The best quality articles on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia anyone can edit, are those that have been edited often by a lot of different people, new research shows.
The study, published on the
arXiv website, shows the power of cooperation in building a site that has seen 236 million edits by 5.77 million different contributors since it was started in 2001.
In their study, the researchers counted the number of edits and contributors for 1211 'featured articles' on the English-language Wikipedia and compared them with the same figures for other English-language articles on the site.
"Wikipedia article quality continues to increase, on average, as the number of collaborators and the number of edits increases," they write.
The first thing they found was that the number of times articles are edited is not random.
Second, the researchers found that the high quality articles are edited more often, and by more people than other articles.
clipped from: www.abc.net.au 