Research talk:Contribution Inequality

Previous research work

I was taking a look at the whole list of research projects and I had apparently overlooked this one for a long time. I was about to add a new reference to the page, but since it would be to one of my own papers I did not find very "elegant" to do it myself (after all, I think it is relevant for this work but this is an open wiki, and others could have already added it). Instead, I prefer to make a comment here.

This ver same approach has been already explored in a paper we published at HICSS 2008, entitled On the inequality of contributions to Wikipedia. I find this a bit surprising that you did not mention it here, because if you search for "inequality wikipedia" in Google scholar this is #1 result (it has been one of our top-cited articles ever, even in other research work beyond Wikipedia itself).

Actually, and contrary to what it is stated in this page, the remarkable fact is that the montly inequality level of contributions to Wikipedia, measured with the Gini coefficient, has remained very stable over time. Furthermore, this is one of the very few quantitative metrics that, apparently, has not been affected by the overall "flattening effect" starting in 2007-2008 for many other activity metrics (like monthly number of edits).

I'm pretty aware of the format followed by the WSoR initiative, and sprints provide flexibility and rapid results. However, I also think that spending a bit more time to look back at previous results could also help to frame the study in a better way, maybe saving some effort. In any case, it is good to see some progress, in the form of Gini statistics for different namespaces other than main. GlimmerPhoenix 19:16, 9 December 2011 (UTC)