Database Reference
In-Depth Information
14.4.1.1 Anonymous Vs. Registered Users
Wikipedia users can contribute to wiki pages both anonymously or as registered
users. Registered users are identified by their usernames, while anonymous users
are tracked by their IP addresses. 10 Although there is no one-to-one correspondence
between people and accounts or IP addresses, Wikipedia uses usernames or IP
addresses to track user behavior for further promotions (e.g., admin assignment) or
demotions (e.g., user block). To investigate the effect of the open editing model of
Wikipedia, we compare the behavior of anonymous and registered users to see if
there is any correlation between registration and quality of the contributed content.
We, as well as others [ 23 , 42 , 54 ], follow the same nomenclature as Wikipedia: a
“user” in this study refers to a registered account or an IP address, and it does not
refer to a real-world individual.
Wikipedia keeps the past revisions of articles, and these revisions are accessible
through history pages of articles. These history pages can be mined in order to
analyze the behavior of both registered and anonymous users in Wikipedia. Our first
attempt to compare the behavior of anonymous and registered users was based on
the revert actions performed to Wikipedia articles. A revert is the action of undoing
all changes made to an article, restoring it to what it was at a specific time in the
past. According to the Wikipedia revert policy, 11 reversion is used primarily to fight
vandalism or similar activities such as spamming. Our study of all English Wiki-
pedia reverts show that 96% of the reverts are done by registered users, while most
of the reverted revisions are associated with anonymous users. Furthermore, in 73%
of the time a revert restores the current revision of an article to a recent revision
submitted by a registered user.
In order to have a more fine-grained analysis of the user behavior, we compared
the text of consecutive revisions to extract the insertions and deletions made by each
user in each revision. The granularity of inserts and deletes is measured in terms of
single tokens (words). The results show that 60.6% of the total inserted content is
contributed by registered users. We also followed the evolution of articles and
extracted the contributions made to each article over time. Using this method, we
were able to determine the contributor of each single token in the last revision of each
article. The results show that 84% of the current content of Wikipedia articles (i.e.,
survived content in the latest revisions of the articles) has been contributed by
registered users. Another interesting observation shows that 49.4% of the contributed
content by registered users has been deleted over time, while this value is 85.2% for
anonymous users. These observations show the high dynamics in the evolution of
content in Wikipedia and the higher stability of the registered contributions.
Comparison of the distribution of the reputation for anonymous and registered
users clearly shows that registered users tend to have higher reputation. The average
of reputation for registered users (as measured in [ 36 ]) is 59%, while that for
10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_create_an_account
11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revert_only_when_necessary
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