Who writes wikipedia?: an investigation from the perspective of ortega and newton hypotheses

Abstract

In any collaborative system, people do not contribute equally. This is particularly observed to be true for systems seeking to gather contributions from a large, diverse group of people. In such settings, it is seen that a sizable amount of contribution comes from a small group of highly-active users. While it is well-understood that such users are instrumental in the system’s progress, the contribution made by a large group of less-active users is not sufficiently understood. Popularly called masses, these users comprise of the majority of the system’s user base. It is, therefore, important to examine their worth in the system. The literature in this direction points towards two contradicting points of view with one acknowledging masses’ contribution (Ortega Hypothesis) while the other deeming them unnecessary in the system (Newton Hypothesis). Given the large-scale collaboration facilitated by Wikipedia where a large crowd with a diverse skill-set and hence unequal contribution participates, a detailed investigation of the worth of masses becomes necessary for informed policy-making. In this work, we examine whether masses help or hamper the knowledge-building in Wikipedia. We specifically consider their contribution across different contribution types pertaining to the insertion of new content as well as the administrative activities. We observe that although the individual contribution by masses is small, yet they contribute important pieces of knowledge to Wikipedia articles. The results indicate that the overall contribution of masses across several parameters even exceeds the contribution by elites. We also find that as compared to masses, highly-active users dominate the edits where no new content is inserted and only activities involving the up-keeping of the existing content such as restructuring or formatting take place. The results of the study may help in devising appropriate incentivization policies for Wikipedia and the collaborative systems in general.