Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization (original) (raw)

2022, PeerJ Computer Science

Peer production online communities are groups of people that collaboratively engage in the building of common resources such as wikis and open source projects. In such communities, participation is highly unequal: few people concentrate the majority of the workload, while the rest provide irregular and sporadic contributions. The distribution of participation is typically characterized as a power law distribution. However, recent statistical studies on empirical data have challenged the power law dominance in other domains. This work critically examines the assumption that the distribution of participation in wikis follows such distribution. We use statistical tools to analyse over 6,000 wikis from Wikia/Fandom, the largest wiki repository. We study the empirical distribution of each wiki comparing it with different well-known skewed distributions. The results show that the power law performs poorly, surpassed by three others with a more moderated heavy-tail behavior. In particular,...