Thesis Methodology

Methodology

Research Question: What features contribute to a wiki's growth?
The proposed methodology for this project will be a quantitative analysis that compares the growth rate of different wikis with differnt features.

Growth rate might be measured using the following: (These metrics are taken from Jakob Voss: Measuring Wikipedia)

1. Database size (combined size of all articles including redirects in bytes)

2. Total number of words (excluding redirects and special markup)

3. Total number of internal links (excluding redirects and stubs)

4. Number of articles (at least contain one internal link)

5. Number of active Users (contributed 5 times or more in a given month)

6. Number of very active Users (contributed 100 times or more in a given month)

Possible Hypotheses to Test

Exclusive Content: wikis that provide a place for content that is not easily available from other places will grow faster than wikis that replicate easily available content.

How to measure: Measure the difference in growth rate between:

1. A set of wikis whose common feature is that they offer a unique place for content, with
2. A set of wikis whose common feature is that they replicate already available content.

Competitive magnets: Contests will result in contribution flurry. But do they lead to an increase in overall contributions?

How to measure:

1. Compare the contribution rate of a single page before a contest solicitation, and after the end of the contest.
2. Compare the overall growth rate of the wiki before and after the contest

Seeding: wikis that are seeded with content grow faster than wikis that expect users to create content from scratch.

How to measure: compare the growth rate between:

1. A set of wikis whose common feature is that they were pre-seeded with content.
2. A set of wikis whose common feature is that they were started from scratch.