockholm (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ortega, F., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M., Robles, G. (2008). Quantitative Analysis of the Top Ten Wikipedias. In: Filipe, J., Shishkov, B., Helfert, M., Maciaszek, L.A. (eds) Software and Data Technologies. ICSOFT ENASE 2007 2007. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 22. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88655-6_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88655-6_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-88654-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-88655-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)