Similarities, challenges and opportunities of Wikipedia content and open source projects

Abstract

SUMMARYSeveral years of research and evidence have demonstrated that Open Source Software (OSS) portals often contain a large amount of software projects that simply do not evolve, developed by relatively small communities, struggling to attract a sustained number of contributors. These portals have started to increasingly act as a storage for abandoned projects, and researchers and practitioners should try and point out how to take advantage of such content. Similarly, other online content portals (like Wikipedia) could be harvested for valuable content.In this paper we argue that, even with differences in the requested expertise, many projects reliant on content and contributions by users undergo a similar evolution, and follow similar patterns: when a project fails to attract contributors, it appears to be not evolving, or abandoned. Far from a negative finding, even those projects could provide valuable content that should be harvested and identified based on common characteristics: by using the attributes of "usefulness" and "modularity" we isolate valuable content in both Wikipedia pages and OSS projects.

On the sustainability of web systems evolution

“…This raises an issue of credibility and bias of the reviews posted, since they could represent the views of a sample of customers much smaller (and biased) than the real user base. Another such example is the collaboratively edited Wikipedia project, where pages are created and maintained by hundreds of online editors: most Wikipedia pages are accessed for information, and their utility or credibility can be measured by the number of views that they have received overall [7]; while another way of determining its credibility is at the level of individual and subjective effort [17].…”