Abstract

Abstract: In a few years, Wikipedia has become one of the information systems with more public (both producers and consumers) of the Internet. Its system and information architecture is relatively simple, but has proven to be capable of supporting the largest and more diverse community of collaborative authorship worldwide. In this paper, we analyze in detail this community, and the contents it is producing. Using a quantitative methodology based on the analysis of the public Wikipedia databases, we describe the main characteristics of the 10 largest language editions, and the authors that work in them. The methodology (which is almost completely automated) is generic enough to be used on the rest of the editions, providing a convenient framework to develop a complete quantitative analysis of the Wikipedia. Among other parameters, we study the evolution of the number of contributions and articles, their size, and the differences in contributions by different authors, inferring some relationships between contribution patterns and content. These relationships reflect (and in part, explain) the evolution of the different language editions so far, as well as their future trends. 1

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