Effects of Contributor Experience on the Quality of Health-Related Wikipedia Articles (Preprint)

Abstract

ObjectiveIn our study we have hypothesized a positive effect of contributor experience on the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles. MethodsWe mined the edit history of all (as of February 2017) 18,805 articles within the domain health & fitness in the English language version of Wikipedia. We identified tags within the articles' edit histories, which indicated potential issues with regard to the respective article's quality or neutrality. Out of all of the sampled articles, 99 (0.53%) articles had at some point received at least one such tag. In our analysis we only considered those articles with a minimum of ten edits (10,265 articles in total; 96 tagged articles, 0.93%). Additionally, to test our hypothesis, we constructed contributor profiles, where a profile consisted of all the articles edited by a contributor and the corresponding number of edits contributed. Results Independent sample t-tests ConclusionsOur findings indicate an effect of contributor experience on the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles. However, the breadth of previously edited articles is a stronger predictor than the mere volume of edits. More research is needed to disentangle the different aspects of contributor experience. We discuss implications of our findings with respect to ensuring the quality of health-related information in collaborative knowledge building platforms.