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http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/thesis-wkp-quantanalysis (PDF)Ortega Soto, Jos´e Felipe. M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering, Departamento de SistemasTelem´aticos y Computaci´on, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, M´ostoles, Madrid, 2009. Wikipedia: Aquantitative analysis.Abstract:Presently, the Wikipedia project lodges the largest collaborative community ever known in thehistory of mankind. Due to the large number of contributors, along with the amazing popularity levelof Wikipedia in the Web, it has soon become a topic of interest for researchers of many academicdisciplines. However, in spite of the increasing significance of Wikipedia in scholar publications overthe past years, we oftenly find studies concentrating either on very specific aspects of the project, orelse, on a specific language version.As a result, there is a need of broadening the scope of previous research works to present a morecomplete picture of the Wikipedia project, its community of contributors and the evolution of thisproject over time. This doctoral thesis offers a quantitative analysis of the top ten language editionsof Wikipedia, from different perspectives. The main goal has been to trace the evolution in timeof key descriptive and organizational parameters of Wikipedia and its community of authors. Theanalysis is focused on logged authors (those editors who created a personal account to participate inthe project). The comparative study encompasses general evolution parameters, a detailed analysisof the inner social structure and stratification of the Wikipedia community of logged authors, a studyof the inequality level of contributions (among authors and articles), a demographic study of theWikipedia community and some basic metrics to analyze the quality of Wikipedia articles and thetrustworthiness level of individual authors. This work concludes with the study of the influence of themain findings presented in this thesis for the future sustainability of Wikipedia in the following years.The analysis of the inequality level of contributions over time, and the evolution of additionalkey features identified in this thesis, reveals an untenable trend towards progressive increase of theeffort spent by the most active authors, as time passes by. This trend may eventually cause that theseauthors will reach their upper limit in the number of revisions they can perform each month, thusstarting a decreasing trend in the number of monthly revisions, and an overall recession of the contentcreation and reviewing process in Wikipedia. Finally, another important contribution for the researchcommunity is WikiXRay, the software tool we have developed to perform the statistical analysesincluded in this thesis. This tool completely automates the process of retrieving the database dumpsfrom theWikimedia public repositories, massaging it to obtain key metrics and descriptive parameters,and loading them in a local database, ready to be used in empirical analyses.As far as we know, this is the first research work implementing a comparative analysis, from anquantitative point of view, of the top ten language editions of Wikipedia, presenting complementaryresults from different research perspectives. Therefore, we expect that this contribution will helpthe scientific community to enhance their understanding of the rich, complex and fascinating workingmechanisms and behavioral patterns of theWikipedia project and its community of authors. Likewise,we hope thatWikiXRay will facilitate the hard task of developing empirical analyses on any languageversion of the encyclopaedia, boosting in this way the number of comparative studies like this one inmany other scientific disciplines.