A Closer Look at Candidate Wikipeida Entries
Posted 3/05/2007 04:48:00 PM |
| Candidate | Edits Since 1/1 (1) | Reverts (2) | Vandal (3) | Top Editor (4) |
| Barack Obama | 1397 | 191 | 20 | HailFire (167) |
| Hillary Clinton | 534 | 63 | 10 | Wasted_Time_R (91) |
| Joe Biden | 282 | 13 | 5 | Andyvphil (28) |
| John Edwards | 248 | 38 | 5 | Jersyko (18) |
| Bill Richardson | 204 | 15 | 4 | Diluvial (12) |
| Dennis Kucinich | 188 | 12 | 2 | Amonk (20) |
| Christopher Dodd | 167 | 5 | 1 | Haus42 (45) |
| Mike Gravel | 119 | 1 | 0 | DavidYork71 (35) |
| Dem. Averages | 392.4 | 42.3 | 5.9 | |
| Rudy Giuliani | 583 | 46 | 4 | Wasted_Time_R (125) |
| John McCain | 482 | 62 | 15 | 204.193.6.90 (17) |
| Mitt Romney | 413 | 39 | 14 | Yellowdesk (37) |
| Sam Brownback | 363 | 27 | 4 | Getaway (106) |
| Ron Paul | 215 | 17 | 1 | SlamDiego (15) |
| Mike Huckabee | 182 | 18 | 3 | A.J.A. (26) |
| Tom Tancredo | 152 | 12 | 4 | SirAndrew1 (36) |
| Duncan Hunter | 84 | 4 | 0 | Victoria2007 (10) |
| Tommy Thompson | 38 | 2 | 1 | Ultimatecoolguy (7) |
| Rep. Averages | 279.1 | 25.2 | 5.1 |
Note: Candidates with "locked" entries are bolded.
What can we learn from this graph? By far and away, Barack Obama has the most frequently updated Wikipedia entry. Of course, the entries of Edwards and Clinton are both locked, so that will contribute to their decreased update status.
Here's what I found interesting. First, the percentage of reverts - about 10 percent of changes seem to be being reverted. A significantly less percentage of changes are outright vandalism.
What is also interesting is the average number of changes per day. In the 64 days since 1/1, Democratic Wikipedia pages have been changed an average of 6.125 times a day (or less than once every 4 hours), and Republican Wikipedia pages are changed an average of 4.36 times a day (or less than once every 6 hours).
Also interesting are the top "editors" of the pages. For one candidate, this top editor is responsible for 29% of all changes to the page since 1/1. You can browse the top editors of the candidate pages and learn a little bit more about them by clicking the links above.
Footnotes and Methdology:
(1) 1/1/2007 was an arbitrary choice of a date, designed to give all candidates an equal baseline for analysis.
(2) These are the total claimed reverts on the history page.
(3) These are the total times vandalism is claimed on the history page.
(4) Top editor of the page since 1/1, (Total edits)
This survey represents a one-time analysis of the change history of candidate Wikipedia pages. It was run on 3/5/2007, and the data was analyzed with simple custom-written software. The "reverts" and "vandalism" numbers are based on self-reports, there was no content analysis.
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2 Comments: (Post a Comment)
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At March 06, 2007 8:15 AM,
Kevin Guidry said...
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Both of the entries you labeled as "locked" are semi-protected; they are still open to being edited (and vandalized) by editors who have been registered for more than a few days. Therefore I don't think that "locked" is quite the correct terminology to describe that state. Further, that the articles were semi-protected should, in theory, indicate that in the recent past there was an abnormally high level of vandalism or an edit conflict the editors were unable or unwilling to solve on their own without disrupting the article. Finally, the number and proportion of minor edits may add to or affect this analysis as there is a significant difference between a substantial edit that adds or deletes content and a minor edit that corrects spelling or punctuation.
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At March 06, 2007 2:39 PM,
Fred Stutzman said...
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Kevin, fair points indeed. Good analysis of the effect of the "semi-protect". And next time I run this analysis I will collect minor edits as well. Thanks for the feedback.
