The Efficiency of Wikipedia's Evolution

The Effect of Changes of Housing Prices on Retirement Likelihoods

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 efficient manner. I examine how efficiently 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 effect 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.

Keywords: Wikipedia, Efficiency, Knowledge Production, Decentralized Platforms, Internet, Public Goods

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 efficient manner. I examine how efficiently 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 effect 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.