Research:Measuring value-added

Who adds the most value to Wikipedia? Which types of edits are most valuable? How do we call attention to high-value opportunities to contribute? While some research projects have touched on related issues (e.g. and ), there have been no thorough, systematic studies that have broken down value-adding behaviors per edit to explore overall trends. In this collection of projects, we'll explore the fundamental nature of encyclopedic value as well as practical measurement strategies.

Formalization of value

${\text{Quality}}\times {\text{Importance}}={\text{Value}}$

${\text{Productivity}}\times {\text{Importance}}={\text{Value-added}}$

In this project, we will adopt the above formulation. value is the product of the quality and importance of content. In the case of Wikipedia, encyclopedia articles are the primary artifact of importance. This formalization assumes that the value of high quality articles is weighted by their importance. In other words, it is particularly desirable to have important articles be of high quality.

In order to increase value, productive contributions are made to articles. The more important the article, the more value productive edits add to Wikipedia.

Sub-projects

Value is a big and complex concept. In order to measure value effectively and robustly, we'll need to explore different aspects of value measurement. These themes can be explored independently in sub-projects.

Article importance

See Measuring article importance

• How do human-assessed importance measures (e.g. WikiProject importance classes) compare to consumption patterns (e.g. view rate) and wiki structure (e.g. # of inlinks)?
• Which readers (in geographic regions/ language, by their engagement -how much they read?) read this article?

Edit productivity

See Measuring edit productivity

• What signals exist for measuring the quality of an edit?
• How do human-assessments of productivity compare with edit productivity measurements?
• Do different types of users (editors, readers, Westerners, Africans, etc.) disagree on the productivity of an edit?

Experimenting with value presentation

See WikiCredit

• How does the presentation of per-user value-added measurements affect editor behavior?
• How will editors try to game value-added measurements and what countermeasures will be effective?
• Who adds the most value to Wikipedia? How effectively direct editors toward high-value opportunities to contribute?

Resources

• Database dumps
• Wikimedia Labs
• Libraries
  • WikiBrainAPI -- A java library for importing and doing intelligent API work with MediaWiki data (Java)
  • MediaWiki Utilities -- Querying and processing MediaWiki datasource (Python)
  • Deltas -- State of the art difference algorithms (Python)
  • Wiki-Class -- Automatic article quality classification (Python)

See also

• Article editing dynamics
• Edit quality
• Editor productivity
• Measuring mission success
• Editor productivity