“If there’s a unifying theory here, a rule about why some topics have sprawling Wikipedia pages and others are relative blips, it’s not immediately evident. A lot of the heftiest articles are in list format, but the topics are all over the map.”
“There is at least one explanation. Wikipedia editing seems to beget more editing, according to a study published in the journal Management Science. Researchers found that even though Wikipedia editors don’t tend to change much—they typically add delete, or alter about half-a-sentence at a time—even small edits to an article prompt other people to jump in and make edits of their own. And those edits encourage even more edits. And so on.”
“Over an eight year period, Aaltonen and Seiler found that Wikipedia articles benefitted from length. The “cumulative growth effect” made articles up to 45 percent longer than articles that weren’t subject to the phenomenon, and the articles that were edited more frequently were generally better quality than those with fewer edits.”
“Quality, of course, is difficult to quantify. Other researchers have found a disconnect between quality and popularity on Wikipedia, findings that suggest articles with fewer readers are often higher quality than articles with many readers. There are other concerns about quality, too, tied to the well-documented gender gap among Wikipedia editors. But having more editors attend to any given article—even if each contribution is minuscule—is generally a good thing, Aaltonen says.”
“And yet the growth of Wikipedia at all still seems miraculous. Today, 15 years since it was founded, Wikipedia has more than 80,000 active monthly editors who volunteer their time editing the site, a spokeswoman for the Wikimedia Foundation told me. Yet there’s no formal hierarchical structure like what you’d find in a traditional business of that size. That’s part of what made the question of motivation so compelling, Aaltonen told me. “It is this highly organized phenomenon, but it lacks the foundations of a traditional organization,” he said. “There are no employment contracts. The system doesn’t even know who its human resources are. How is it possible that a system that doesn’t have managers keeps its labor force aligned? How did it learn all this? Several hundred million revisions or contributions don’t fall together as a high-quality encyclopedia just by accident.””