Research talk:Newbie reverts and article length

Gold rush effect

You might want to link to previous discussion of the gold rush effect you mention. Those of us who've not (yet) been following discussions about editing patterns here at Meta won't be clear on what you're talking about otherwise. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:04, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Do you have an example of such a discussion I might link to? --EpochFail 15:58, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

...just re-read and I think I understand now that you'd like a discussion of what is meant by "gold rush". I came across the term while working with people in the Community Dept. @ the WMF. Our conversations were informal and in-person so I wouldn't have reference to it, but I agree with the need for a good discussion of hypothetical editing patterns that might cause the decline. To answer the question I'm assuming you are asking -- "What do you mean by 'gold rush effect'?" The general idea is that Wikipedia articles were ripe for the picking back in the early days. Any scholar will have something the say about the core topics of an encyclopedia (see en:Wikipedia:Core_topics_-_1,000), so those articles will be mostly completed early. In the later stage of the volunteer built Wiki, fewer and fewer core topics will need substantial contributions that many volunteers will end up (1) nit-picking already completed, core article and/or (2) creating new articles about obscure topics that are likely to be deleted or orphaned.

In this work, I was trying to look for evidence of the first alternative: nit-picking already completed, core articles. I also hypothesized two things:

1. New editors would be more likely to end up working on these already completed articles
2. Edits to already completed articles are substantially more likely to be rejected

--EpochFail 16:26, 10 February 2012 (UTC)