The New Age of a Wikipedia Community.

Upon hearing “Wikipedia”, perhaps your first reaction is “The Free Encyclopedia”. You can take what is there for granted, as it seems to have built itself open-source without the help of any other Internet.

But are sites like Google and Wikipedia mutually beneficial?

We don’t usually consider the Internet to be interdependent, but it makes sense. Communities consist of many connected people who specialize in different industries. An Internet community is similarly built on relationships between ever-evolving online entities.

To investigate how important content from Wikipedia is on the performance of its related sites, researchers at Northwestern University created a dual-ended question. How does Wikipedia provide to Reddit and Stack Overflow (SO), and how do those communities in turn give back to Wikipedia?

The investigation used Reddit and Stack Overflow (SO) as examples of Wikipedia’s closely related online communities.

Reddit, a large-scale online discussion-based community, has a popular “TIL” (Today I Learned) section. The sub is mainly composed of Wikipedia links as well as short summaries.

Stack Overflow is a Q&A community for programmers, where Wikipedia supports answers in the form of links and quoted text (e.g. definitions).

Both communities have aspects of operation that are highly dependent upon Wikipedia articles. Additionally, both have ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ options that allow users to “score” posts and responses.

The following system measured “value” to online communities:

The following system measured “value” to Wikipedia:

Through measuring the amount of value that Wikipedia provided to SO and Reddit and vice versa, the experiment measured how much each community benefits the other by grouping in degrees of interdependence and relevance.

The research concluded that Wikipedia creates a large amount of value for SO and Reddit. Posts containing Wikipedia links on both sites are exceptionally valuable, with user-voted scores much higher than posts that do not contain Wikipedia links (often by at least 2x, and sometimes as much as 4x-5x). This results in an estimated increase in revenue on the order of $100,000 per year for both sites.

However, they found little evidence that posts with Wikipedia links provide direct value to Wikipedia. Wikipedia posts on the popular Reddit community TIL were responsible for a large spike in viewership. However, results suggest that this large effect does not generalize beyond the “TIL” community or beyond Reddit.

Moreover, there are barely any increases in Wikipedia edits and editors despite the large volume of links on both sites. Wikipedia’s permissive content licenses make it easy for Reddit and SO to directly include content in their posts, which could be decreasing the benefits of links to Wikipedia’s new edits/editors.

For companies that rely on Wikipedia content, these findings highlight the value created by Wikipedia’s free and volunteer-created content. However, it also presents more challenging implications for the Wikipedia community due to the lack of returned benefit. There needs to be more research on solutions to the paradox of re-use.

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