Visitors and Contributors in Wikipedia

Wikipedia continues to provide the community with a vast collection of articles that cover almost all the different areas of knowledge. The on-line encyclopedia is built upon altruistic contributions from individuals and organizations, which constitutes an absolutely new approach in knowledge compilation and distribution. The progression of Wikipedia to a mass phenomenon has promoted several initiatives devoted to deal with different issues concerning it, specially the quality of its contents and the authoring of its contributions. However, very few attention has been paid to aspects related to users’ attitudes and behavior when browsing the information it offers. For this reason, this paper aims to find patterns that can describe how users interact and behave when visiting the Wikipedia’s pages. We will consider the two most common forms of interaction between Wikipedia and its users: visits and contributions (edits). From these observations we will be used obtain different metrics, such as the degree of participation or the reluctance exhibited by users which, in addition, will be used to perform a comparison amongst the different Wikipedia editions. Our study is based on a sample of the requests that users submit to Wikipedia, which we receive in the form of log lines. Its results can help to better understand the nature of the relationship between Wikipedia and its users, and to properly characterize the different interactions between them.