One of the more interesting sessions I attended at the recent HICSS conference was a presentation on (eventual best paper prize winner) Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia by Fernanda Viegas. Using both content analysis of Wikipedia Talk pages and an internally developed visualization tool called History Flow, Viegas and her fellow researchers were able to provide interesting insight beyond the rate of Wikipedia’s growth and into the nature of that growth.

One interesting result was the observation that while vandalism continued to happen in Wikipedia as it became a “high value target,” it remained very resilient to such acts: mass deletions of various kinds, for instance, are both still deleted in a median time of under 3 minutes!

The History Flow visualizations show the phenomenal increase in editing and a simultaneous decrease in “edit wars” (long sequences of editors undoing each other’s changes):

Finally, it is easy to see that while the volume of Wikipedia content continues to blossom, pages in non-content namespaces (talk, templates, categories) are growing disproportionately:

Further analysis of the Talk pages, whose content was independently coded into ten different categories (coordination request, reference to guidelines, off-topic remark, etc) showed that nearly 60% of the content on Talk pages was made up of various requests for coordination of content, over 10% were requests for further info and clarification, nearly 8% were references to Wikipedia guidelines, and over 1.5% were info boxes of various kinds!

Wikipedia remains a prime example of decentralized, collaborative resource creation and maintenance. It’s often used as an example of what people can do working together with a goal and letting the coordination and organization of a project emerge naturally from the group. That makes it all the more satisfying to see this kind of research into what that distributed coordination actually looks like and what kind of structures are emerging.