Deconstructing Wikipedia: Collaborative Content Creation in an Open Process Platform

Collaboration in Wikipedia articles has widely been touted as a great leap forward and an example of how technology can be leveraged to improve collaborative processes. If we focus on the creation of individual articles, what does that creation process look like? Information was collected from the Revision History Statistics page of thirty Wikipedia featured articles to examine variables such as number of edits, number of editors and total edits by the largest contributors to a given article. This small pilot study suggests that the article creation process may more closely mirror the traditional writer/editor process than it does the “crowd as writer-editor”. It also raises questions about potential changes in how people view the content creation process.