Stanford Cracks the Code of Wikipedia’s Content Growth
Stanford Graduate School of Business recently posted an article by Bill Snyder that explores Wikipedia’s unlikely knack for harnessing “the unpaid efforts of so many people”—80,000 at time of publishing—with no financial reward, no structure, and barely any acknowledgement.
Stanford associate professor of marketing and economist Stephan Seiler and Warwick assistant professor of information systems Aleksi Aaltonen, published findings in the July 2016 issue of Management Science, which outlined a method for quantifying “the effect of such an open production process on productivity.”
According to the article, the duo found that a “cumulative growth effect” played an enormous role in Wikipedia’s content growth between 2002 and 2010. In plain English: “Edits to articles act like magnets to attract other editors, and the edits performed by the new editors attract even more edits, and so on.”
Seiler and Aaltonen “compared edits made by additions of content versus deletions” using “a dataset from January 2001 through to January 2010,” focusing on “the 1,310 articles about the Roman Empire, a subject whose editorial changes were unlikely to be influenced by current events.”
Seiler notes, “Without the cumulative effect, Roman Empire articles would have been only about half as long in 2011.” They also found that not only do articles tend to get longer, but they also get better, with greater numbers of references, footnotes, and web links.
The duo believes their findings are broadly applicable to major companies and nonprofits, many of which use similar wiki platforms. Seiler offers no-strings-attached advice for organizations looking to draw audiences to its wiki like flies to a spider: “Prepopulate the wiki with existing content and give incentives to people who might become editors.”
About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
